“Good,” he says. “We start now.”
I roll my shoulders.
The monster moves with me.
For the first time in days, I don’t pretend it doesn’t.
Chapter Seventeen
ROGUE
Crave works the way he does everything else, without ceremony, without waste. He moves efficiently, skipping anything that looks like performance and getting straight to the work.
He starts by pulling Charlie out of the cabin before the frost has lifted off the clearing, his voice carrying that flat, measured quality that leaves no room for negotiation. It’s not unkind or cruel, but it is absolute. The way a mountain is absolute.
I stand at the treeline and watch.
My wolf is restless with it, the protective instinct running hot beneath every breath, reading proximity and threat and the fact that the man standing ten feet from my mate is one of six beings on this continent capable of killing her without breaking concentration. The math of it grinds through my chest, a low, constant friction I bury beneath two centuries of discipline.
Crave is exactly what Charlie needs.
And what she needs outranks what my wolf wants.
So I stay at the treeline.
And I watch.
The first session ends badly.
Crave brings her to the edge of bloodlust with nothing more than proximity and patience, letting his own nature press against hers the way an ocean presses against a shore, constant, unhurried, indifferent to the damage it does by simply existing. Charlie’s fangs descend within four minutes. Her eyes go full red by the seventh. By the tenth, she’s shaking with the effort of holding herself above the pull, her hands fisted at her sides, jaw clenched so hard the muscle in her cheek jumps from where I’m standing.
He doesn’t back away.
He doesn’t move at all.
“Feel it,” he says. Not instruction, just a statement of fact. “Don’t fight it, don’t run from it… sit inside it and understand its shape.”
“I know itsfuckingshape!” she grits out, every word costing her. “Its shape is a damn problem.”
“Its shape is information. Learn the difference.”
She makes a sound in the back of her throat that isn’t quite words, isn’t quite animal, and is, somehow, exactly Charlie. The noise she makes when she disagrees with something so thoroughly that she can’t find language adequate to the situation.
The session runs for an hour. By the end, her hands have unclenched. The shaking has settled to something smaller, contained in her shoulders rather than her whole frame. She doesn’t look calm—Charlie has never looked calm. Throughout the time we’ve been here, I have not once seen her approximate the expression, yet she looks present.
Crave steps back, studies her, then nods once.
It is the most approval I haveeverseen him extend to a new scion in a single morning.
I exhale through my nose and say nothing.
***
The meditation comes next.
I taught her breathing, groundwork, and the fundamentals of stillness under pressure. Crave teaches her organization. Something older and more precise, techniques drawn from centuries of trial and a depth of error I can only estimate. He sits across from her in the clearing and speaks in a measured cadence, building a framework inside her that doesn’t suppressthe hunger but contains it. The way a riverbed contains a river, not stopping the water, but giving it somewhere to go.
She absorbs it faster than she should.
