My phone sits face down on the left corner of the desk.
It has sat in the exact same position for four days.
Scorch’s reports are sent over the encrypted line at 0600 and 1800 like military precision. The only predictable element in an increasingly unpredictable situation. He sends them in bullet points because Scorch has never once in five centuries wasted language on sentiment.
Dragonfire Treatment:Temporary. A window of approximately forty minutes before the hunger cycle resets. No lasting suppression.
Wolf Pack Arrived:Alpha male attempting environmental conditioning. Some reduction in anxiety response. Bloodlust unaffected.
Then this morning’s report is stripped entirely of anything resembling optimism.
Eleven Days Since Turning:Control window not extending. Everything we have is buying her hours, not stability. This is not sustainable.
I read that last report four times.
Then I set my phone face down and return to the territory dispute documents.
My bond with Rogue tells me things Scorch’s reports do not. The Bloodguard connection has been fraying since he left, worn to something thin and rough-edged, worn down to its inner fibers. It still carries sensation. Still transmits the low-frequency signal of his state across whatever distance separates us.
For the first week, the bond ran hot. Ferocity and desperate grinding focus, the wolf pouring everything it had into the one problem directly in front of it. I recognized the feeling. I’ve felt it from him before, on battlefields, during standoffs, in the brutal aftermath of wars we barely survived. Rogue has always been the man who responds to crisis by burning hotter rather than colder. It’s what makes him extraordinary.
It’s also what makes him impossible.
For the last three days, something else has been bleeding through underneath the fire.
Something uncomfortably close to desperation.
I don’t like feeling it.
I like even less what it means.
My deadline came and went. I gave Rogue the extension because the Bloodguard bond demanded it, and because, under the control, under the cold strategy and the centuries of practice at making hard calls, there is a part of me still irrevocably his president…
His brother.
I gave him more time because I couldn’t make myself do anything else.
The thought of him out there in a cabin at the edge of the wilderness, pouring himself into a situation with a body count, a ticking clock, and a fated mate he cannot save through force of will alone, sits in me the way bad news sits. Refusing to be ignored. Growing heavier the longer I leave it undisturbed.
I miss him.
The admission costs something I don’t have clean language for.
Not the VP, though I feel his absence from the table every time we sit in Church without him.
Not the Bloodguard, though the bond fraying at the edges registers in me the way a wound registers, dull and impossible to forget.
Butmy brother.
The shape of having Rogue at my back, steady and fierce, the one man in two centuries I’ve trusted at my flank without question or caveat.
I’ve outlived most of the people I’ve called brother. The ones who didn’t survive the wars we fought, the ones who chose other paths, the ones whose loyalties fractured under pressure and remade themselves into something I no longer recognized. Over two hundred years of that grief, I’ve learned not to list what I have while I still have it. I learned to hold it without squeezingit. Learned to let people be what they are without building monuments to them inside my own chest before they’re gone.
With Rogue, I’ve never entirely managed it.
He came to the club with nothing but the wolf, his nerve, and the absolute, unflinching refusal to be anything other than exactly what he was. No performance, positioning, or careful management of what he showed me or what he kept back. He is, after two centuries together, still the most straightforwardly honest person I have ever had the complicated fortune of leading.
I turn back to the complaint from the Coven’s liaison and find a sentence I’ve read three times without absorbing any of it.
