Chapter Sixteen
CHARLIE
The Next Day
Ten days since we drove north into the cold air, pine, and the kind of silence that has nothing peaceful in it, not for me, not anymore.
It’s been days since the first brother arrived at this cabin.
I’ve spent every one of them trying not to think of five heartbeats as five meals.
So many days of Dragonfire, Null Pulses, fear conditioning, and a wolf alpha sitting cross-legged in frost across from me at dawn, holding a stillness I’m not capable of anymore, waiting for the storm inside me to burn itself out.
Ten days.
For the record.
The storm has not burned itself out.
I’m on the floor with my back against the bed frame, because the bed stopped feeling manageable somewhere around hour three of tonight.
Too soft. Too still. Too much like surrendering to something I can’t afford to surrender to.
The floor is cold through my jeans, and the sensation is currently the most grounding thing available to me, so I am holding onto it and trying to breathe through a hunger that doesn’t respond to breathing the way panic does.
Breathing doesn’t fix this.
I have breathed so much in the last ten days, I am the most well-oxygenated disaster you have ever seen.
Even though I do not need goddamn oxygen.
Scorch’s fire bought me forty minutes this morning before the bloodlust came back as if it had never left.
The burning had been an interruption rather than a solution.
Forty minutes where I could sit at the table and hear the sounds of the cabin without tracking every heartbeat in the room by proximity and temperature.
Forty minutes that felt, in the immediate aftermath, like proof that something was possible.
Then it came back, and the forty minutes stopped feeling like proof and started feeling like the universe had a mean sense of humor.
Here… look at this thing you want. Now watch it burn.
Cool, great, thanks.
Rogue is on the floor beside me.
Not touching, he’s learned the distance I need when it gets like this.
Close enough to anchor me without being close enough to make the hunger worse.
Because his smell is the most intoxicating out of everyone here, and if there was anyone’s throat I was going to rip to shreds because of my insatiable hunger, his would be my first target.
Why does he have to smell so damn good!
His shoulder is three inches from mine, and I feel the warmth of him, that lycan heat running a few degrees above baseline, and I’ve gotten better at registering it without it becoming a trigger.
Better, not good. There is a significant distance between those two words, and I have taken up permanent residence in it.
“Talk to me,” I say. My voice is steadier than I feel, which is its own kind of dark comedy. My voice has been doing that for days, holding a composed surface over an experience that bears no resemblance to composed.
“About what?”
“Anything that isn’t this.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “There’s a ridge about two miles north. Elevation drops off on the east side, and at this time of year, the ice on the rock face catches the moonlight in a way that looks like it’s lit from inside. I found it on the third night. I couldn’t sleep.”
I close my eyes and try to build it. The ridge, the dark, the ice lit silver from within. “Did you go back?”
“Every night since.”
“Alone?”
“Mostly. Once with Talon. He didn’t say anything about it, just stood there, which was the right call.”
Talon, who I have privately documented as the one most likely to win a staring contest against a mountain. Correct instinct. “I want to see it,” I say. “When this is over.”
“You will.”
Not maybe.
Not hopefully.
If the Coven doesn’t decide you’re a liability and Crave doesn’t show up and—
He doesn’t do that.
He says ‘You will’ and means it.
And somehow the simple certainty of it is the most useful thing anyone has said to me in ten days. Possibly ever.
I tip my head back against the bed frame, stare at the ceiling, and hold the image.
The ridge. Moonlight doing something extraordinary in the dark.
Me, standing at the edge of it, not on a floor, not fighting a hunger I can’t suppress, not an ongoing supernatural incident requiring crisis management.
The door opens.
My body reacts before my brain does.
I’m on my feet in a movement I don’t consciously authorize, spine pressed to the wall, every sense I have detonating simultaneously.
The hunger, a constant grinding undertone for hours, spikes so hard and so fast my vision whites at the edges.
My fangs descend without my permission, which I’m listing under ‘things my body does now without consulting me,’ a category that has become very full.
What walks through the door earns every bit of it.
Predator.
The word arrives in the part of me that predates language, the part that the turning carved into existence and filled with knowledge I never asked for and would very much like to return.
Not prey. Not the warm-blood-vulnerable-vessel situation I’ve been learning to manage.
Something at the absolute top of a hierarchy I’ve only recently discovered has many, many floors.
Danger.
Original.
Crave fills the doorway the way certain people fill spaces, not through size alone, but with the gravity of something very old and incredibly controlled.
The kind of old where it shows not in wrinkles but in the weight of the air around him, as if the atmosphere has had five centuries to get used to making room.
His eyes find me immediately.
I am pressed to the wall with my fangs out, my hands flat against the plaster, and every vampire instinct I currently possess has taken one look at Crave and filed him under ‘Things We Absolutely Do Not Pick Fights With.’ My survival instincts are making several compelling and extremely loud arguments for running.
He doesn’t look remotely concerned about my several compelling arguments.
“Easy, Charlotte.” His voice lands in the room with a quality I have never encountered in a human voice.
Authority isn’t the right word, because authority can be dismissed, questioned, or ignored.
No, this is something structural. Something that cuts past thinking and hits instinct directly, and to my surprise, it works.
I am still pressed to the wall. But the white-edge panic changes shape into something I can at least see around.
“I’m not here to hurt you.”
Right, says the extremely rational part of my brain that has been largely drowned out for ten days. The man who has been tracking your body count and debating your continued existence is here to hurt you. Very plausible.
Rogue is beside me without me registering his movements. The warmth of his shoulder finds mine, and I grab onto it like a lifeline, which, to be fair, is what it is.
Someone comes through the door behind Crave.
Sloane.
I know her from the early days in the basement when everything was noise, hunger, and the terrible new sharpness of every sensation. Smaller than I expected. Eyes sharp, taking everything in, long past trying to dial it back.
And there is something around her that is not quite visible. More a quality to the air near her that does something entirely unexpected to the hunger roaring through me.
It doesn’t silence it.
I want to be clear that nothing damn-well silences it, and apparently, I’ve tried everything short of a full exorcism at this point.
But it resonates with it.
Finds some frequency inside the bloodlust and hums against it, the way a tuning fork held near a vibrating string produces something that’s almost harmony.
My fangs don’t retract, but the white-edge panic at my peripheral vision eases, the hunger recognizing something in her it doesn’t clock as threat, prey, or trigger.
I have absolutely no idea what that means. I file it in the increasingly sprawling mental folder labeled ‘Vampire Biology,’ the things nobody explained before I needed them, and make a note to ask about it later.
Assuming there is a later.
Crave moves into the room without hurry, without the careful telegraphing every brother has learned to do around me, the slow movements, announced intentions, and maintained distances. He moves the way he moves and lets the weight of what he is handle the rest.
He pulls the chair from the table, turns it, and sits facing me.
Studying me.
Not the way a threat studies prey. The way someone who knows exactly what they’re looking at takes the time to confirm the details. It is a deeply, specifically unsettling experience, being studied by something that has had millennia to develop its assessment skills.
“You’re fighting your nature,” he says.
It’s not a question, but a flat, accurate observation. The kind of tone that treats it like data, not opinion.
“Correct,” I say. My voice comes out steadier than I have any right to expect, given the fangs, the wall, the full internal emergency, all of it.
“That’s good,” he says.
I will not pretend the wave of relief those two words produce is dignified, because it isn’t. Two words from this man and something unknots in my chest that I’ve been carrying knotted for days.
Objectively embarrassing.
Completely involuntary.
“But you’re fighting it wrong.”
I furrow my brows in confusion. “What the hell does that mean?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. His eyes move over me with that measuring quality, reading things I’m not consciously broadcasting. “What are you doing, right now, in this moment, with the hunger?”
I open my mouth, close it, and reach past the answer that sounds best and find the honest one. “Pushing it down. Holding it back. Trying to keep it from—”
“From what?”
“From taking over.”
“Taking over what?”
The question lands somewhere inconveniently specific. “Me. My choices. What I do.”
He nods. “You’re trying to suppress it.”