Her eyes narrow, studying me like she’s trying to decide whether I’m full of shit. “Survive,” she repeats softly, the humor slipping for a moment.
The weight of what she’s become presses in, visible in the way her shoulders tighten.
“I’m not asking you to trust me blindly,” I continue. “Just give me one week. That’s all I’m asking. If at the end of that you want to leave, I won’t stop you. Your choice.”
She watches me for a long moment, hunger and skepticism wrestling behind her eyes. “One week,” she says slowly. “You get seven days of me not trying to bolt or eat anyone.”
“That’s all I’m asking.”
“And after that, I can walk?” she presses.
“You can walk.”
Silence stretches between us, tense but no longer hostile.
Finally, she nods.
Reluctant but real.
“Fine,” she says, exhaling. “Seven days. Don’t make me regret it.”
Chapter Eight
CHARLIE
The cabin settles around me like it’s deciding what to make of me, all old timber and mountain silence and the smell of a place that has held other people’s secrets for years. The fire Rogue lit before he left the room crackles in the stone hearth with the cheerful indifference that doesn’t care about the supernatural crisis unfolding three feet away from it. I’m sitting on the edge of the bed with my hands curled in my lap and my brain doing its absolute level best to dissolve into static.
Seven days, I said.
Seven fucking days.
Charlotte Harris, what in the actual hell is wrong with you?
He comes back twenty minutes later carrying something that smells like the butcher’s section of a grocery store, setting a sealed container on the table near the door before turning to look at me with an expression that says he’s prepared for this conversation and still expects it to go sideways. He’s not wrong about that. He should put it on his resume—impressive situational awareness with a strong grasp of the obvious.
“You’re gonna want to ask me something,” he says, settling into the chair across from the hearth with the kind of deliberate calm that tells me his version of sitting down has nothing to do with relaxation and everything to do with making himself look less threatening. Which is an interesting strategy from a man who looks like he was carved out of granite by something with anger management issues.
I stare at my hands for a moment. My nails are slightly too sharp, a detail I hadn’t noticed before in the chaos of waking up and agreeing to voluntary imprisonment in the wilderness. Myskin is cooler than it should be. I pressed my fingers to my wrist earlier and found no pulse waiting for me, and the absence of it sits in the center of my chest.
“WhatamI?” The words come out quieter than I intended, stripped of the wit I usually deploy like armor, falling into the space between us with a kind of raw, unguarded weight that makes me want to immediately take them back. I clear my throat, and try again with a little more Charlotte Harris and a little less open wound. “I mean, I have a working theory. The fangs are a clue. The total absence of heartbeat is another strong hint. And the fact I spent an entire morning apparently trying to eat people I’m fairly sure I would’ve liked under normal circumstances suggests something has gone fairly significantlyoff the railswith my biology.” I look up at him. “But I’d like to hear it from someone who isn’t me, because the inside of my head is not a great place to be right now, and external confirmation would be really fucking helpful.”
Rogue studies me for a moment, his golden eyes doing that thing they do where they don’t miss anything, processing with an attention to detail that should feel invasive and somehow doesn’t, which is its own separate problem I’m filing away for later.
“You’re a vampire,” he says, not softening it. “A scion. Turned against your will by a vampire old and powerful enough that the process happened faster than it should have, which is part of why you woke up the way you did, overwhelmed, with no frame of reference, no guidance, no preparation…” He pauses, his jaw working slightly as if measuring something before he releases it. “You were made, Charlotte. And you were left to figure it out alone, which isn’t something that shouldeverhappen to a new scion.”
There it is.
I sit with that for a moment, letting it settle through the layers of shock, sarcasm, and the terrible, clawing hunger that has been my constant companion since I woke up on a warehouse floor with no memory of how I got there.
Vampire.
The word should feel absurd.
It should come with the embarrassment of something said out loud that has no business being said out loud, like announcing you believe in Bigfoot or that you’ve adopted seventeen cats.
It should land as comedy.
But it doesn’t land as comedy.
