Page 85 of Property of Scar

“I wasn’t expecting it to be.”

“No,” she agrees, her gaze flicking briefly toward Roxy before returning to me. “You weren’t.”

She pauses briefly before continuing, “What I will offer comes at a cost.”

“Name it.”

Her attention sharpens, just a fraction. “There is a curse on my Court,” she says, the words delivered with the same calm precision as everything else, but something colder sits underneath them. “Placed decades ago by a witch with more patience than restraint. It is why I cannot leave this realm. Not even to help defend my son when bikers with incredible powers are attacking it.” She pauses, for effect, to let us know she means when we attacked her son.

Not that it wasn’t warranted, mind you.

“The curse does not strike directly,” she continues. “It does not announce itself. It takes… increments small enough to avoid immediate retaliation and large enough that ignoring it is no longer an option.”

The room feels tighter around that statement.

“Untangle it,” she says, her gaze holding mine again, steady and expectant. “Remove it completely so that I am free to leave if I am needed.”

“And in return?”

Her mouth curves again, sharper this time. “You will have everything I know about the Crimson Circle.”

I hesitate, glancing at Raze, but he subtly nods.

“And if we don’t?”

Something in the room settles harder into place.

“Then…” Titania says softly, “… you will leave my Court exactly as uninformed as you arrived.” She pauses again for dramatic effect. “And I will consider whether your presence here has been worth… allowing.”

The terms are clear.

The cost is not small.

And neither is the alternative.

Roxy’s hands go still in her lap.

“She is not your instrument.” Raze’s growl stays low, but it’s got weight behind it, the kind that says it won’t stay quiet for long.

Titania looks at him for a long moment. “No,” she agrees. “She is not. She would be a guest performing a service, freely offered, for which payment would be rendered.” Her eyes return to Roxy. “I do not force bargains. The Court has its pride.”

Roxy looks at Raze, and they have a whole conversation in the space of three seconds. He doesn’t like it. It’s written in every line of his stillness, ice shards beginning to spiderweb up his arms. But he knows her, knows what she’ll decide before she says it. We all do, and what he does in the silence that follows is the thing that strikes me, quietly and without announcement…

He lets her.

“I’ll try,” Roxy says. She goes still, not frozen but focused, like everything in her has narrowed down to a single point I can’t see. For a moment, nothing happens, and then the air begins to tighten around her, subtle at first, a quiet pressure building along the edges of the room that most wouldn’t notice. Still, I feel it immediately, the shift in space, the sense of something gathering itself.

When she lifts her hand, the movement is deliberate, and the first thread of light that slips from her fingers is so fine it almost disappears as soon as it forms. It stretches outward anyway, searching, sliding through the structure of the Court as though the stone and root mean nothing, until it catches on something buried deep beneath it all.

More threads follow.

They don’t spill or flare, they unspool with careful precision, one after another, until they begin to fill the space around her, threading through the living architecture in patterns too complex to track, weaving themselves into the Court’s magic like they were always meant to be there.

And then they pull.

All at once.

Roxy’s body reacts to it, her shoulders tightening sharply, a breath catching hard enough that it cuts through the room, and I see the strain hit her in the way her balance shifts, the way her control has to hold rather than simply exist.