Am I crying fucking blood?
Great! Just great!
“H-help m-me.” The words break in half as they come out, fracturing across a sob that has been building since the warehouse, since the woman’s body crumpled to the diner floor, since waking up in this strange amber-lit room with no idea how to be whatever I am now. “P-pl-lease.” The please is worse than the rest of it. Thepleasecomes from a place so raw and genuine that its sound even catches me off guard. “Please, I don’t want to be this. Tell me how tonotbethis!”
His arms shift, and the restraint becomes something else entirely. Still present, still immovable, but changed, wrappingrather than containing, one large hand coming up to cup the back of my head, pressing it gently against his chest.
His heartbeat is right there. I close my eyes and press toward it like a compass finding north, even though the sound of it makes the hunger flare, even though every rational reason I have to pull away is screaming, I don’t. I can’t.It’s the first warm, living, real thing I’ve had access to since I died.
“I’ve got you.” His voice has dropped completely, no authority in it now. “Charlotte.” The way he says my name is different every time, and this version is like something he’s handling with care, and it undoes something in my chest I didn’t know was still intact. “You’re safe with me.”
“I killed people.” The raw and horrible words tear out of me before I can stop them. “In the diner, that lady was so nice to me. I-I didn’t mean to, I didn’t want to, but I—”
“I know.”
“You can’t j-just…” My voice cracks. “You can’t just know and be okay with me killing people!”
“In this life we live, Charlotte, innocents get hurt. It’s not okay, but it happens.” His hand shifts at the back of my head, a slow, deliberate pressure applied. He doesn’t try to calm me down or talk me out of it. He stays with me through it, steady as stone. “But that’s not who you are. It’s what happened to you. Those aren’t the same thing.”
The sob that comes out of me is ugly, desperate, and I’m beyond caring.
But he holds on through all of it without flinching or pulling away, saying nothing for a long moment, the gold-eyed stranger who keeps putting himself between me and everything in this world I want to destroy, and somehow… somehow, that includes me.
“She can’t be out here.” Rogue’s attention doesn’t leave my face. “Not with a building full of heartbeats behind every wall.She’ll tear through your brothers before she finishes figuring out what her own hands can do,” Rogue states.
The silence that follows has texture and edges.
“Then we contain her.” Crave’s voice stays low and even. “The moment she crossed into this compound, she became club business. You don’t get to handle this alone, Rogue. Not with her. Not with what she is.”
“I’m not locking her in chains.”
“I didn’t ask you to.” Crave’s silver gaze flickers to me, brief, clinical, the look a man gives a weapon before deciding whether to holster it or use it. “Basement… it’s reinforced. She stays down there until the club decides what comes next.”
Rogue’s jaw works. I feel the refusal building through his chest against my back, tension winding tighter by the second, and for one heartbeat, I think he’s going to fight his alpha right here in front of me.
But he doesn’t.
His hands adjust on my shoulders, careful and deliberate—the kind of careful that costs something to maintain.
“I stay with her,” he says. It’s not a question and definitely not a request.
Crave studies him for a long moment. The shadows at his feet shift as if they’re weighing something too.
“Until Church convenes,” he says finally. “Then you’re at the table with the rest of us. This isn’t a decision you get to make for the club, brother… not even for her.”
I feel Rogue’s fingers tighten fractionally against my arm, and then release.
“Understood.”
Crave turns to the woman beside him, says something low I can’t catch. Her crimson-gold eyes flick to me once, unreadable, and then they move together toward the hallway, the rest of theroom peeling away behind them in that ordered way predators move when they’ve been dismissed without being dismissed.
The door at the end of the hall opens, then closes.
And then… it’s just the two of us.
Me, and the warm, gold-eyed stranger whose arms are the only thing standing between me and every worst instinct this new body has.
“Come on, Charlotte.” His voice is lower, gentler, the gravel in it worn softer around the edges. “Let’s get you downstairs.”
