Page 94 of Property of Scar

Calder straightens immediately. “You got it.” The words come out quick and sharp, like he’s been waiting for something to do.

Rhett watches him for a second, then nods once, tension still sitting under his skin but contained now, redirected into something useful.

Bennett finally looks up, just briefly, his gaze moving between them before dropping back to the blade. “Try not to die out there,” he says, like it’s an afterthought.

The room settles back into motion around them.

Calder’s voice, when it comes, is quiet enough that it nearly disappears under the low hum of the room around them. “Anyway… someone needs to protect the club girls.”

The silence that falls between Rhett and Bennett is small and weighted. They look at each other, and something passes between them, an unspoken exchange, the kind that comes from knowing each other well enough to skip the words.

Rhett turns back to Calder. “The kid’s got a point.”

“Agreed,” Bennett says.

Neither of them argues again.

I watch Scar move through the room, red eyes tracking everything at once. His centuries of surviving things that should have ended him, and he is still the most certain thing in any room he walks into. His movements are quiet and controlled, carrying the kind of assurance that comes from knowing exactly what he is and what he’ll do.

Tomorrow we go into the dark.

And for the first time, I’m not wondering if we will survive it.

I’m wondering what’s going to survive us.

Because whatever is waiting down there…

It hasn’t met us yet.

Chapter Twenty-Three

SCAR

The clubhouse roof sits thirty feet above the world, and the world down there has no idea what’s coming for it tomorrow.

I find Cali by the parapet, her back to the door, her face tipped toward the sky. She hasn’t heard me, or if she has, she’s choosing not to react, which would be very Cali of her. I stand in the doorway for a moment longer than I need to, watching the way the starlight settles across the line of her shoulders, the way she holds herself out here when she thinks no one is watching. She is quieter and less armored. It is the version of her that she doesn’t let into the room very often.

I let the door fall shut behind me.

She doesn’t startle. Just says, very quietly, “I knew it was you.”

“Of course, you did.” I cross the rooftop and come to stand beside her, close enough that our shoulders nearly touch, looking out at the same stretch of dark sky she’s been staring at.

Neither of us speaks for a while.

That’s something I’ve only recently stopped fighting, the silence she doesn’t fill. Five centuries of trying to break the silence, and then this woman stands in it like it’s hers.

“Can’t sleep,” she says eventually. It isn’t a question.

“I don’t sleep,” I remind her.

She cuts me a look from the side. “You know what I mean.”

I do. I’ve been walking the hallways for hours, checking perimeters that don’t need checking, running logistics that Flux already has covered three times over, looking for somewhere to put this restlessness that has no useful outlet the night before something that could go catastrophically sideways.

The assault is planned.

The brothers are ready.