The fraying is real.
Every day I spend here is a day not at Crave’s side, not feeding the bond the sustained proximity it requires to stay at full strength. Every hour I give to Charlie is an hour that was supposed to belong to a two-century oath, and the math of it lands whether I want it to or not. His presence reaches me, deliberate, as he makes room for something he doesn’t fully understand, extending the kind of patience that costs him more than he’ll admit. The guilt of that sits in my gut with enough density to qualify as structural.
I have been failing my oath every day since we arrived.
I know it.
He knows it.
The bond hits instantly and clearly doesn’t give a shit what I intended.
I get up, moving quietly through the hall to the doorway of Charlie’s room, resting my shoulder against the frame, and looking in at where she sleeps with the restless, fitful quality of someone fighting something even in unconsciousness. Her body shifts against the blankets, her face doing work that sleep should have paused, the hunger finding her even here, even in the few hours she manages to go under.
I know what this is. I’ve known since she hit the clubhouse floor and my chest registered something my head wasn’t ready to name.
The bond.
Pack-deep.
Lycan-absolute.
The thing I’ve spent two centuries assuming I’d never have because the Bloodguard oath didn’t leave room for it. And now it’s in my cabin, bruised, hungry, andmine. Her hand is curlednear her face on the pillow, and the gesture is so unguarded, so entirely human in a body that’s no longer human, that something in my chest shifts in a way I’ve stopped fighting. I lie to myself about it a little longer, because the moment I let the word settle fully, there is no version of this where I walk away from her. And I can’t afford that yet.
She stopped tonight.
At the precise moment her body was winning the argument,she stopped.
Three days in and she’s already doing something that most new scions can’t manage in a week. The intelligence underneath the hunger, the sheer stubborn refusal to become the thing the hunger is asking her to be, it’s real, it’s formidable, and it’s going to be the thing that saves her.
I look at her, examining the fraying thread of my oath, and I understand, without needing to work through the logic of it, that there isnoversion of this where I leave.
There are four days left, and we are using every one of them.
The bond with Crave will have to hold until I can tend to it again. The oath will have to understand that protecting someone is not a betrayal of protection, that what I am is not diminished by where I’m standing. The Bloodguard doesn’t always guard as everyone expects.
I pull the door mostly shut and go back to the fire and sit with the guilt and the certainty tangled together in my chest. Two things that have no interest in resolving themselves into one, and I let the night outside the cabin be as dark and as quiet as it wants to be.
She stopped.
For now, in the specific arithmetic of this week, that is enough.
Chapter Ten
CHARLIE
The Next Day
I will not eat Rogue. I will not eat Rogue. I will not eat Rogue.
The mantra loops through my head on day four the same way it has every morning since we arrived at this cabin, threadbare from repetition, held together by sheer determination and not much else. I repeat it while I watch the shadows shift on the ceiling above my bed. I repeat it when I hear his boots cross the hallway, and the cadence of his heartbeat precedes him the way a storm front does pressure. The most maddeningly edible sound in the known universe.
He hasn’t tried to kill me today, which I’m counting as progress.
I also haven’t tried to eat him, which I’m counting as a miracle.
The bloodlust is… marginally better.Marginally.Like trading an open wound for one with a bandage that’s mostly holding. There are stretches now, twenty minutes, sometimes forty, where the hunger recedes to a low, constant roar instead of a full-throated scream. Where I can sit in the same room as Rogue without my vision tunneling down to the pulse point at the side of his throat. Where I remember that I was a person once, a whole person, who liked terrible reality television and overcaffeinated lattes and casual sex with boys whose names I never learned.
Then something will shift, a movement too fast, a scent carried on a draft, and the forty minutes of relative peace collapse into five seconds of white-knuckled control and everything starting over from the beginning.
