“Stop talking,” Jet says, without heat.
Ronan grins anyway, pocketing his coin. The tally marks on his forearm catch the light as his hand moves, borrowed luck, already counting down.
“Reyna…” Crave’s voice doesn’t shift in register, but the weight of it does, the way it always does when he’s addressing someone he’s counting on rather than issuing a courtesy. “You’re on the strike team.”
Reyna doesn’t react the way some people do when they’re called into a fight, no sharpening of posture, no flash of heat. She’s already leaning forward with her forearms on the table, dog tags catching the overhead light as they swing forward, and the faint glow along her lightning-vein scars pulses once, reading the room, reading the combat potential in each of us the way only her All-Mother’s Sight can. She simply nods, and the movement carries the weight of a thousand battlefields behind it.
“Seraphine…” The name falls from Crave’s mouth with deliberate care. “I want you on the strike team. Valeria’s scions are newborns… they’re running on instinct and hunger, and instinct responds to Resonance. If we need to slow them without destroying them, your voice will do what none of us can.” Something moves across Seraphine’s face, not surprise, but recognition, the look of someone who has spent years beingdesired for the wrong reasons, finally being valued for the right one. Her eyes, always a fraction too bright to look at directly, settle on Crave with quiet acknowledgment. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t need to.
“Eden…” The final name, and the air in the room goes still in the way it always does when Crave says it, because even the most ancient thing in the room has learned to pay attention when the banshee is addressed. Eden stands near the far end of the table, her Irish-dark hair falling forward as she tilts her head, the lights above her flickering once in that unconscious way they always do in her vicinity. “You stay with Hex and Grizz. If we take casualties, if anyone’s dying, and I need to know about it before it happens, I need your Deathsense inside this compound, not a mile away in a derelict church.” He says it without apology, without softening it into something she hasn’t already accepted. “You are this compound’s warning. There is no one else I trust with that.”
Eden’s gaze holds his for a long moment—the lights above her steady. “I’ll hear them coming,” she says, and her voice, even at conversational volume, carries that quality, not musical, but resonant, like the space around it has been touched. “Any soul moves toward this compound with intent to harm, I’ll know before they hit the gates.”
“Good.” Crave stands. “Then we know exactly what we are walking into and exactly who is holding the line behind us.” His gaze sweeps the full table—brothers, Old Ladies, club girls, prospects reduced to their posts. “All right, I think we’re set.”
“There’s one more thing…” Sloane’s voice is quiet, but it carries the way hers always does now. She steps away from the wall, and the firelight catches the faint crimson shimmer at her fingertips, Bloodfire sitting just beneath the surface of her skin, restless and patient all at once. “I’m coming.”
Crave doesn’t flinch, but I see the barely perceptible shift in his posture, not resistance, more like he was waiting for it. “I know,” he says.
“The scions Valeria’s built her army from, they’re not beyond saving.” Sloane’s gaze moves across us, direct and certain. “My Bloodfire can purify the sire influence she’s forced on them. We don’t have to destroy every person she’s turned. We can free them.” Something moves through the room, quiet but real, a collective recalibration. Because we all know what it costs to kill, and we all know what it means to be something monstrous through no fault of your own. “We go in to end Valeria. Not to massacre the people she used.”
The silence afterward isn’t disagreement.
It’s acceptance.
Scorch exhales a slow stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “I can work around Bloodfire,” he says, which, coming from him, is the equivalent of a standing ovation.
“Right.” Crave’s gaze sweeps the table one final time. “Gear up. We leave in—”
“I’m coming too.”
Every head turns.
Charlie’s voice is steady, filling the room without apology. Her chin is up, and her hands rest flat on the table in front of her, mirroring Crave’s earlier posture in a way I don’t think she’s consciously aware of.
The word leaves my mouth before I can dress it in anything diplomatic.“No!”
Her eyes find mine.
She doesn’t flinch either.
“You’ve been a vampire for a month, Charlie.” My voice comes out lower than I intend, the edge in it not anger but something rawer, the part of me that spent weeks watching her bleed, struggle, and fight her own body for control. The part thatcannot stand the idea of walking her into a church full of feral newborns and an ancient vampire with a sire command aimed directly at her. “A month. The church will be crawling with Valeria’s influence, and you’ve already proven she can reach you through that connection. It’s too—”
“Dangerous?” She finishes the word before I can, and there’s no heat in it. No sarcasm. “I know. I’ve already thought through every version of this argument, Rogue. I know what the risks are.” She looks around the table, and there’s something settled in her expression now that wasn’t there a month ago, a resolve that was earned, not borrowed.
“Valeria built her army from people like me. Frightened people who woke up feral, starving, and completely alone. No one there is going to be able to reach them the way I can, because none of you have been them.” Her gaze comes back to mine. “I’m the only person in this room who understands what it feels like to be inside that hunger and find your way back out of it. And you know it… Crave excluded, of course.”
The room is quiet.
I look at Crave.
He’s watching Charlie with that ancient, unreadable expression he wears when he’s already made a decision and is simply waiting for the moment to say it out loud. His shadow shifts on the wall behind him, independent and restless. “She’s right,” he says.
Two words.
That’s all it takes.
Something hot and sharp moves through me, not anger at Crave, not even disagreement, because every part of my rational mind acknowledges that Charlie’s argument is sound. It’s something older than logic. The part of me wired to put my body between her and anything with teeth.
