Page 9 of Property of Scar

The blade settles against his throat, the edge resting just firmly enough to mark skin. I feel the give of flesh beneath it, the hard stop of bone underneath that. Everything else falls away. The alley, the noise, the rain, all of it gone until there’s nothing left except steel against skin and the split-second decision to finish it.

This is the part they never struggled with teaching me.

This is the part they made sure I got right.

I exhale.

Steel parts flesh in a hot, slick drag, fresh blood spilling across my hand, the warmth of it immediate. It’s thicker than human, and the scent of it sharpens as it hits the air.

The blade meets bone, and I don’t hesitate, shifting my grip and driving through it, feeling the vibration travel up my arm as steel grinds through with a stubborn resistance that never gets easier to feel, no matter how many times I’ve done it.

My jaw tightens.

Not from effort but familiarity.

From the way my body knows exactly how much force it takes.

The sound is low and final, and by the time the neck gives, by the time the last of the resistance breaks and the motion completes, I’m already pulling back, already stepping away before the rest of it can register, before the weight of what I’ve just done has time to settle into anything more than second nature.

I don’t watch his head fall.

I don’t need to.

The job is done.

And the part of me that notices anything beyond that is something I learned a long time ago to keep quiet.

By the time I step back, the change has already started. The tension leaves him all at once, like something unseen has let go, and his body sinks heavier against the concrete, muscles slackening in a way that’s too sudden to be natural. The shape of him softens where it shouldn’t, like whatever was holding everything tight beneath the skin has been ripped out, leaving nothing behind to keep it in place.

Then the blood turns.

It doesn’t spread.

It thickens.

What should be a dark, liquid pool beneath him slows, then drags, the surface going tacky, almost sticky like tar, as if the air itself is rejecting it. The color deepens fast, red collapsing into something darker, duller, until it looks less like blood and more like something spilled from a machine that was never meant to run this long.

A slow, wet sound follows as it clots in real time, strands forming where it shouldn’t, clinging to the concrete, to my boot, stretching when I shift my weight like it doesn’t want to let go.

The smell changes with it.

Copper goes sour, and sharp becomes rotten.

Something tangy pushes through, thick enough to taste at the back of my throat, like whatever was keeping it fresh has finally given up and let it spoil all at once.

I’ve seen it before, and I still fucking hate it.

Because it’s not just death.

It’s the body remembering it shouldn’t have been alive in the first place.

The silence settles across the alley, broken only by the distant groan of city infrastructure and the wet, uneven breathing of the victim against the far wall.

He’s going to survive this.

He’s going to wake up with marks on his throat and no memory of the thing that put them there. In six months, he’ll probably convince himself it was a blackout, a bad night, some screwed-up mugging his brain never pieced together properly.

Good.