Chapter Twelve
CHARLIE
The Next Day
The voices reach me before dawn. They carry through the cabin walls, clear and layered, impossible to block out.
Engines cut, and boots hit gravel. Quiet conversation moves between men who know how to keep their voices low and still be heard.
My eyes open to the ceiling before my brain has caught up with the information, and then the rest of it arrives in a wave, because it’s not just voices.
It’s heartbeats.
Multiple.
Arriving all at once.
My body responds before I have anything resembling a choice in the matter.
The hunger, which has spent the last hour doing a passable impression of something manageable, detonates straight up my throat.
My hands grip the blanket. My spine presses flat against the mattress as if I can somehow anchor myself there through sheer refusal, as if the cotton and batting beneath me could hold against the tide of noise, pulse, and need currently dismantling everything I’ve built in the last four days.
Four days of breathing exercises, meditation, and Rogue’s infuriatingly steady voice talking me down from ledges I can’t even name.
Four days of animal blood in containers that taste like disappointment and survival at the same time.
Four days of holding myself together with the grim, white-knuckled determination of someone who has decided, through no grace or nobility but through sheer absolute refusal to become the thing the hunger wants her to be, that she will not cross that line again.
Even during crazy, animalistic sex, I didn’t give in to that insatiable craving. The desire to rip Rogue’s throat apart and bathe in his blood, even though every instinct inside me desperately wanted to.
But now on day five, there are six heartbeats outside this cabin, and every single one of them sounds like a meal.
The door to the bedroom opens without ceremony, and Rogue fills the frame.
He’s already dressed, already reading the situation from my face, and his expression does the thing it always does now, that calibration between authority and something else, something beneath the controlled surface that doesn’t have a clean name.
“They’re here,” he says, which I know. Obviously. “Five brothers. They’ve come to help.”
“Five more people,” I manage, my voice steadier than I expected it to be. “Five more heartbeats in a confined space with a vampire who is currently fighting every instinct she has.”
“Yeah.” He doesn’t soften that fact. I’ve come to appreciate that about him, the way he doesn’t pad the truth into something gentler than it actually is.
“And we’re going to take them one at a time.
You set the pace. If anyone comes too fast or too close, you say the word, and they back off. No arguments.”
My throat works around the hunger. “And if I can’t hold it?”
His gold eyes hold mine across the room, unwavering and certain in a way that does something entirely inconvenient to my pulse, or whatever passes for a pulse now. “You will. You held it last night… in really intense circumstances.”
The confidence in that sentence is, objectively speaking, unreasonable. It is also the only thing currently preventing me from losing my mind entirely.
“But I’m not going to be fucking all five of them… right?”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “No… absolutely not.”
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s do this then.” I’m out of bed before Rogue can respond, moving with the grace of a gazelle still getting used to her own speed. Five minutes later, I’m dressed and walking into the main room.
Scorch enters the cabin first. He shoulders through the doorway like the room needs to adjust around him, and the heat of him arrives before he does, a wall of warmth that hits me in the chest. His arms are crossed, his expression carrying that permanently furrowed quality of someone who was born impatient with the universe and has spent five hundred years confirming his suspicions about it.
The veins along his forearms carry a faint luminescence, deep amber and red, barely visible beneath the skin, yet present the way a banked fire is, quiet but entirely unextinguished.
He stops at a careful distance and looks at me, assessing rather than judging, head tilted, eyes moving over me with a methodical attention that has nothing to do with pity.
“Dragon fire…” he says, without preamble, “… can burn away vampire instincts. Temporarily.” He pauses, and his jaw shifts.
“It’ll hurt like hell. No way to dress that up differently.
But it might give you clarity. Space between you and the bloodlust where you can actually think instead of just fight. ”
I stare at him. “You want to set me on fire?”
“Controlled application.” He uncrosses his arms, and the faint glow in his veins shifts, brightening slightly as if responding to the subject matter. “Nothing burns that isn’t meant to. I’ve been doing this a long time.”
Something about the complete lack of apology in his voice, the absence of any attempt to make this sound appealing, lands more convincingly than reassurance would have. He’s not selling me anything. He’s telling me the truth and leaving the choice where it belongs.
“Noted,” I say.
The corner of his mouth shifts, barely, but there. He nods once, which, from Scorch, I suspect, constitutes the equivalent of an enthusiastic endorsement, and steps back toward the center of the cabin.
“Sit,” he says, his voice low, all business now.
Rogue moves before I do, dragging a heavy chair into the open space near the hearth. The air thickens, as if the cabin is bracing for impact. I lower myself onto the seat slowly, instincts snarling at the idea of stillness while something stronger prepares to burn.
Scorch rolls his shoulders once. The glow beneath his skin intensifies, veins lighting in molten amber and red. Heat gathers around him in slow, deliberate waves. Shadows bend toward him, drawn by something older than fire. “Keep your eyes on me,” he says.
I do.
His gaze shifts first, molten gold bleeding through the brown, ancient and vast. When he exhales, the air ripples, shimmering between us like a thin veil.
“This isn’t punishment,” he murmurs. “It’s refinement.”
Then he breathes fire.
A narrow ribbon of living flame unfurls from him, controlled and precise, gold-edged in white heat. It coils toward me like it already knows my shape.
The moment it touches me, pain detonates.
Not surface pain. It drives inward, burning through instinct, through hunger, through the restless beast pacing behind my ribs. My back arches, my fingers crushing into the arms of the chair as heat floods my veins.
A raw sound tears from my throat before I can stop it.
The Dragonfire sinks deeper, peeling back layers I didn’t know existed—every moment since my turning flashes through me.
Every surge of bloodlust.
Every fight for control.
My vision fractures into shards of gold.
And then… something else is there.
Not Scorch.
But bigger.
A presence brushes against my mind like the sweep of colossal wings. Ancient awareness coils around me, curious rather than cruel. I feel scales without seeing them, heat without flame, a consciousness so vast it makes my thoughts feel small and fragile.
Dragon.
The word isn’t spoken.
It exists.
For one suspended heartbeat, I am not alone inside my own head. The fire moves with intent, guided by something older than Scorch himself, something that sees the hunger inside me and chooses not to devour it, only temper it.
The flames tighten around my chest, and instinct screams at me to fight, to lash out, to run. My fangs drop, my hands clenching as the urge to tear free surges hard enough to crack bone.
“Hold onto me,” Rogue says, his voice low and steady.
His fingers close around mine, warm and unyielding.
Not forcing.
But anchoring.
I lock my gaze on him instead of the fire, clinging to the solidity of him while the dragon’s presence brushes through me again, vast and assessing. The pain spikes, sharp enough to splinter thought, and for a terrifying second, I feel the bloodlust recoil like a wounded animal beneath the heat.
The relief is almost worse than the agony.
The constant roar inside my head fades, replaced by a quiet so sudden it feels wrong. I sway forward, trembling as the flames trace every vein, burning away the frantic edge that has ruled me since my turning.
The dragon’s awareness withdraws slowly.
The last wave of fire curls around my chest, pressing inward, and something inside me breaks open. Hunger doesn’t vanish, but it pulls back, forced into stillness by the ancient heat threading through my body.
Then the flames vanish…
And silence crashes into the room.
I slump forward, shaking, skin humming as if every nerve has been rewired. The hunger is still there, a distant pulse instead of a scream, quieter now, as though something ancient pressed a hand over its mouth.
My thoughts feel… clear.
Not empty.
Not numb.
But mine.
For a long moment, no one speaks. The cabin settles around us, wood creaking softly as the heat recedes. The lingering scent of smoke curls through the air, warm and grounding instead of suffocating.
Scorch exhales hard, the glow in his veins dimming as the dragon withdraws behind his eyes. He rolls his shoulders once like a man stepping back into a body that suddenly feels heavier. “Well,” he mutters, his voice rough. “You’re still standing.”
I almost laugh because technically I am sitting, but it comes out as a broken sound.
My hands tremble where they rest on my thighs, not from weakness but from the sudden absence of pressure inside my head.
For the first time since the turning, the bloodlust isn’t clawing at me, isn’t demanding, isn’t drowning out everything else.
Rogue’s hand tightens around mine, grounding and steady. His thumb moves once across my knuckles, a small, deliberate motion that reminds me where I am, who I am, what I chose.
The fire didn’t just burn.
It saw me.
And it chose to let me remain.