Chapter Twenty-Six #3
Crave stands near Sloane, speaking low, and whatever passes between them takes less than thirty seconds but carries the weight of something far longer.
She presses one hand flat against his chest, and I see the faint flare of Bloodfire at her palm.
It’s not aggressive, more like a pulse, a check, a wordless conversation between blood and power.
He covers her hand with his, briefly. Then she steps back, and he moves, and they are both exactly what they are—an Original vampire and his Blood Witch, a supernatural partnership moving as one.
I find Charlie near the weapons rack.
She’s standing with her back to me, fingers moving over the available options with more consideration than I expected.
She selects a short blade, something she can use in close quarters.
She turns it once in her hand, testing the balance, then slides it into the sheath at her hip with the kind of quiet confidence that stops me where I stand.
“Charlie.”
She turns.
For a second, neither of us speaks. The compound noise carries on around us, boots, voices, and the metallic sound of preparation, but in the narrow space between us goes muffled, like the world steps back to give us a moment it knows we need.
I start to speak. “If something happens to me tonight, I want you to—”
“No!” She crosses the distance between us in two steps, and her hand finds my chest, fingers curling against the leather, and the look on her face cuts right through me, fierce, certain, and refusing every syllable of where that sentence was heading. “Don’t. Don’t you dare finish that.”
“Charlie—”
“We are both surviving this.” Her voice is low and absolute, the way it gets when she’s decided something and closed every door against the alternative. Her eyes are dark, steady, and blazing with something that has nothing to do with bloodlust. “Say it back to me.”
My hands find her face, and my thumbs trace her jaw. She tips her chin up, and the wolf in me pulls tight against the inside of my ribs like a rope going taut.
“We’re both surviving this,” I tell her.
The words barely settle between us before something deeper takes over. I don’t so much decide to kiss her as find myself already moving, already closing the distance, the world narrowing to the precise, unbearable need to feel her mouth against mine.
The impact is not gentle.
It’s a collision.
Her breath catches sharply as our lips meet, the sound swallowed by the heat that detonates between us.
She fists the leather of my cut like she needs leverage against the force of it, like the ground might tilt if she doesn’t anchor herself.
My hand finds her hair without hesitation, threading deep, pulling her closer with a possessiveness I don’t pretend to temper.
The kiss deepens on instinct alone.
There is nothing careful about it. Nothing measured.
It’s hunger, certainty, and the reckless relief of finding something solid in the middle of chaos.
Her mouth moves against mine with a fierce, answering urgency, the taste of her sharp and electric, charged with the kind of emotion neither of us has ever learned to articulate.
The mate pull surges.
It isn’t a metaphor. It’s physics.
It floods through me in a violent wave, incandescent and consuming, lighting up every nerve like a system suddenly running at full power.
My wolf rises hard and immediate, pressing forward with primal recognition, while her vampire answers with equal intensity.
Something ancient and lethal in the way she meets me at the seam where instinct becomes inevitability.
This thing between us, whatever it is, stops pretending to be subtle.
It roars.
Her body fits against mine with devastating precision, every point of contact sending another shock of heat through my bloodstream.
I feel the tension she’s been carrying begin to fracture under the weight of the moment, feel her lean into me, as if this is the only place she can exist without breaking.
I taste her certainty.
She tastes my promise.
The kiss becomes less about urgency and more about inevitability, slowing not because the need fades but because it transforms, deepening into something that feels dangerously close to belonging.
My hand slides from her hair to the curve of her neck, holding her there as though letting go might unravel something vital.
We only separate because breathing eventually becomes non-negotiable.
The space between us feels charged, the air thick with the aftershock of everything we just said without words. Her forehead rests against mine, the contact grounding and unbearably intimate, her chest rising and falling hard enough that I feel each breath like a physical echo.
Her grip on my cut loosens slowly, finger by finger, like she’s relearning how to release control. “Together,” she says, so quietly the world has no right to hear it.
“Together,” I answer, the promise settling into my bones as something permanent.
And when we finally turn toward the door, it feels less like walking into whatever comes next and more like stepping into something we have already chosen.
Outside, the night is waiting, and Valeria’s church sits somewhere in the dark ahead of us.
I keep Charlie in my peripheral as we walk, and my wolf holds the line steady, alert, certain, and unwilling to consider any version of tonight where she doesn’t make it back.