Chapter Seventeen
SCAR
Cali watches me in a way I haven’t had directed at me in a very long time. There’s no fear in it and no awe either, which should probably feel like a relief after five centuries of people offering one or the other. Instead, it leaves me feeling strangely exposed.
She studies me the same way she studied the wound in my side while she stitched it closed, patient and focused, letting the truth come to her instead of trying to force it.
And after everything she’s just told me, after the cost of those memories flickered behind her eyes while she spoke, she’s still sitting there in the dim safe house light, looking at me like I’m simply something she’s trying to understand.
The realization settles deeper than it should. Most people want something from me like leadership, protection, answers, and those expectations have a way of attaching themselves to every conversation, whether anyone means them to or not.
Cali doesn’t seem to want anything.
She’s just waiting to see what I do next.
I don’t do this.
I don’t reach back when someone extends a hand, offers history when silence will serve just as well, or lets anyone close enough to see what the years have left behind. The club knows pieces. Raze knows the outline. No one has been given the whole story.
The silence between us is thick enough to live in, and I am considering spending the rest of the night inside it when I hear myself speak, “Her name was Astrid.”
Cali goes quiet. The question hanging between us stays exactly where it is. She lets it. Her attention never leaves me, giving the silence in the room enough time to settle instead of rushing to fill it.
The silence breathes around us, and for once, it isn’t something that needs fixing. Because for the first time all night, it feels like I might actually know what to do with the words.
“We met on a battlefield in Norway, 1670.” I let my eyes drop to the floor.
The wood grain is old and uneven, splintered at one edge, and I stare at it the way I haven’t allowed myself to stare at this memory in years.
“She was berserker. I was a vampire. We were on opposing sides of something that has long since stopped being important.”
I take a reflexive breath, not necessary considering I don’t need to breathe.
“She hit me with a war axe so hard it took three days to heal properly, and when I came back for her, she laughed at me.” The corner of my mouth does something without my permission.
“Not mockery. Pure, unguarded delight…” I pause.
“I’d never encountered anything like her. ”
Astrid, mid-battle, golden hair matted and all over the place, blood on her teeth, laughing.
“She was wild the way storms are wild. Not destruction, a kind of living force. More present in one moment than most things I’ve encountered in five centuries.
She woke up joyful. She fought as if she loved it because she genuinely did.
She had this way of making even the ugliest parts of existence feel like something worth being present for. ”
My jaw tightens. “The change started four years after our love blossomed, in 1676… it began with an insatiable temper. Small things at first, a rage that took slightly too long to pass, an edge in her eyes after a fight that hadn’t been there before.
I thought it was her nature… she was a berserker, after all. ”
I force myself to hold the memory still, not to flinch away from it. “Some of her kind carry a madness in their blood. A curse that takes them if the bloodlust goes untended too long. I’d seen it before, and told myself that was all it was.”
I told myself that because the alternative was worse.
“By the time the innocents were dead, I’d already spent six months convincing myself I was imagining it.”
The words land in the room, heavy and blunt, but Cali doesn’t flinch.
“I tracked her for two weeks. Found her in a burning village in the highlands. She was still herself, underneath it. I could see it, flashes of her surfacing through something else that had taken root in her, something that wore her face but moved like a fever, like something that had gotten in and wouldn’t come back out. ”
My hands are pressed flat against my thighs. Hard. “I begged her. I’m not a man who begs. I got down in that burning snow, and I told her to fight it, that I knew she was still in there, that she was stronger than whatever this was.”
Pain ripples through me at the memory.
“She looked at me.” My voice drops. “She knew who I was. She knew what I was asking. And she… she just couldn’t fight the rage. She couldn’t even to stop herself from trying to come after me.”
The silence closes around that sentence.
“So, I had to choose. And I could see behind those rabid eyes, there was a small part of my Astrid in there begging for it to end, so… I ended it.”
Cali’s breath shifts, not a gasp, just a quiet change in rhythm, there and gone.
My hand rises without thought, fingers finding the ridge of scar tissue that runs the length of my face, tracing it the way I’ve traced it ten thousand times in the last three and a half centuries.
Always there. Always the same. A line of raised flesh that I have refused to let my healing take, refused every time my body tried to erase it.
“She gave me this scar during the struggle. She was fighting on two fronts, against me and against whatever had taken root inside her.” My fingers drop. “When it was done, I held her while she died.”
The room becomes very quiet, and my throat closes around the next part, but I don’t let it stop me. “She knew it was me. She knew what I’d done and why…” I pause, letting the memory flood through my thoughts. “She thanked me on her last breath.”
Two words.
Centuries of weight underneath them.
My voice doesn’t break, but it comes very close. Close enough that I feel it, the internal fracture, the hairline crack in something I keep extremely precisely sealed, and for a single unguarded moment, it is there in the open between us, visible, unavoidable, mine.
I don’t look at Cali. I keep my eyes on the splintered floor and let the silence stretch, holding it without rushing to fill it.
Cali doesn’t offer me a platitude. She leaves the space untouched, no hand reaching for mine, no easy reassurances about fault or right decisions, none of the things people say when grief shows up uninvited. She simply sits with it, with me. Quiet, present, and unafraid of what the room holds.
And then, low and careful, she says, “Maybe it wasn’t her fault.
” The words find me before I’m ready for them.
“The madness.” She’s thinking while she speaks, and I can hear the shape of it, the careful way she’s building toward something she’s not sure I can handle.
“If something got into her, something planted, something deliberate… maybe she wasn’t cursed?
” She meets my eyes when I finally raise them to hers. “Maybe someone did this to her.”
I don’t answer.
My gaze stays on hers, but my attention slides sideways, catching on the idea before I can stop it.
It doesn’t settle.
It sticks.
And that alone is enough to change my feelings.
The lab.
The warehouse.
Mordain’s notes…
Mixing vampire blood with berserker blood—violent rages, paranoia, uncontrollable bloodlust.
Three hundred and fifty years.
Three and a half centuries, and the symptoms sitting in front of me line up with Astrid’s so perfectly it feels like the past reached across time and grabbed me by the throat.
For a second, I don’t move.
Not because I’m forcing myself to stay still.
Because something inside me has gone strangely quiet.
I’ve spent centuries building my control into something solid. Layer after layer, brick by brick. Every ugly thing locked away behind walls I trusted to hold because they always have.
I reach for that certainty now, and my hand closes on something different.
The foundation is still there.
But it shifts, just enough to matter.
Just enough to make my stomach tighten.
The feeling rolls through me hard because uncertainty isn’t something I’ve had much practice carrying. Not like this. Not where it counts.
And somehow that unsettles me more than anything I’ve heard tonight.
Astrid’s face is there before I can stop it.
Not as memory.
As recognition.
The way she looked right before it took her. The way I knew, with absolute clarity, that there was no fixing it, no saving her from what she was becoming.
The way I had to end it.
And something cold moves through me.
Something old.
Something I buried with her.
The thought doesn’t arrive slowly. It locks into place cleanly. And for the first time in five centuries…
I don’t know how to stop it.
What if it wasn’t the berserker curse?
What if it was him?
What if Mordain had her before I ever knew she was already gone?
My hand presses flat against my chest, while Cali watches me and doesn’t say another word. And somehow that is the most devastating mercy she could offer, because if she spoke right now, I don’t think I could answer her.
The thought blooms wide, terrible, and undeniable in the quiet of the room.
I am simply inside it, unable to move, unable to contain it, immovable and controlled in the face of the possibility that everything I carried, every year of grief, every night I chose to keep this scar instead of letting it heal, every time I said her name in the dark and meant it as penance, has been built on an incomplete truth.
She thanked me.
She fucking thanked me.
What if she was thanking me for ending Mordain’s work as much as her suffering?
What if she knew?
She knew she could never come back from the Frankenstein bullshit he did to her, and the only way out was death.
She wanted me with her at the end.
I have been punishing myself for killing her all this time…
But what I did to her was mercy.
I just never fucking knew it.
“But that was a long time ago,” I say, because it’s easier than answering her. “Long before I had any name worth keeping.”
“So then… how did you end up here?” Cali asks, after enough silence has passed that the question doesn’t feel like it’s chasing the last one. “With them. The Kings. That’s not exactly the natural next step for a grieving three-hundred-year-old vampire.”
I let out the faintest huff of amusement.
“No. It wasn’t.” Then lean back against the counter, giving myself something to hold onto besides the conversation.
“Fifty years after Astrid, a coalition of vampire lords moved against a cult that had been carving up supernaturals for parts and calling it research. I joined because old debts demanded it, not because of her. I told myself that, and I believed it. Burying myself in someone else’s war was easier than sitting still with grief I refused to bury myself in.
“We burned their stronghold. I watched it come down myself, believed their leader died in the wreckage same as everything else that was his. As far as I knew, that was a closed chapter, a monster I never had to think about again.” Something in my chest goes cold at the memory, though I can’t yet say why.
“There were notes. Records. I burned a stack of them without reading them closely. Evidence, I told myself, nothing worth keeping. I didn’t think about it again for three hundred years. ”
Cali is watching me with steady eyes.
“After that…” I continue, because it is easier to keep moving than to sit inside that particular thought, “… there was no coalition, no cause, no name that stuck to me longer than a season. Decades blurred into each other. I kept moving because stopping meant feeling something, and I had gotten very good at not feeling things. I don’t remember most of that era.
I’m not sure I was fully present for it. ”
“And then Raze?”
“And then Raze.” I allow myself something closer to a real smile this time.
“I drifted into mountain territory he was still learning to hold, freshly exiled, still leashing whatever got him thrown out in the first place. We didn’t meet.
We collided. It was a fight before it was ever an introduction, and somewhere in the middle of it, one of us took a hit meant for the other.
Real. Costly. No time to think it through. ”
“He patched you out of pity?”
“He patched me because I was owed it, and Raze doesn’t deal in anything else.
” I shake my head. “He didn’t offer me comfort afterward.
I wouldn’t have taken it if he had. He offered structure, rules…
a code. Brothers who’d notice if I didn’t come home at night.
” I meet her eyes, finally, and let her see the rest of it.
“I didn’t take the patch because I wanted a family again.
I took it because I recognized, better than most men could, exactly what a weapon looks like once it stops having a leash.
I’d have become that. I think some nights I still could. ”
Cali is quiet for a long moment. “That’s not nothing, you know. Choosing the leash on purpose.”
“It’s the only thing that ever worked on me,” I tell her. “Purpose, held by people who’d come looking if I didn’t answer. Everything before that was just momentum.”
She crosses her arms across her chest, and doesn’t fill the quiet that follows with anything at all. She just stays, present. Simply there.
It should feel like too much, all of it laid out in one night after centuries of keeping it filed away where no one could reach it.
It doesn’t.
It feels, for the first time in longer than I can accurately measure, like something has been set free rather than buried. I don’t know yet what it costs me, telling her the truth about the coalition, that I burned pages I never read, that I called a chapter closed I never actually finished.
Tonight, I only know that Cali listens as if it matters. And for the first time in so very long, I let someone else hold a piece of this instead of carrying all of it alone.