“Blood magic.” She pushes off the doorframe and moves toward the bedroom to pack, unhurried and certain. “My Crimson Sight identified Valeria’s signature in Charlie’s blood. My knowledge of blood-based suppression techniques may be the one thing they haven’t tried yet. The combination of scion blood and sire signature is specific. There are working methods for it, old ones, that don’t require Dragonfire or fear conditioning or wolf-pack grounding.” She glances back at me over her shoulder. “You know I’m right.”
I do know she’s right.
The irritation of loving someone who matches you.
“Pack light,” I tell her. “We ride in forty minutes.”
“Twenty,” she says, disappearing around the corner.
I move back to the desk. Clear what needs clearing. Leave the territory dispute documents in a stack with a note for Hex to handle the liaison correspondence if I’m not back within three days. Set the club running on automatic in the way I’ve done a hundred times before when something required me elsewhere.
The Bloodguard bond shifts as I work.
Not the fraying pull of the last nine days, but something different. Less rope under strain, more a line held taut between two points, finally stopped moving away from each other.
Rogue reached out.
He asked for help, for me specifically, not as his president, his anchor, or the authority holding the club together. He asked for his brother. Trusted me enough to say I’m begging you in the middle of the night when he had every reason to expect the answer he’s been getting for days.
Distance.
Strategy.
Management from the appropriate remove.
The bond doesn’t lie about what it costs a man like Rogue to reach across all of it and ask anyway. And it doesn’t lie about what it means. What we’ve lost ground on over these days and what we might, with sufficient effort, find our way back toward.
The word‘brother’has weight in our world. It isn’t handed out. It isn’t sentiment. In an MC built on supernatural blood oaths and centuries of shared violence, it means something specific. It means I will stand between you and the thing coming for you. It means your name is on my list of non-negotiables.
I pull on my cut.
I’m not ready to examine all of it yet.
What it means to hear Rogue sound like that and feel something in me move toward him instead of holding theconsidered distance I’ve been maintaining for my own reasons. None of which was wrong.
All of which still led to this.
But I can drive north.
I can do what I do, what I’ve done for centuries. I can take a newborn vampire tearing herself apart against her own hunger and show her what control looks like when it’s been built rather than borrowed. When it’s forged in the deep, patient dark of something older than her turning, older than the bloodlust she’s fighting, older than the fear.
I can give Rogue back his mate.
Chapter Sixteen
CHARLIE
The Next Day
Ten days since we drove north into the cold air, pine, and the kind of silence that has nothing peaceful in it, not for me, not anymore. It’s been days since the first brother arrived at this cabin. I’ve spent every one of them trying not to think of five heartbeats as five meals. So many days of Dragonfire, Null Pulses, fear conditioning, and a wolf alpha sitting cross-legged in frost across from me at dawn, holding a stillness I’m not capable of anymore, waiting for the storm inside me to burn itself out.
Ten days.
For the record.
The storm has not burned itself out.
I’m on the floor with my back against the bed frame, because the bed stopped feeling manageable somewhere around hour three of tonight. Too soft. Too still. Too much like surrendering to something I can’t afford to surrender to. The floor is cold through my jeans, and the sensation is currently the most grounding thing available to me, so I am holding onto it and trying to breathe through a hunger that doesn’t respond to breathing the way panic does.
