Then her mouth drags sideways.
It happens in a single breath, her lips leaving mine and tracking along my jaw with a different quality of focus, hunger shifting in her body from the kind I’ve been managing for days into something older and more specific. The graze of herteeth against the line of my neck arrives with the inevitability of something she has been fighting since the moment she first registered what I smell like, and for a fraction of a second, half a breath, less, something in me wants it. Wants her teeth in my throat, wants her to take what she’s asking for, wants the thing I’ve spent two centuries being too disciplined to want.
My wolf doesn’t weigh consequences.
My wolf has already consented.
She isnotready.
I am the one who knows that, and she is the one who has to stop, and the gap between those two facts is the narrowest it has ever been.
Then she stops.
She stops so hard it’s almost violent, wrenching backward, her hands coming off me as though my skin has burned them, a sound leaving her throat that carries equal parts horror and want in a combination she clearly can’t disentangle.
She turns.
Her back is to me before the motion fully completes, spine rigid, both hands coming up to her face in a posture refusing to let what’s happening be witnessed. When she speaks, her voice is controlled, though it doesn’t sound like it will stay that way. “I’m sorry,” she says, barely audible. “I didn’t mean to… I can feel them, and I’m—”
“Charlie.” She stops. “Turn around.”
“I’d really rather not.”
“Charlotte.”
She hesitates, then she turns, slowly, hands still pressed to her jaw. Her eyes are wet, which she’s clearly furious about.
“You stopped,” I say.
“I almost didn’t.”
“But you did.”
“Rogue, my fangs were—”
“I know where your fangs were.” I keep my voice steady. “I also know you pulled back. At the hardest possible moment, you chose to stop.” I hold her gaze. “Do you understand how significant that is?”
Something flickers across her face as she holds my gaze for a long second.
“It wasn’t just the blood,” she says quietly. “What happened before that. I want you to know that. That wasn’t the hunger.”
Something in my chest goes very still. “I know,” I reply.
“Okay.” She exhales. “I just needed you to know.”
The silence between us feels different now. Charged in a way that keeps dragging my attention back to her no matter how hard I try to focus on anything else, like something has settled between us and neither of us knows what the hell it is.
“I held it for ten minutes,” she says quietly, after a moment. “In the session before sparring.”
“Ten minutes,” I confirm.
She nods once, to herself, and puts the armor back on. “I’m gonna go get a drink,” she states, and walks off.
I let out an exhale as she starts walking toward the cabin. “Okay,” I reply, and as I slowly make my way back into the cabin, she closes her door behind her and doesn’t come back out for the rest of the night.
***
It’s long after midnight when Crave reaches me through the Bloodguard connection. The contact lands against the inside of my chest with the texture of something threadbare, still present, still recognizably him, but attenuated in ways it wasn’t a week ago. The signal is weaker, requiring effort to resolve where it once arrived without friction. I sit in the main room of the cabin with the fire burned low, the building quiet around me, and Ilet the connection form properly, feeling along its edges the way you’d feel the state of a rope you’re not sure is still load-bearing.
