My body keeps fighting.
My body has not received the memo that something has changed in the emotional register of this encounter.
“Listen to my voice.” Still steady, still low, still right beside my ear. “You’re not a prisoner. Nobody here is going to hurt you. But you cannot run out of this building right now, do you understand? Youcannot.”
The hunger roars in response, a tidal crest of need that blurs my vision at the edges and fills my mouth with the phantom taste of copper, and all those heartbeats are still pounding through the walls.
“The hunger,” I choke out, the words barely words, mostly sound, mostly the raw edge of desperation with syllables attached. “Please, it’s… you don’t understand, it’s—”
“I understand.” And the thing is, he says it with a conviction that stops me more effectively than the physical restraint does. A certainty that doesn’t come from theory, because he says it like it’s lived in him for a long time. “I knowexactlywhat it costs you to hold it back. And I know you can.”
My legs stop fighting.
My arms begin to tremble instead.
His grip loosens, barely. It’s just enough to stop being a cage and start being something else.
“There she is,” he says quietly.
I almost laugh. It comes out as a broken sound that isn’t quite either. “You don’t know what I am right now.”
“Yeah, I do.” There’s no hesitation in his words. “You’re someone who’s been holding themselves together by their fingernails for hours, you’re exhausted, you’re terrified, and you haven’t hurt anyone in this room even though every instinct you have is telling you to…” He pauses. “That’s not nothing.”
I don’t have a response, so I ask the only thing that matters. “Who are you?” The question scrapes out of me, hoarse with everything the last several hours have done to my voice, my dignity, and the orderly structure of a life I’m fairly certain no longer exists. “H-How do you know my n-name?”
He hesitates, his arms never loosening their grip around me. “Rogue,” he says. “My name is Rogue.” Another pause, and in it something moves in his chest against my back, of words being chosen with more care than the situation might seem to require. “And…” he hesitates, “… I don’t know how I know, but I feel like I know everything about you. You’re safe here. You have my word on that.”
Safe.
The word lands somewhere in me. The hunger grabs it and tears it apart, because safe and hungry are not compatible states, and my hunger has opinions about every available option in this room. All of those opinions are terrible. The drumming of heartbeats through the walls builds back into a roar that overrides every other signal my overloaded brain is trying to process.
“Charlie.” His voice drops further. The gravel in it intensifies, and beneath the words, there’s something else, a resonance, a layered quality, and his arms tighten, not in punishment or cruelty, but the immovable quality that has drawn its line and will not move it. “Charlotte.” My full name lands differently, and it cuts through the noise. “Look at me. Turn and look at me.”
The hunger doesn’t obey.
But something beneath it hesitates.
Something smaller, frightened, the last fragile piece of the person I used to be, still trying to understand what’s happening instead of devouring it.
That part of me turns.
My head shifts sideways against his hold until his face comes into view, close enough that I can finally see his eyes.
They’re gold. Not honey, not amber, not any conventional warm color, gold in the way a flame held at the right angle burns. They are focused on my face with an attention so total that everything else is pushed to the periphery. His jaw is set.A muscle works in it. The restraint in every line of his face isn’t comfortable… it’s chosen, and the choosing costs him. I can see the cost of it plain as daylight.
My lungs work uselessly.
The hunger still claws at the inside of my throat.
The heartbeats still hammer through the damn walls.
But his eyes hold mine, and in them there’s something that reaches past every screaming, animal layer of this nightmare, past the hunger, the horror, and the complete unraveling of everything I thought was true about the world, and finds me. The part of me that still exists underneath all of it. The part that remembers what it was to be Charlotte Harris, who never asked for any of this, who certainly didn’t sign up for fangs, bloodlust, strength she can’t control, and the crushing weight of killing four innocent victims that she cannotevertake back.
The tears arrive without warning.
They come hot, fast, and with the full, catastrophic weight of every moment since the lookout, when a woman with cold hands and no heartbeat smiled at me and said she had ‘plans’.
And as I wipe away a tear, I realize my tears are crimson red.
