Chapter Eleven #5
He’s quiet for long enough that I think he’s not going to answer, but then, “My bloodline was created to protect vampires. Not any vampire, the most powerful ones. The ones whose deaths would cost the supernatural world something irreplaceable. We’re hardwired for it.
The bond is biological, instinctual, as fundamental to what I am as the shift is.
” His eyes find the fire. “Crave has been my anchor for over two hundred years. The connection between us… it’s like a second heartbeat.
I know where he is. I know when he’s hurt.
I know when he needs me before he does.”
“And right now?”
A muscle moves in his jaw. “Right now, it’s thinning.
Every day I’m here and not there, it frays a little more, and the guilt of it—” He stops, then starts again.
“He told me to ‘Fix you or kill you.’ Those were his words. The whole club is watching the Coven. The last thing he needs is an uncontrolled vampire drawing attention, and if I can’t deliver results, he’ll make the call himself. ”
The fire pops and snaps between us.
“What the hell is the Coven?”
Rogue tilts his head like he had completely forgotten that I wouldn’t know what he was talking about.
“Crave’s original family. In layperson’s terms, they keep the supernatural world in order.
They were the first vampires to walk the earth.
Very fucking powerful, and trust me, you do not want to cross them, or get on their radar.
And the club seems to constantly be on their radar…
probably because Crave was a part of them back in the day.
I think they never fully forgave him for leaving them, so they’re always watching him. ”
“Jesus, they sound more like overlords than governors.”
Rogue snorts out a laugh. “You’re not half wrong.”
I slump my shoulders and glance up at him. “Then why are you doing this?” The question comes out quieter than I intend. “Your president ordered you to fix me or kill me. Why not take the easier road and kill me, especially if the overlords could get involved?”
He looks up from the fire, a slight smile crossing his lips, and his gold eyes hold mine across the flames with a directness that doesn’t flinch from the weight of the question.
“Because my wolf won’t let me.” The words are simple, stripped of everything decorative. “Because you’re mine to protect, even if you don’t understand what that means yet. And I’m gonna tell Crave you call them overlords… he’s going to like that.”
Something in my chest catches and pulls.
It moves through me like a tide, unmistakable now that I know what it is.
The thing I’ve been feeling since Rogue first said my name in that compound basement, that frequency underneath the hunger and the fear, the thread that runs from my sternum toward him regardless of what I want or what I’ve decided.
“We’re connected, aren’t we?” The question drops out of me like a stone dropping into still water. Not uncertain, not asking for reassurance, but already knowing.
Rogue holds my gaze for a long beat, then nods. “With lycans, we have what’s called a Fated Mate. We have no control over it. We can’t choose it… think of it as destiny playing its hand.”
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I’ve heard since I turned.
“I don’t want to be anyone’s mate.” The words come out clear, honest, and slightly desperate, because underneath the honesty lives the terror of having something else decided about my life without my input.
“I didn’t choose this. Any of this. Someone took every choice I had, and I’ve been fighting ever since to take something back, and now you’re telling me the universe already decided this, too?
” My voice doesn’t break. I won’t let it break.
“I didn’t choose to become a vampire. I didn’t choose this hunger or these fangs or the fact that I’m still chanting at myself not to eat you. And now I didn’t choose you, either?”
The fire cracks between us.
He reaches across and sets his hand over mine where it’s clenched on my knee, one brief press of warmth, and he doesn’t hold it. Just acknowledges it. “Neither did I.” His voice is very quiet and carries no argument. “But here we are.”
Here we are.
The fire breathes between us, throwing light across his face, the scar, the jaw that looks carved rather than grown, the eyes that carry two hundred years of guarding something precious at the cost of everything else.
And I understand, sitting here on the other side of these flames, what he has put on the altar to stay in this cabin.
His oath, his anchor, the connection that has been the center of his purpose for longer than I’ve been alive.
For me.
For a feral newborn vampire he’d never met, and a mate bond he never asked for.
The anger doesn’t leave. It won’t, not tonight, maybe not for a long time. The grief of unchosen things takes longer than four days to metabolize. But something shifts alongside it, making room—a sliver of space where understanding lives, unexpected and quiet.
“Does it get easier?” I ask. “Any of it.”
“I’ll let you know when I find out.” The corner of his mouth moves. It’s not quite a smile. It’s something more honest than that.
But I guess we’re in this together.
Whether we want to be, or knot.