Chapter Seven
CRAVE
“I’m sorry,” Sloane whispers, her voice cracking. “I… I don’t know why I pulled away. I wanted… God, I wanted to kiss you…” She breaks off, shaking. “But something inside me just… reacted. As if it knew something was wrong even if I didn’t.”
I finally look at her, my fangs back in place, my hunger easing, and the light is fading to soft embers under her skin, but the fear remains, confusion twisting her features, frantic breaths trembling out of her.
And horror settles somewhere I cannot dislodge it.
I almost killed her.
I almost drained the only woman who’s woken something inside me that isn’t hunger or violence.
The one spark of light in a life defined by darkness.
“It’s not your fault,” I manage, though my voice still carries the rasp of restrained need. My Bloodfire still lingers quietly, restless, always waiting, but somehow, with her standing there, trembling but alive, the urge to protect her eclipses my urge to feed.
I’ve never been able to stop the Bloodfire once it takes hold.
Never.
But Sloane?
She smothered it without knowing, without trying. She reached inside the oldest, darkest part of me and extinguished my craving with her bare hands.
Oracle’s warning echoes like a prophecy, ‘The more time you spend with her, the more the darkness stirs inside her.’
He was right.
Whatever Sloane is, whatever power sleeps in her blood, I’m waking it. And when that power fully awakens…
I don’t let myself finish that thought.
“Come on,” I say softly, the burn on my chest still throbbing in time with her heartbeat. “I’ll take you home.”
She nods, and without another word, we climb onto the back of my bike, and I take off.
The ride back is silent, awkward in a way that makes my chest ache.
She sits behind me, her grip looser than before, her body tense with questions neither of us knows how to answer.
The connection between us hasn’t broken, because I still feel the pull, that inexplicable magnetism, but now there’s fear mixed in with the desire.
Fear of what we might become together.
Fear of what I might do to her.
I pull up outside her apartment building, a modest complex in a neighborhood that’s seen better days. She climbs off the bike, pulling off the helmet, and I follow her to the door because even now, even after almost killing her, I can’t bring myself to just leave.
“How did you know where I live?” Sloane asks.
“You told me.”
She shakes her head. “No, I didn’t.”
Frowning, I run a hand through my hair. “I asked Hex to check you out.”
“As in a background check?”
“Nothing so official,” I say. “Just enough to know you weren’t lying about who you are.”
Her eyes narrow. “You had someone dig into my life?”
“I had someone make sure you were real,” I correct. “Where you live, where you work, that you weren’t walking into my world under a false name.”
Sloane folds her arms and asks, “Did I pass?”
“You did, which is the problem.”
Silence stretches between us, charged and fragile. Her arms are folded, but she hasn’t stepped back, and it feels deliberate. I’m close enough to see the faint crease between her brows, the way her pulse jumps at her throat when my attention lingers there a second too long.
“I didn’t mean to cross a line,” I add, quieter now. “I needed to know you were safe.”
Her shoulders ease, a fraction. The defensiveness doesn’t vanish, but it does soften, reshaping into something more uncertain than angry. She studies my face, searching for the truth she already suspects is there.
“And now?” Sloane asks.
“Now,” I say, holding her gaze, “I step back.”
Something flickers across her expression, disappointment, maybe, or relief? She hesitates, fingers tightening on her arms, then loosen again.
“Do you want to come inside?” she asks, but her voice is small, uncertain. It feels as though she’s offering out of obligation rather than want.
“I can’t.” The words taste like ash. “Club business. It never sleeps.”
She nods, trying for a smile and failing. “Right. Of course.”
We stand here in the dim hallway, the fluorescent light buzzing overhead, neither of us knowing what to say. How do you apologize for almost murdering someone when they don’t even know that’s what happened?
Finally, I lean in and press a brief, chaste kiss to her cheek, careful, controlled, nothing like the hunger that nearly consumed us both. “Goodnight, Sloane.”
“Goodnight, Crave.” She breathes out heavily. “Crave?”
“Yeah?”
“You still owe me answers, and looking at your shirt and what happened at the lookout, sooner would be better.”
“Yes. Before I do, I need to talk to my club. Can you give me time?” I ask almost pleadingly.
“I’m scared.”
Slowly, I raise my hand and cup her cheek. “Nothing is going to happen to you. I give you my word, but what you ask of me is no small thing. I will answer all your questions… all I’m asking for is time.”
Sloane closes her eyes and leans into my touch. “It feels as if time is running out.”
I lower my hand, and her eyes open, then I force myself to turn and walk away.
I force myself onto my bike.
I force myself to start the engine.
I force myself not to look back at her silhouette in the doorway.
But as I ride toward the clubhouse, my Bloodfire settles into a low simmer, contained but not satisfied.
Waiting.
Always waiting.
I need answers.
I need to know what Sloane is and why her presence affects me like this. I need to understand why her blood calls to me with such intensity while simultaneously protecting her from me.
The clubhouse is blazing with light when I pull up, unusual for this hour.
Something’s wrong.
I stride through the doors into chaos.
Brothers everywhere, armed and angry. Hex hunched over his laptop, screens glowing with data feeds. Dread is standing in the center of the room, his fear projection crackling through the air like static electricity, making every supernatural in the vicinity tense with primal unease.
“What’s going on?” I demand.
Hex looks up, his face grim. “Found your rogue vampire, Prez. And it’s worse than we thought.”
He spins the laptop to face me. Security footage plays across the screen, grainy, black-and-white, but clear enough.
A vampire I recognize, one of my own scions from the Sacramento Chapter, is turning a human in broad daylight.
Not feeding, turning, and the human is screaming, drawing attention, with phones coming out to record.
“Viktor,” I growl.
“Gets better,” Hex says darkly. “He’s not just breaking the Law of Silence. He’s doing it deliberately. Leaving bodies where they’ll be found. Turning humans in public places.”
My hands clench into fists. “He’s challenging my authority.”
“More than that.” Rogue steps forward, his lycan eyes glowing faint gold. “He’s trying to draw them here, to our territory, to our doorstep.”
The temperature drops.
Not gradually.
Not the slow creep of cooling air.
Instantly.
As if a door to the void has opened and let winter’s corpse crawl through.
I feel it before I understand what’s happening, a pressure building behind my sternum, spreading outward through my veins.
My ancient instincts, honed over a millennium of survival, start screaming warnings my conscious mind hasn’t caught up to yet.
It doesn’t announce itself. There’s no warning. One second, the room is tense but manageable, and the next, terror floods the space alive and smothering.
It starts as a whisper at the base of my skull.
Something is wrong.
Something is coming.
Something you can’t fight.
Then it grows.
The rational part of my brain knows it’s Dread’s power, knows he’s the source of this suffocating fear, but knowing doesn’t help. My body responds anyway, every cell remembering what it felt like to be prey instead of predator.
Around the clubhouse, my brothers react.
Scorch’s veins ignite, molten red crawling up his arms as his dragon’s instinct to burn flares. His breathing goes shallow, rapid. “What the fuck—”
Hex’s fingers freeze over his keyboard, his face draining of color. His eyes glaze slightly, reflecting something only he can see, probably every digital system he’s ever hacked, every ward he’s ever built, failing simultaneously in his mind’s eye.
Hades goes absolutely still, his necromancer’s calm cracking as his connection to death suddenly feels as though it’s dragging him under.
His voice comes out hoarse. “I can feel them. All of them. Every soul I’ve ever touched. They’re screaming.”
Even Rogue, my steadfast lycan VP, flinches back. His partial shift happens involuntarily, claws extending, fangs dropping, not from aggression but from pure survival instinct. The beast inside him isn’t raging.
It’s cowering.
Grizz’s Stonehide activates reflexively, his skin hardening with a sound of grinding stone, his massive frame going rigid as if bracing for an impact that hasn’t come yet.
Oracle’s flames dim to near-extinction, his ancient fire recognizing something older, something that even the First Flame respects…
Or fears.
Ronan is pressed against the wall, his usual cocky grin completely gone, one hand clutching at his chest as if he can’t breathe. His fae blood is screaming at him to run, hide, vanish into the earth, and never return.
Jet is already halfway to phasing, his wraith form bleeding through as his body tries to escape into the space between worlds. His spectral layer is visible, writhing, and desperate.
Behind the counter, I hear glass shatter. Eden’s scream cuts off abruptly, not because she stopped, but because her banshee gift is recognizing death approaching on a scale that silences even her. This is what Dread does.