Page 132 of Property of Scar

His eyes never leave Bennett.

The look on the hellhound’s face hits harder than the collapse did.

“You saved me,” Rhett communicates telepathically, though we all hear it.

Bennett doesn’t look down. His wings are shaking with the effort, divine light bleeding from every feather into the dark. “We’re brothers,” he replies, through his teeth. “That’s what we do.”

Rhett is quiet for a moment. Then, with a voice stripped of all its usual sharp edges, he smiles, though it’s in hellhound form, so it’s more baring his teeth. “Brothers… I like that.”

I don’t have time to watch what passes between them after that as I push through.

Daylight hits me like a physical blow. I stagger through the tunnel mouth, and my eyes water so hard I’m blind for three full seconds, blinking against the pale, early-morning sky that has no business being this beautiful right now. My knees buckle on the uneven ground outside, and I go down hard on one, Scar’s weight pitching forward with me, and I catch him, barely, both arms shaking with the effort, muscles screaming their objection.

He doesn’t make a sound.

He hasn’t made a sound since he fell.

I lower him to the ground carefully, hand at the back of his head, and then kneel over him for a moment with my chest heaving and my vision swimming at the edges, listening to the distant, structural groan of the compound finishing its collapse behind us.

Raze is already counting. Moving from brother to brother with that brutal efficiency of a president running a damage check, one hand still on Roxy’s, grip iron tight. His eyes find me last, or they find Scar first and then find me after, and something passes through his expression too quickly to read. “Everyone breathe,” he says to the group, and it’s a command, not a comfort.

Roxy crouches beside me before I ask. Her hands move over Scar without touching him, magic trailing her fingertips in thin threads of amber light that probe the space around him, around the wound, around whatever the toxin has done to him from the inside out. I watch her face while she works.

She knows how to keep her expression neutral.

But she’s not managing it perfectly.

“It’s using him against himself,” she says finally, and her voice is steady even if her jaw isn’t. “The poison opened the door. But he is what’s keeping him there.”

The brothers have gone quiet behind us. Not out of disinterest, but because they’re done pretending this isn’t worth watching

“Can you pull him out?” I ask.

Roxy looks at me, and I can see her measuring how much truth I can take right now, and I appreciate that she decides to give me all of it. “Not from outside. The toxin is keyed to his bloodline and his… grief. His guilt. Whatever’s in there is something I can’t reach.” She pauses, threads of magic still moving through the air. “But there is a way in. If someone with blood that already knows his could create a channel… just enough to reach him, possibly, maybe…”

She doesn’t finish.

She doesn’t need to.

I know exactly what she’s saying.

I have known since halfway through the tunnel, some low, primal part of my dhampir instinct, putting it together while the rest of me was too busy keeping him breathing to let it fully surface. A blood bond—ancient and irrevocable. The kind of thing my vampire half understands in the same wordless way it understands hunger, not as a concept but as truth. It will change me. It’s already changed me, if I’m being honest with myself, but this would make it biological and permanent. Woven into what I am in a way that nothing, not time, not distance, not whatever comes after, can undo.

Even if everything falls apart.

Even if he wakes up and can’t stand the sight of me.

Even if I spend the rest of my life regretting every choice I’ve made in this compound…

It will still be there.

He will still be there, somewhere in the framework of my blood.

I am aware of every man standing behind me.

I am aware of the silence they’re holding, and what it costs men like these to hold it.

No one speaks, moves, or tries to make this decision for me, tell me what it means, or talk me into it or out of it.