Chapter Fifteen
CRAVE
The clubhouse runs on a different kind of quiet at this hour.
Not peaceful. Nothing about the Eternal Sins MC is ever truly peaceful.
But there is a quality to the silence settling in after midnight, after the last prospect kills the exterior lights, the bar stools are upended on the counter, and the only sounds left are the low hum of Hex’s servers and the distant rumble of highway traffic filtering through reinforced walls.
It’s a silence the building earns each night, the exhale of something wound tight all day finally permitted to breathe.
I’ve sat in this silence for three hours.
The paperwork spread across my desk has been waiting longer than tonight.
Territory dispute documents require my signature.
Supply chain records from our legitimate operations, Sloane’s accountant needs by the end of the month.
A formal complaint from the Coven’s regional liaison about ‘Irregular Supernatural Activity’ in our northwest quadrant, requiring a careful, measured, politically neutral response that doesn’t read as the threat it technically is.
The pen moves with mechanical precision. Five centuries of practice at finishing things I don’t want to do.
My phone sits face down on the left corner of the desk.
It has sat in the exact same position for four days.
Scorch’s reports are sent over the encrypted line at 0600 and 1800 like military precision. The only predictable element in an increasingly unpredictable situation. He sends them in bullet points because Scorch has never once in five centuries wasted language on sentiment.
Dragonfire Treatment: Temporary. A window of approximately forty minutes before the hunger cycle resets. No lasting suppression.
Wolf Pack Arrived: Alpha male attempting environmental conditioning. Some reduction in anxiety response. Bloodlust unaffected.
Then this morning’s report is stripped entirely of anything resembling optimism.
Eleven Days Since Turning: Control window not extending. Everything we have is buying her hours, not stability. This is not sustainable.
I read that last report four times.
Then I set my phone face down and return to the territory dispute documents.
My bond with Rogue tells me things Scorch’s reports do not.
The Bloodguard connection has been fraying since he left, worn to something thin and rough-edged, worn down to its inner fibers.
It still carries sensation. Still transmits the low-frequency signal of his state across whatever distance separates us.
For the first week, the bond ran hot. Ferocity and desperate grinding focus, the wolf pouring everything it had into the one problem directly in front of it.
I recognized the feeling. I’ve felt it from him before, on battlefields, during standoffs, in the brutal aftermath of wars we barely survived.
Rogue has always been the man who responds to crisis by burning hotter rather than colder. It’s what makes him extraordinary.
It’s also what makes him impossible.
For the last three days, something else has been bleeding through underneath the fire.
Something uncomfortably close to desperation.
I don’t like feeling it.
I like even less what it means.
My deadline came and went. I gave Rogue the extension because the Bloodguard bond demanded it, and because, under the control, under the cold strategy and the centuries of practice at making hard calls, there is a part of me still irrevocably his president…
His brother.
I gave him more time because I couldn’t make myself do anything else.
The thought of him out there in a cabin at the edge of the wilderness, pouring himself into a situation with a body count, a ticking clock, and a fated mate he cannot save through force of will alone, sits in me the way bad news sits.
Refusing to be ignored. Growing heavier the longer I leave it undisturbed.
I miss him.
The admission costs something I don’t have clean language for.
Not the VP, though I feel his absence from the table every time we sit in Church without him.
Not the Bloodguard, though the bond fraying at the edges registers in me the way a wound registers, dull and impossible to forget.
But my brother.
The shape of having Rogue at my back, steady and fierce, the one man in two centuries I’ve trusted at my flank without question or caveat.
I’ve outlived most of the people I’ve called brother.
The ones who didn’t survive the wars we fought, the ones who chose other paths, the ones whose loyalties fractured under pressure and remade themselves into something I no longer recognized.
Over two hundred years of that grief, I’ve learned not to list what I have while I still have it.
I learned to hold it without squeezing it.
Learned to let people be what they are without building monuments to them inside my own chest before they’re gone.
With Rogue, I’ve never entirely managed it.
He came to the club with nothing but the wolf, his nerve, and the absolute, unflinching refusal to be anything other than exactly what he was.
No performance, positioning, or careful management of what he showed me or what he kept back.
He is, after two centuries together, still the most straightforwardly honest person I have ever had the complicated fortune of leading.
I turn back to the complaint from the Coven’s liaison and find a sentence I’ve read three times without absorbing any of it.
The pen scratches across the bottom of the third document when my phone lights up.
I feel the call through the bond before the screen fully illuminates, a pulse arriving simultaneously with the vibration against the desk. The timing is precise enough to make something lock up in my chest.
I turn the phone over.
Rogue.
I stare at his name long enough that the screen begins to dim.
With only Scorch’s reports and nothing else, no direct contact, no voice on the other end of a line, nothing requiring me to hear how he sounded and make a real-time assessment of where he was.
The reports were clean, manageable, the kind of information I could process from a distance and translate into strategic decisions without the inconvenient weight of everything else that comes with him.
The screen dims further, so I act. My thumb moves and slides across the screen, and I answer, “Rogue.”
Silence greets me on the other end. Not dead air.
I hear him breathing, slow and deliberate, a controlled rhythm as he chooses his next words with the care of knowing he only gets one shot at landing them.
“Crave.” Rogue’s voice comes through the phone, roughened by something that doesn’t belong to him.
Pressure.
The kind that grinds mountains down to dust if given enough time.
“I need you.”
For a moment, I don’t answer, not because I don’t understand the words. Because I understand them too well.
Something shifts in my chest. Not a crack or a break, I am too old for dramatic fractures. It is subtler than that. The slow, grinding adjustment of something ancient acknowledging new weight.
In all the centuries I have known him, Rogue has called for support, for reinforcement, for strategy, for blood, steel, and war.
He has never called for me.
Not like this.
I draw a breath I don’t need and lean my forearms against the edge of the stone table in front of me, staring down at the map spread across its surface without seeing a single line.
“Tell me where you are with her.”
Silence stretches across the bond, then Rogue exhales. “She’s still fighting.”
His voice steadies as he moves into report mode, the discipline sliding into place like armor.
It is the only way he knows how to survive something like this.
“We tried Scorch’s Dragonfire first. Forty-minute windows.
It burns the hunger out of her system, but it comes back stronger every time, like we’re cauterizing something that refuses to die. ”
I close my eyes.
Forty minutes.
“Hades ran the Null Pulse,” Rogue continues. “It shut everything down, completely. When she came back from it, she was hollow-eyed and furious. Said she’d rather fight it consciously than disappear inside it.”
There’s a faint tremor under the words, and underneath that, through the bond, the tight, burning pressure of him hating this choice, hating what she’s being asked to endure.
“She didn’t come back clean,” he adds, quieter. “Kept seeing ghosts for hours afterward. Thought something was following her. Wouldn’t let anyone stand behind her.”
My hand curls slowly against the stone. “What about Dread?” I ask.
“We used fear conditioning.” He pauses for a moment.
“It went too deep.” He exhales once. “She didn’t resist it the way we expected,” he continues.
“She didn’t push back. She leaned into it.
Let it in, trying to understand it, to get ahead of it.
” His jaw tightens. “Dread’s work isn’t built for that.
It compounds. The more you let it in, the more it gives you.
” Another pause. “She took too much of it at once.”
I roll my shoulders. “She sounds strong.”
“That’s just it… she apologized,” Rogue adds, quieter. “For not being stronger.”
I have led armies, watched kingdoms burn. Buried people I loved, but something about that sentence unsettles me more than any battlefield ever has.
“And the wolves?” I ask.
“They came at dawn. Kade grounded her. Sat her in the frost until she stopped shaking. Brynn reached her somewhere the rest of us couldn’t… Talon got her running. First time she laughed since this started. The hunt, the burn of physical exertion seems to help.”
For a moment, relief brushes through our bond like weak sunlight.
Then it fades.
“What happened today?” I ask.