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“Then let me make it.” My nails skim through his short hair, just above his ears.

His hands stay on my waist, neither pulling me closer nor putting me down. There’s a moment where I think I’ve won the argument, that he’s going to let us keep doing this.

Shaking his head, his chin tips down, and a bucket of ice water douses the embers in the pit of my stomach. “I’m sorry, Ellery.”

A sting builds behind my eyes that I’m fighting as I untangle myself from his arms. I want to run outside, lie in the snow, and die an icy death.

He wants this. I felt it. Want isn’t what’s stopping him, which means there’s something else.

Fingers outstretched, he tries to take my hand, but I slip out of his grasp.

“I’m going to bed.”

I get under the covers fully dressed, facing the wall. My fingers find the spot below my ear where his teeth grazed. It stings.

He doesn’t come. He doesn’t move at all, doesn’t shift his weight or stretch his legs or put another log on the fire.

I lie there and listen to him not moving.

Chapter 26

Nick

I sit with the smoldering embers and wait for her to fall asleep.

She doesn’t. She wants me to think she has, and she’s good at it—her breathing is slow and even and completely wrong, and underneath it, her heart is going like she’s running up a hill. I throw a log onto the fire and take myself outside.

The fog sinks around the cabin. The cold doesn’t reach me. Nothing does, except the sound of her ten feet away, trying to hold herself together through sheer force of will.

I can still taste her pulse against my tongue. My nose pressed to her warm skin like I’ve imagined a hundred times. Vanilla, and the copper tang of her blood rushing underneath, and a need I’ve only ever caught the edge of before. My fangs pricked through my gums, not all the way, but enough to graze her throat. Too close, and I was still counting how many more seconds I could have.

Losing control was the wake-up call I needed. A way out when the reason got fuzzy.

A rusty nail sticks out of the porch railing, and I pry it out of the wood, only to push it back in, over and over again.

Weeks of keeping her at arm’s length, and I had her in my lap inside of three minutes. And somewhere in those three minutes, I stopped thinking about what happens after. Where we start something that has no good ending. It’s me pressing my hand on the scale and giving her a reason to stay someplace that doesn’t deserve her.

She’s braver than I am. She crossed that divide and asked me to come with her. And for one clear moment, it felt possible. I almost told her everything.

The words were right there. I’m not what you think I am.

Behind them came the price of saying it out loud. My mother an accessory, my brother a Guardian. Ellery in front of a council that would vote on whether she gets to keep the last two months.

So I said nothing, and I’d like to pretend that was the real reason. Mostly, it’s easier to be a man who can’t make up his mind than one who’s been lying since September.

The thick fog hangs in the air for hours, silencing the small sounds of a village sleeping. A little after three, it thins enough that I can see the woodpile across the road, and the trees beyond that.

A branch cracks in the dark.

A clean snap, not the groan of timber giving out under a load.

I’m off the step before the echo dies, but the forest is quiet again. In the direction of the sound, beside a fallen log, two boot prints pressed deep into the snow. I crouch down and run a finger along the ridge. No tracks leading to them or away, but it had a clear line of sight to the cabin.

There’s a scent, thin and fading, nothing I can place. Two steps past the log, it’s gone. The fog has been sitting on this ground for hours and taken everything with it. How long was it watching?

Hollings is one hundred and thirty miles from Ravenslight Creek. There’s nothing here, only a handful of vampires and some kids who haven’t taken their Rites yet. And two dozen coolers on a plane with me and Ellery that are now in Damon’s walk-in. Constantin said it was a hungry wanderer from the Yukon, but hungry wanderers don’t track planes. A starving one might follow its nose to a cache of blood. But whatever was here didn’t come for blood. It came for a clear view of the cabin.

For an hour, I comb the village and the nearby woods and find no more boot prints or a thread on the air. I walk over to the Wi-Fi hotspot and text Anna to make sure she knows the intruder has come this far.