“Okay,” I say.
“Okay,” he echoes.
The stars burn overhead, and for the first time since all of this began, the word doesn’t feel like a placeholder.
It feels like a decision.
A decision to survive this.
A decision to walk out of this cabin and into whatever comes next with the man beside me and the framework inside me and the stubborn, ruined, beautiful fact that I’m still here.
Chapter Nineteen
CHARLIE
The fire pops, and Rogue leans forward, adding another log, the movement easy, unhurried. Light from the flames slides over him, catching on muscle and shadow, his shirt pulling tight across his shoulders as he shifts.
My focus catches on his chiseled body.
Just… stops.
The line of him, the breadth, the way his weight settles.
I don’t remember deciding to look.
I don’t remember deciding to stop.
The air feels different, warmer, even with the cold pushing in at my back, and I hold there a second too long. Then I drag my attention away, like it matters that I do. Because if I keep looking at Rogue like that, I don’t know where my decision will land—eat him, or rip those tight clothes off and fuck him senseless.
Both versions sound delightful to me right now, which isexactlywhy I keep my eyes off him.
An hour later, when Rogue’s back on the porch step beside me, he reaches past me for his coffee and the inside of his wrist crosses the outside of mine, the barest contact, half a second, and every nerve in my arm notifies me simultaneously. His skin is warm—it’s always warm. The warmth of him registers on my skin the way sunlight does, broad and penetrating, arriving at a level below the surface.
He doesn’t comment.
Neither do I.
But I’m aware of my arm for the next twenty minutes in a way I was not before.
We’re standing at the edge of the porch looking out at the dark, because we’ve both run out of reasons to go inside, and I say something dry about the coffee, and he makes a sound. It is low, involuntary, barely there, the compressed beginning of a laugh, and the sound lands in the space between us and does things to me I was not prepared for. I’ve been memorizing his voice since the basement. The controlled timbre of it, the lycan weight beneath the words, the way it drops when he’s certain about something and rises slightly when he’s asking rather than stating. The laugh-sound is different from all of those—unguarded and accidental. A sound that didn’t get the approval of the two centuries of careful control but slipped out anyway.
I want to hear it again with a specificity that alarms me.
“Charlie…” he says softly to get my attention.
Not Charlotte, Charlie, the shortened version, the one he uses when the formality has come down enough to let something less managed through, and my name in his voice has always done something particular to me, the way he says it, like it’s a thing he means rather than a thing he’s saying, as though the sound of it matters to him personally.
“Charlie,” he repeats.
“I heard you.”
“You are not responding.”
“I’m processing.” I turn to look at him. He’s watching me with the expression I know well, which means he’s reading something off my face I haven’t consented to share. “Stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Reading me. You do it constantly. It’s invasive, and you should stop.”
