Chapter Twenty-Five
SCAR
Equipment runs wall to wall, monitors glowing in cold blue and white while systems cycle without interruption, every piece of it unmistakably Mordain’s lab.
Ventilation forces stale air through the space, carrying the chemical bite of blood and compounds that shouldn’t exist. Nothing down here is accidental—everything is controlled.
The light throws hard shadows across every surface, and under it, I can smell him.
Old blood.
Older power.
And something else.
Something patient.
I push through the inner door and find him exactly where I expected. He remains facing the wall, calm as a man standing in his own kitchen instead of a tunnel full of bodies. Running clearly isn’t on the agenda. Neither is reaching for a weapon.
He doesn’t even bother turning around.
He is at the far end with his back to me, hands hanging loose, not moving a damn inch. Just standing there like he knew we’d come.
And then slowly, he turns.
I have spent weeks remembering Mordain, the myth I took down with the vampire lords centuries ago.
But none of it prepares me for this. He doesn’t look alive.
Not really. Whatever time has done to him, it’s carved him into something lean and hard, all edges and no softness left anywhere.
Pale as bone, dark-eyed, with a face that carries centuries of intelligence arranged into something that almost resembles serenity.
It isn’t serenity.
It’s a look that already knows how this ends, and he just waits for the world to prove him right.
His gaze moves to mine and stays there, and something cold drags down the length of my spine. The deep-body recognition that one predator has for another, when the one across the room has been alive long enough to have buried every challenge it ever faced.
“Scar,” he says, his voice smooth, unhurried, carrying through the chamber without effort.
“I wondered when you’d finally make it this far.
” He tilts his head, fractionally, studying me the way a collector studies a piece he’s been waiting to acquire.
“You look exactly as I imagined.” He lifts his hand, as if he is giving an order, and the rogues begin moving again.
I widen my eyes as they start lunging at my brothers, Cali, and Roxy, the fighting starting up around the room behind me.
I go to take off to help, but Mordain steps in front of me.
“Let them fight it out. You and I have things to discuss.”
I don’t answer him. Instead, I move forward, every sense spread wide, tracking exits, surfaces, and the precise coordinates of every glass panel, piece of equipment, and possible thing he could put between himself and me in the next ten seconds.
His expression shifts into something that isn’t quite a smile. “The vampire who killed his own lover,” he murmurs, like he is recalling something fond. “You were always my favorite tragedy.”
The words stop me cold.
Not the content of them—the certainty. The intimacy of them, the way they arrive already shaped around something specific, something mine, like he has been holding them in his mouth for an eternity and has finally found the right moment to release them.
My jaw locks. “You don’t know anything about—”
“Astrid?” The name falls out of him like a stone dropping into still water, and the ripple it sends through me is something I refuse to show.
He watches me with visible pleasure. “Berserker bloodline. Nordic origin. Extraordinary regenerative capacity, remarkable pain threshold. A will forged in steel.” He begins to move, slowly, in a circle that isn’t an attack and isn’t a retreat—just the unhurried movement of something that doesn’t feel threatened.
“I chose her specifically, you understand. Not because of what she was. But because of you.”
The room narrows, every line of it pulling tight, and I feel something in me go cold and still, as if the world has reduced to this one moment.
“Formula Twelve…” he continues, his tone carrying the quiet satisfaction of a masterwork finally revealed, “… was the finest thing I ever built. Not in its mechanics… those were perfected over decades of prior subjects. In its elegance…” He pauses, letting it settle.
“I designed it to work slowly. To let the subject fight. To give them just enough of themselves to keep choosing to resist.”
Something cuts through me, sharp and hard to place.
She fought the madness for as long as she could.
“She held on longer than any of them,” he states, and there is genuine appreciation in his voice, which is the most obscene thing I have ever heard.
“Months longer than my projections. Do you know why?” He stops moving. His eyes hold mine, dark and unblinking. “You. She was holding on for you.”
Something hits.
Hard.
My grip tightens before I realize I’ve done it, fingers locking down on the stake hard enough that the wood creaks under the pressure. Every muscle in my body pulls taut at once—not movement, but containment. Like something just tried to tear loose and got caught halfway out.
He keeps talking.
I don’t hear it.
Not properly.
Because everything in me has narrowed to a single point, a line drawn straight from him to me that nothing else is allowed to exist inside of. The room’s noise drops away, the fight, the others, all of it pushed back behind something colder and more precise.
Three hundred and fifty years of control doesn’t break.
It locks.
I feel it in the way my jaw sets, my shoulders square without thought, and in the stillness that settles into me so completely it reads as calm from the outside.
It isn’t calm.
It’s pressure.
Held in place.
Built over centuries and forced into shape, every instinct I have is driving in one direction while everything I’ve learned drags it back into line.
He’s watching me.
Waiting to see what gives.
But nothing does.
But something in me shifts anyway, something that has been set in place for a very long time, taking a hit it wasn’t built to absorb.
And instead of breaking…
It holds.
Just barely.
“Did you think her madness was natural?” He spreads his hands slightly, as if the point should already be obvious. “I built it. I perfected it. And you put her down like an animal, never knowing—”
I move before the sentence finishes. Centuries of speed, launches across the chamber in a single explosive burst, every cell of my body locked onto one precise target, his throat, his chest, the fastest route to whatever it would take to make him. Stop. Existing!
He moves the second I commit, not faster than I do, but earlier, like he’s been waiting for the exact point where there’s no pulling the motion back, no correcting the line once it’s set.
By the time I realize it, I’m already in it, already closing the distance, already past the moment where instinct can save me from the choice I have made.
He doesn’t rush to meet me, doesn’t need to.
He shifts instead, one clean step to the side, controlled and precise, the kind of movement that comes from knowing exactly where I’ll be before I get there.
It isn’t reactive or defensive. It’s positioning, like he’s been standing in the right place for this long before I stepped into it.
For a fraction of a second, we’re close enough that everything sharpens, my focus narrowing to the smallest details, the angle of his shoulders, the set of his stance, the expression on his face.
Settled.
Certain.
Like this moment was never in doubt.
His hand moves, and it barely registers at first, just a small shift in his position, nothing dramatic, nothing that should carry any real weight behind it.
I’m already driving forward, already committed to the strike, already inside the motion with no intention of pulling it back, and that’s exactly when it happens, when something slips through my guard so cleanly it feels like it was never there to begin with.
There’s no impact, the way there should be, no collision of force against force.
It isn’t a hit.
It is an intrusion.
I don’t see the blade.
I feel it.
It goes in cold, a pressure more than a strike, something sliding into my side with a precision that doesn’t belong in a fight, parting muscle like it knows the exact path it’s meant to take.
There’s no hesitation in it, no resistance that matters, just a steady, deliberate push inward that settles deep between my ribs before my body fully catches up to what’s happening.
And then my body reacts.
Everything in me locks down at once, every muscle pulling taut in instinctive refusal, like I can stop it, like I can force it back out just by denying it the space it’s already taken.
My strike falters for half a second—not enough for anyone else to see, but enough for him—and I feel the shift in balance immediately, the space I just lost, the ground I just gave up.
The blade seats deeper.
Cali screams. The sound cuts through everything sharp, raw, and close enough to matter.
I don’t turn.
I can’t.
My body is still caught on that single point inside me, every instinct trying to decide whether to rip the blade out or drive forward and take his head off anyway.
She’s moving. I feel that more than I see it, the shift in the air, the sudden violence of motion coming hard from my right as she breaks formation without thinking, without hesitation, sprinting straight for me like nothing else in this room exists.
“Scar!” Her voice hits again, closer now, cracking at the edges.
She doesn’t slow down, just comes straight in, and gets hit.
A rogue slams into her from the side, catching her mid-stride and dragging her off line hard enough that her feet leave the ground for a second before she twists into it, fighting the momentum, trying to tear herself free.
She doesn’t even look at it.
Her focus stays on me.
“Get the fuck off me—” The words come out sharp, vicious, cut short as the rogue tries to haul her back, claws digging in, strength enhanced enough to matter, to slow her, to keep her just out of reach.