She meets my eyes and nods slowly. “O-okay.”
I get to my feet and hold my hand out to her. She eyes it for a second like she’s still deciding whether trusting me is a spectacularly bad idea, but then finally takes it.
Hades is waiting in the hallway exactly where I figured he’d be, all quiet stillness and graveyard energy. He doesn’t ask questions, or need the explanation either. He simply moves past me into the room, his power unfurling, wrapping around Charlie with the kind of precision that comes from centuries of practice. She goes down without a sound, her body relaxing into unconsciousness so smoothly it looks like sleep rather than magical intervention.
I catch her before she hits the floor, her weight settling into my arms with the kind of trust she can’t offer consciously but her body gives anyway, every instinct recognizing safety even when her mind can’t process it yet.
Hades steps back, his black eyes meeting mine with understanding that doesn’t require words. “She’ll sleep until you wake her. No dreams. No pain. It’s clean.”
“Thank you, brother.”
He inclines his head, the gesture carrying acknowledgment, then disappears back into shadow with the efficiency of someone who’s learned not to linger in places where his presence reminds the living of their mortality.
I carry Charlie upstairs, through the clubhouse where brothers watch with expressions ranging from concern toskepticism, past Sloane whose crimson-gold eyes track my movement with the kind of knowing that makes me wonder what her blood magic sees when she looks at us. Crave stands near the bar, his gaze heavy with the weight of ultimatums and the bond between us that’s been fraying since the moment I recognized my mate.
Our eyes meet, and something passes between us that doesn’t fit into language—the acknowledgment of what this costs him, what it costs me, what we’re both sacrificing to different altars because fate doesn’t care about oaths sworn or loyalties built when it decides to rewrite the rules.
His jaw tightens, but he nods.
Permission. Reluctant and painful. Given anyway because he understands better than anyone what it means to have your world fractured by a woman you didn’t choose but can’t abandon.
The bond with Crave aches as the distance grows. Still present and real, but quieter now, in the background where it used to be primary. My wolf whines, confused by the competing loyalties, unable to reconcile serving two masters when instinct screams thatmates come first, always first.
Before presidents.
Before pack.
Before anything.
I load Charlie into the truck’s passenger seat, securing her with the seatbelt, even though I know it’s unnecessary. An old habit, human gestures that provide comfort even when logic says they’re pointless. The engine turns over with a rumble that vibrates through the cab.
In the early hours of the morning, with darkness still surrounding us, I pull out of the compound’s lot, watching the clubhouse shrink in the rearview mirror, watching my brothersstanding in formation outside the main doors like sentinels guarding territory I’m driving away from.
The bond with Crave aches.
Not broken or severed, but distant in ways it’s never been before, a phantom limb I can still sense but can’t quite reach. Still there, but not primary, not commanding, not the compass my wolf uses to orient himself in the world.
She’s the compass now.
Sleeping.
Dangerous as hell and fragile as glass.
Mine.
The drive north starts in tense silence, my hands tight on the wheel, my awareness split between the road ahead and the woman beside me whose stillness presses at my instincts, no pulse, no living rhythm, only the quiet hum of the mate bond beneath her skin. Transformed into a creature that needs blood to survive and hasn’t learned yet that survival doesn’t require killing.
An hour passes before I stop.
The butcher shop sits on the edge of a town too small to matter, the kind of place hunters use when they don’t want to haul carcasses home whole.
Most nights it’s dark. Closed.
Tonight there’s a light on.
Relief slides through me. A single bulb glows behind the front window, cutting through the pre-dawn dark. I hadn’t been certain‘The Butcher’would be here and hadn’t wanted to drive farther with the clock working against me.
I kill the engine and step out. Cold air bites at my face while the world feels suspended.
