Chapter Eight
CHARLIE
The cabin settles around me like it’s deciding what to make of me, all old timber and mountain silence and the smell of a place that has held other people’s secrets for years.
The fire Rogue lit before he left the room crackles in the stone hearth with the cheerful indifference that doesn’t care about the supernatural crisis unfolding three feet away from it.
I’m sitting on the edge of the bed with my hands curled in my lap and my brain doing its absolute level best to dissolve into static.
Seven days, I said.
Seven fucking days.
Charlotte Harris, what in the actual hell is wrong with you?
He comes back twenty minutes later carrying something that smells like the butcher’s section of a grocery store, setting a sealed container on the table near the door before turning to look at me with an expression that says he’s prepared for this conversation and still expects it to go sideways.
He’s not wrong about that. He should put it on his resume—impressive situational awareness with a strong grasp of the obvious.
“You’re gonna want to ask me something,” he says, settling into the chair across from the hearth with the kind of deliberate calm that tells me his version of sitting down has nothing to do with relaxation and everything to do with making himself look less threatening.
Which is an interesting strategy from a man who looks like he was carved out of granite by something with anger management issues.
I stare at my hands for a moment. My nails are slightly too sharp, a detail I hadn’t noticed before in the chaos of waking up and agreeing to voluntary imprisonment in the wilderness.
My skin is cooler than it should be. I pressed my fingers to my wrist earlier and found no pulse waiting for me, and the absence of it sits in the center of my chest.
“What am I?” The words come out quieter than I intended, stripped of the wit I usually deploy like armor, falling into the space between us with a kind of raw, unguarded weight that makes me want to immediately take them back.
I clear my throat, and try again with a little more Charlotte Harris and a little less open wound.
“I mean, I have a working theory. The fangs are a clue. The total absence of heartbeat is another strong hint. And the fact I spent an entire morning apparently trying to eat people I’m fairly sure I would’ve liked under normal circumstances suggests something has gone fairly significantly off the rails with my biology.
” I look up at him. “But I’d like to hear it from someone who isn’t me, because the inside of my head is not a great place to be right now, and external confirmation would be really fucking helpful. ”
Rogue studies me for a moment, his golden eyes doing that thing they do where they don’t miss anything, processing with an attention to detail that should feel invasive and somehow doesn’t, which is its own separate problem I’m filing away for later.
“You’re a vampire,” he says, not softening it.
“A scion. Turned against your will by a vampire old and powerful enough that the process happened faster than it should have, which is part of why you woke up the way you did, overwhelmed, with no frame of reference, no guidance, no preparation…” He pauses, his jaw working slightly as if measuring something before he releases it.
“You were made, Charlotte. And you were left to figure it out alone, which isn’t something that should ever happen to a new scion. ”
There it is.
I sit with that for a moment, letting it settle through the layers of shock, sarcasm, and the terrible, clawing hunger that has been my constant companion since I woke up on a warehouse floor with no memory of how I got there.
Vampire.
The word should feel absurd.
It should come with the embarrassment of something said out loud that has no business being said out loud, like announcing you believe in Bigfoot or that you’ve adopted seventeen cats.
It should land as comedy.
But it doesn’t land as comedy.
It lands like a goddamn verdict.
“Turned,” I repeat, and something in my voice cracks on the word that I can’t control.
“Turned as in, someone chose this for me. Someone made this decision about my body and my life and my entire existence and didn’t bother asking?
” My hands tighten against each other in my lap, knuckles going pale.
“And the bloodlust. The hunger. That’s… that’s permanent?
That’s what I am now, something that needs to—” I stop, because finishing that sentence means looking directly at the memory of the diner, at what I did, at the woman who I killed, and I’m not ready to do that.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to do that.
“Is it going to be like this forever? This… screaming inside my throat every time I get near—”
“No.” He says it before I finish, firm and immediate.
“The hunger doesn’t disappear, but it becomes manageable…
controllable. It’s a need, like any other need, and the difference between a scion who loses control and one who doesn’t is learning how to meet it before it gets loud enough to override thought.
” He leans forward slightly in the chair, elbows braced on his knees, his entire attention on me in a way that somehow makes the room feel smaller and larger simultaneously.
“What you’re experiencing right now is the worst it ever gets…
new turn with no preparation, an empty system.
You’ve been running on chaos, adrenaline and the terrifying novelty of existing in a body that rewired itself without your consent.
” He pauses again, and something in his expression shifts.
“It gets quieter. I promise you, it gets quieter.”
Something about that specific promise does what the word ‘vampire,’ the word ‘turned,’ and the entire accumulated weight of the last several days couldn’t quite manage to do.
It cracks me open.
Not dramatically. Not the way things crack in films, with a sharp sound.
It’s more gradual than that, a slow fracture traveling from the center outward, and when it reaches my face it arrives as tears, which is profoundly inconvenient, embarrassing, and entirely beyond my ability to stop.
I press my fingers to my eyes as though that’s going to achieve anything useful, and my voice, when it comes, has lost its armor entirely.
“I didn’t ask for this.” The words arrive stripped down to their bones, nothing decorative about them, nothing witty or deflective or wrapped in the self-preservation of humor.
“I didn’t get attacked in… an alley thinking this was a reasonable Tuesday outcome.
I wasn’t signing up for fangs and… and murder, and a creepy cabin in the woods with a really ridiculously attractive man I don’t know, and the complete annihilation of every plan I had for my life, which, okay, it wasn’t spectacular, fine!
But it was mine, and at least I had a freaking pulse!
” My breath frays apart, catching in my chest.
“You think I’m ridiculously attractive?” Something shifts in his expression, not quite a smile, but close enough to be dangerous.
The heat that crawls up my neck is deeply inconvenient and entirely involuntary. “That was… I was making a list. It was a comprehensive list of grievances, and you happened to appear on it.”
“On the ridiculously attractive section?”
“On the irrelevant details section.” I point at him. “Don’t make it weird.”
“You brought it up.”
I scoff out of spite. “I brought up a lot of things. We’re moving on.” The almost-smile doesn’t fully leave his face, and that is genuinely not helpful.
“You always dodge questions you don’t like?” he asks.
“Only the ones I plan on answering later…” My head tips to the side. “Or never.”
His brow rises. “That’s an infuriating personality trait.”
“So, I’ve been told.” Something in me loosens despite myself, and is gone again almost immediately.
“I don’t want to be a monster. I don’t want to be something people should fear.
I don’t want to spend the rest of whatever-this-is hurting strangers who did nothing to deserve it, and I can’t, I can not have died…
” I hesitate, then continue, “… in an alley—”
“Lie.” The word lands soft.
I look up at Rogue, who stands a few feet away, head tilted slightly, eyes locked on mine.
Heat crawls up my neck.
How the hell does he know I am lying about where I was attacked?
“It wasn’t an alley,” he says evenly. “You hesitated.”
I cross my arms, hating that he noticed. Hating that he always notices. “Does it matter?”
His silence stretches.
I force myself to hold his gaze. Because I don’t know why admitting to Rogue that I was getting it on with Jake, or Jason, or whatever his stupid name was before the attack, makes me feel like I am betraying Rogue.
What the fuck is that about?
“The location doesn’t change the outcome. I was out, I met someone, I made a bad call. Congratulations. That’s the whole tragic backstory.”
His jaw tightens, but he doesn’t interrupt.
“It was dark,” I continue, my pulse pounding in my ears.
“I was being reckless. That’s the headline.
Not whether it was brick walls or a scenic overlook or whatever detail you’re trying to dissect.
” I swallow against the burn in my throat.
“I didn’t expect to die. I didn’t expect to wake up with blood in my mouth and my life shredded beyond recognition.
I expected a mistake. Not… this.” I wave my hands around my pulseless and breathless body.
My voice fractures, but I push through. “Where it happened doesn’t matter. The fact it happened does.”
Silence settles between us again, heavy and loaded.
And he keeps watching me as if he can still see the truth I refuse to hand him.