I raise my eyes to the eastern horizon, where the city meets the dark, and I think of Draven sitting in his Church room with his brothers around him and the weight of what’s coming settling into his chest.
And I am, for the first time in two hundred and thirty-seven years, entirely at peace.
“Soon, Draven,” I say to the glass. “Soon you’ll understand what it’s like to loseeverything.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
CHARLIE
The Next Day
The doors to the clubhouse open before Rogue even reaches for the handle, swinging inward on heavy hinges, and the smell hits me so hard and fast that my legs nearly buckle under the force of it.
Blood.
Not the clean, cool scent of the animal blood I’ve been drinking from glass bottles at the cabin, carefully poured, carefully controlled, the whole exercise of it so deliberately removed from anything living that it almost doesn’t register as food anymore.
This is different.
It’s layered, warm, and impossible to categorize, the internal rhythms of every supernatural body weaving through the air in discordant harmony.
Lycan heat. Vampire stillness. Magic that vibrates rather than pulses.
Iron, salt, ancient power, and the electric tension of predators sharing space without drawing teeth.
Nothing about this is human.
Everything about it is alive.
My fangs descend before I can stop them.
Rogue’s hand presses flat against the small of my back, steady and immovable, and the warmth of it travels through the fabric of my shirt, sinking straight through to the base of my spine. It doesn’t erase the hunger. Nothing erases the hunger, not completely, not yet, probably not for a long time if the last three weeks have taught me anything at all. But it changes its texture,shifts it from a shrieking, blinding thing to something I can look at sideways.
Something I can hold at arm’s length for a little while longer.
‘You’ve done this before,’he told me on the drive back. ‘You’ve sat in rooms with people, and you’ve held on. You know how to do this.’
I breathe through my mouth instead of my nose and step through the doors. The room goes quiet the way rooms go quiet when something unpredictable enters them, that collective, held-breath stillness of brothers who have survived long enough to recognize danger when it walks toward them wearing human clothes. They are positioned around the space with casual deliberateness, but none of them is actually being casual.
Scorch leans against the bar with his arms folded, the faint ember-glow running up his forearms visible even through his sleeves, his dark eyes tracking me with the flat, measuring attention of a predator who hasn’t yet decided whether the situation calls for action.
Dread stands near the back wall, and whatever it is he does, whatever invisible current runs through the air when he’s present, it presses against my skin like a second layer of pressure I can’t name and don’t need to, because every instinct in my body is already responding to it, pulling tight and defensive.
Grizz, massive and earth-steady, watches from beside the pool table with an expression that is not quite hostile but is absolutely, carefully neutral.
The prospects, Ronan and Jet, hang further back, and Ronan is actually pale, which strikes me as notable given that I’m fairly certain leprechauns aren’t supposed to look pale.
Nobody speaks.
I lift my chin anyway, because whatever else Valeria took from me that night at the lookout, she didn’t take my spine, andI absolutely and unequivocally refuse to walk into this room like an apology.
Sloane comes forward. She moves differently from how I remember her from those early, chaotic hours at the compound, before Rogue took me to the cabin, before everything became training, controlled feeds, and learning to exist inside a body that no longer operates by rules I understand. Even when I saw her at the cabin—maybe it was me, not her—but there’s a deliberateness to her now, an awareness of her own power that wasn’t there before. Her eyes when they find me are sharp and attentive, which makes something in the back of my skull tighten. She carries the scent of burning iron with her the way other women carry perfume.
“Charlie.” Her voice is measured, neither warm nor cold, and she stops at a careful distance, leaving space between us that I understand is for her protection as much as for my comfort. “I need to look at you, if that’s all right?”
“You mean with the bloodline thing.” I’ve heard them call it the Crimson Sight, heard Rogue describe it in the matter-of-fact way he describes most of the impossible things that apparently constitute normal life in this world. “Go ahead.”
Something shifts in her gaze, the color of her irises changing, bleeding outward like ink dropped into water, until her eyes track things I can’t see, and she is looking at me the way a person looks at a map, reading it for information rather than for beauty. The moment stretches around us, and the room stays very still.
