Chapter Five #3
“I’ve got you.” His voice has dropped completely, no authority in it now. “Charlotte.” The way he says my name is different every time, and this version is like something he’s handling with care, and it undoes something in my chest I didn’t know was still intact. “You’re safe with me.”
“I killed people.” The raw and horrible words tear out of me before I can stop them. “In the diner, that lady was so nice to me. I-I didn’t mean to, I didn’t want to, but I—”
“I know.”
“You can’t j-just…” My voice cracks. “You can’t just know and be okay with me killing people!”
“In this life we live, Charlotte, innocents get hurt. It’s not okay, but it happens.
” His hand shifts at the back of my head, a slow, deliberate pressure applied.
He doesn’t try to calm me down or talk me out of it.
He stays with me through it, steady as stone.
“But that’s not who you are. It’s what happened to you. Those aren’t the same thing.”
The sob that comes out of me is ugly, desperate, and I’m beyond caring.
But he holds on through all of it without flinching or pulling away, saying nothing for a long moment, the gold-eyed stranger who keeps putting himself between me and everything in this world I want to destroy, and somehow… somehow, that includes me.
“She can’t be out here.” Rogue’s attention doesn’t leave my face. “Not with a building full of heartbeats behind every wall. She’ll tear through your brothers before she finishes figuring out what her own hands can do,” Rogue states.
The silence that follows has texture and edges.
“Then we contain her.” Crave’s voice stays low and even. “The moment she crossed into this compound, she became club business. You don’t get to handle this alone, Rogue. Not with her. Not with what she is.”
“I’m not locking her in chains.”
“I didn’t ask you to.” Crave’s silver gaze flickers to me, brief, clinical, the look a man gives a weapon before deciding whether to holster it or use it. “Basement… it’s reinforced. She stays down there until the club decides what comes next.”
Rogue’s jaw works. I feel the refusal building through his chest against my back, tension winding tighter by the second, and for one heartbeat, I think he’s going to fight his alpha right here in front of me.
But he doesn’t.
His hands adjust on my shoulders, careful and deliberate—the kind of careful that costs something to maintain.
“I stay with her,” he says. It’s not a question and definitely not a request.
Crave studies him for a long moment. The shadows at his feet shift as if they’re weighing something too.
“Until Church convenes,” he says finally. “Then you’re at the table with the rest of us. This isn’t a decision you get to make for the club, brother… not even for her.”
I feel Rogue’s fingers tighten fractionally against my arm, and then release.
“Understood.”
Crave turns to the woman beside him, says something low I can’t catch.
Her crimson-gold eyes flick to me once, unreadable, and then they move together toward the hallway, the rest of the room peeling away behind them in that ordered way predators move when they’ve been dismissed without being dismissed.
The door at the end of the hall opens, then closes.
And then… it’s just the two of us.
Me, and the warm, gold-eyed stranger whose arms are the only thing standing between me and every worst instinct this new body has.
“Come on, Charlotte.” His voice is lower, gentler, the gravel in it worn softer around the edges. “Let’s get you downstairs.”
I don’t move.
The word ‘basement’ has done something unpleasant to the inside of my chest, some small animal part of me that understands cages even if my conscious mind doesn’t. My feet plant, my fangs throb, and a growl I didn’t authorize slides up the back of my throat.
Rogue doesn’t flinch. He turns me slowly, his hands steady on my arms, until I’m facing him, and those eyes catch mine and hold. “I know,” he says simply. “I know.”
And something about the way he says it, as if he understands what a cage feels like from the inside, like this isn’t the first time in his long life he’s had to ask someone to trust him toward a door they don’t want to walk through, settles me.
Fractionally, but it settles me.
So, I nod, but he doesn’t smile. Something near his mouth shifts—that almost-smile, the careful one, the one I’m starting to understand costs him something to offer. He steps back and his hand slides down my arm, until his fingers find mine. The contact is so simple it shouldn’t mean anything.
But it means everything.
“The stairs are steep,” he says, his thumb moving once across my knuckles, a gesture so small I could pretend I didn’t notice, but I don’t pretend. “I’ll go first.”
“I’m a vampire,” I grumble, but my voice comes out steadier than I expected. “I think I can handle stairs.”
“Yeah…” He doesn’t let go of my hand. “Humor me.”
“That’s what we’re calling it.”
He glances back at me, once. “Get moving, Charlotte.”
“Bossy,” I mutter, following him into the dark.
And his hand stays around mine the entire way down.