The warmth that moves through my body at those words is catastrophic, and I face forward before it reaches my face.
“Don’t be nice to me,” I say. “It undermines my armor.”
“Your armor is fine.”
“My armor is barely functional, the hinges are completely shot, I’ve been operating on structural integrity alone sinceapproximately day three, and you saying things like that is how the whole structure goes down.”
Something happens at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile, but something quieter and more dangerous.
“Eat another container when you’re hungry,” he says, and pushes off the rail. “I’ll make coffee.”
Charlotte Harris,I tell myself, watching him go.You are in so much trouble.
Because the reason you fought so hard…
Was entirely forhim.
***
The stars come out sometime after dinner.
We eat outside, which neither of us suggests explicitly, it simply happens. Him with food I couldn’t tell you the contents of, and me with another container, which I consume with slightly more dignity than the first. We don’t go back inside, and the night comes down around us in increments, the sky over the mountain’s ridge filling up with more stars than any city sky I’ve lived under.
My vampire eyes read every one of them.
Sharp and impossibly, gratuitously beautiful.
I tip my head back and look at them from the porch step, my elbows on my knees, and feel the framework Crave built inside me hold steady against the night air, the quiet, the absence of urgency. The bloodlust is present in the way the weather is present, ambient, undeniable, not currently requesting my full attention.
Rogue is sitting beside me on the step. We are not touching. There are three inches of deliberately maintained distance, which I am increasingly aware of in the way I’m aware of all his distances, filing them against the occasions when the distancehas been less. The heat of him has been against my shoulder, and my whole nervous system has had very strong opinions about it.
His hands are loosely clasped between his knees. The knuckles are scarred in several places, old marks, the kind that accumulate over two centuries of being the person who stands between their person and whatever’s coming. My eyes trace them in my peripheral vision, and then I make myself stop, because if I start indexing his hands, we’ll be here all night.
We might be here all night anyway.
“Can I tell you something?” I say.
“Yeah.”
I keep my eyes on the stars. “I’m scared.”
The silence that follows is different from his other silences.
“Of the bloodlust?” he asks. Not dismissing, just clarifying.
“Of… all of it.” The words come out slowly, feeling their way, the honest version underneath the armored version. “Of getting back to the real world. Of being around humans again. Of the first time someone stands too close, and I can hear their heartbeat, and the framework just doesn’t hold. Of the Coven deciding I’m too high-risk regardless of what any of us proved. Of hurting someone…” I pause. “What if Ican’tdo this? What if everything we built here doesn’t survive contact with an actual city?”
He doesn’t answer immediately, and I appreciate that. The immediate answer, designed to soothe, would feel like a consolation prize. His pause has the quality of genuine thought, of someone who takes the question seriously enough to give it the time it deserves.
“Then I’ll stop you,” he says.
I turn my head and look at him. His eyes are already on me, gold and certain, steady in the dark. The same directness he’s been giving me since the basement, the refusal to hand me a comfortable version of a hard truth.
“And then I’ll keep helping you until you can stop yourself.” The words are quiet and carry no doubt. “You’re not doing this alone, Charlotte. You haven’t been since the first night, and you won’t be when we leave this cabin. The framework doesn’t fail because the setting changes. You built it. It goes where you go.”
The thing in my chest does the thing it’s been doing with increasing frequency, the warm, pulling sensation I find soothing. I hold his gaze for a beat too long, and his doesn’t waver, the three inches between us does something with the air that the cold night has no involvement in.
I look back at the stars.
