“You’re fighting your nature,” he says.
It’s not a question, but a flat, accurate observation. The kind of tone that treats it like data, not opinion.
“Correct,” I say. My voice comes out steadier than I have any right to expect, given the fangs, the wall, the full internal emergency, all of it.
“That’s good,” he says.
I will not pretend the wave of relief those two words produce is dignified, because it isn’t. Two words from this man and something unknots in my chest that I’ve been carrying knotted for days.
Objectively embarrassing.
Completely involuntary.
“But you’re fighting it wrong.”
I furrow my brows in confusion. “What the hell doesthatmean?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. His eyes move over me with that measuring quality, reading things I’m not consciously broadcasting. “What are you doing, right now, in this moment, with the hunger?”
I open my mouth, close it, and reach past the answer that sounds best and find the honest one. “Pushing it down. Holding it back. Trying to keep it from—”
“From what?”
“From taking over.”
“Taking over what?”
The question lands somewhere inconveniently specific. “Me. My choices. What I do.”
He nods. “You’re trying to suppress it.”
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing?” I hear myself, and I will confess that ten days of Dragonfire, Null Pulses, fear conditioning, wolf-pack sitting, and breathing exercises have put a certain edge on my patience for discovering I’ve been doing it wrong. “Because I have put in what I would describe as a significant fucking amount of effort on that particular strategy.”
Something moves in Crave’s expression that isn’t quite amusement but is adjacent to a recognition of it. “I know you have.”
“Ten days!” I add, in case the number wasn’t clear.
“I know.”
“I’m past the deadline you originally gave us.”
“Charlotte.”
“I’m not a fucking science project, you know?”
“Noted.” The not-quite-amusement holds for a moment, then it settles back into that flat, certain calm. “Suppression is not what you’re supposed to be doing. And it’s why ten days of every technique we have has bought you windows and not control.”
My eyes snap to Rogue, and he’s watching Crave with an expression I can’t fully understand, something between absolute trust and tension of him hearing a verdict he already knew the shape of but hadn’t heard spoken aloud. Which is deeply unhelpful from where I’m standing, because I would very muchlike someone to argue with Crave right now, and Rogue is clearlynotgoing to be that person.
“You cannot suppress the hunger,” Crave says. “You’re a vampire, Charlotte. Hunger is not an intruder in your body. It’s not an illness. It’s not a malfunction.” He tilts his head, and the weight of what follows fills the space before he says it. “It’s part of you now. It will always be part of you. Every technique this week works on the premise of reduction, pushing it down, burning it back, dampening it at the edges. And every technique has failed by the same mechanism. You cannot remove what you are from what…you are.”
The room falls quiet.
I want to argue.
Fuck I want toscream.
The part of me that has been grinding through these days on pure stubbornness would like very much to argue, because if he’s right, then everything I’ve been doing has been built on a wrong foundation, and I do not have the energy reserves for a structural renovation right now. I am running on fumes, spite, and whatever Rogue’s shoulder-warmth translates to as a nutritional category.
