Here we are.
The fire breathes between us, throwing light across his face, the scar, the jaw that looks carved rather than grown, the eyes that carry two hundred years of guarding something precious at the cost of everything else. And I understand, sitting here on the other side of these flames, what he has put on the altar to stay in this cabin. His oath, his anchor, the connection that has been the center of his purpose for longer than I’ve been alive.
For me.
For a feral newborn vampire he’d never met, and a mate bond he never asked for.
The anger doesn’t leave. It won’t, not tonight, maybe not for a long time. The grief of unchosen things takes longer than four days to metabolize. But something shifts alongside it, making room—a sliver of space where understanding lives, unexpected and quiet.
“Does it get easier?” I ask. “Any of it.”
“I’ll let you know when I find out.” The corner of his mouth moves. It’s not quite a smile. It’s something more honest than that.
But I guess we’re in this together.
Whether we want to be, orknot.
Chapter Twelve
CHARLIE
The Next Day
The voices reach me before dawn. They carry through the cabin walls, clear and layered, impossible to block out. Engines cut, and boots hit gravel. Quiet conversation moves between men who know how to keep their voices low and still be heard. My eyes open to the ceiling before my brain has caught up with the information, and then the rest of it arrives in a wave, because it’s not just voices.
It’s heartbeats.
Multiple.
Arriving all at once.
My body responds before I have anything resembling a choice in the matter. The hunger, which has spent the last hour doing a passable impression of something manageable, detonates straight up my throat. My hands grip the blanket. My spine presses flat against the mattress as if I can somehow anchor myself there through sheer refusal, as if the cotton and batting beneath me could hold against the tide of noise, pulse, and need currently dismantling everything I’ve built in the last four days.
Four days of breathing exercises, meditation, and Rogue’s infuriatingly steady voice talking me down from ledges I can’t even name.
Four days of animal blood in containers that taste like disappointment and survival at the same time.
Four days of holding myself together with the grim, white-knuckled determination of someone who has decided, through no grace or nobility but through sheer absolute refusal tobecome the thing the hunger wants her to be, that she will not cross that line again.
Even during crazy, animalistic sex, I didn’t give in to that insatiable craving. The desire to rip Rogue’s throat apart and bathe in his blood, even though every instinct inside me desperately wanted to.
But now on day five, there are six heartbeats outside this cabin, and every single one of them sounds like a meal.
The door to the bedroom opens without ceremony, and Rogue fills the frame. He’s already dressed, already reading the situation from my face, and his expression does the thing it always does now, that calibration between authority and something else, something beneath the controlled surface that doesn’t have a clean name.
“They’re here,” he says, which I know.Obviously.“Five brothers. They’ve come to help.”
“Five more people,” I manage, my voice steadier than I expected it to be. “Five more heartbeats in a confined space with a vampire who is currently fighting every instinct she has.”
“Yeah.” He doesn’t soften that fact. I’ve come to appreciate that about him, the way he doesn’t pad the truth into something gentler than it actually is. “And we’re going to take them one at a time. You set the pace. If anyone comes too fast or too close, you say the word, and they back off. No arguments.”
My throat works around the hunger. “And if I can’t hold it?”
His gold eyes hold mine across the room, unwavering and certain in a way that does something entirely inconvenient to my pulse, or whatever passes for a pulse now. “You will. You held it last night… inreallyintense circumstances.”
The confidence in that sentence is, objectively speaking, unreasonable. It is also the only thing currently preventing me from losing my mind entirely.
“But I’m not going to be fucking all five of them… right?”
