Page 33 of The First Scar
One frightened girl with unstable marks and nowhere left to run?
Child's play.
The rooftop was flat, tar-sealed, still holding the day's heat. I dropped into a crouch behind a chimney stack and watched herfrom across the square. Shaking. Bleeding. Her power flickering through her skin like a candle in a storm.
The rebels would come for her soon. They always did—collecting the broken, the desperate, the dangerous. All I had to do was make sure she was scared enough to say yes.
I smiled. Time to remind her what was hunting her.
AMARIA
The rooftop was all pokey edges and rot.
Corroding slate bit through my boots. That festering distortion at the edge of the city that seemed closer every time I looked. Below, searchlights swept the streets in slow, hungry arcs—Enforcer patrols, hunting for a face that looked like mine.
I hadn't meant to come up here. But the alleys had started to feel like a coffin, and my lungs had demanded open air, and before I knew it I was climbing, scrambling up drainpipes and fire-blackened beams until there was nothing above me but sky.
Serenya was below, tucked into a hammock in the abandoned courtyard, sleeping or pretending to—amid moss-covered flagstones, walls where the plaster had given up, a busted fountain dry enough to use as a fire pit. Giving me space to fall apart where she couldn't see. Generous of her. Infuriating, too.
My vision kept tunneling, the edges of the skyline blurring into a gray smear every time I closed my eyes.
The mob. The fae with my face, bleeding in the square. The poster I'd tried to burn and the Veil-glitch that had answeredinstead—rocks lifting, cracking, reality itself hiccupping because I'd lost control. Again.
What if it's you?
The question echoed in my skull, burrowing deeper every time I tried to shake it loose. The glitches clustered around me. The Veil bled harder when my power spiked. Correlation wasn't causation, but—
Maybe the King wasn't lying about what I wasdoing. Just about what Iwas.
The thought was poison. I swallowed it anyway.
Hiding wasn't working. Running wasn't working. Every door I tried closed in my face, and the world kept tightening around me like a noose made of fear and twenty million marks.
A crack in the slate near my knee had split wide enough for soil to gather. And there—stubborn, impossible—a wildflower. Tiny, purple-blue, petals no bigger than my thumbnail, growing where nothing should. I watched it longer than made sense. My finger traced the edge of one petal, barely touching, the way you'd reach for something you were afraid to ruin. It had no business being alive up here. Neither did I. I pulled my hand back and tucked it under my arm before the tenderness could spread.
I was so tired.
My eyes shut. Just for a second. Just to breathe without seeing my own face staring back from every wall—
A hand clamped over my mouth.
Body pressed to my back. Hard. Unyielding. A wall of controlled power that pinned me before I even registered the movement. His other hand held a blade to my throat—cold steel kissing the place where my blood beat hardest.
I lurched and thrashed, then drove my elbow into his groin. He growled and his free arm locked around me, pinning both arms to my sides. I bucked against him. Useless. Like fighting a wall that knew how to breathe.
His lips grazed my ear.
"You're not hiding as well as you think you are, little fox."
The Crownforged. My stomach flipped in a way I wanted to blame on the blade.
My marks seared. They surged in furious tandem, reacting to his proximity like flame to oil. His power answered—that subtle thrum from the tunnel, a resonance that made my teeth ache.
The steel edge pressed harder and my breath hitched.
"Every patrol in the city is looking for you," he continued, conversational, like we were discussing the weather. "And here you are, bleeding power onto a rooftop like a beacon. I could feel you from four streets away."
Four streets.
