I lunge.
The sound Rogue makes is not a word.
It’s something older than language, something that comes from the wolf before it passes through the man, a sharp, commanding sound that cracks through the basement like a physical impact. His arms come around me from behind, and they are immovable, unyielding, the strength in them belonging to a creature that has been protecting things he loves for over two centuries, and they do not give.
But it’s not the restraint that pulls me back.
It’s what comes through the connection between us.
Rogue’s presence floods the space that Valeria’s voice has opened. His wolf, steady, ancient, ferociously certain of what I am and who I belong to, pours itself into the space where Valeria’s voice is screaming its commands, and it is so much larger than her. His certainty swallows her hold the way the sea swallows a handful of salt, absorbing it, neutralizing it, until her voice thins, retreats, and I can hear my own thoughts again.
‘You are Charlie. You are mine to protect. You are not her weapon.’
Rogue doesn’t say the words aloud. He doesn’t need to. They arrive in that wordless channel that runs between us, written in warmth and absolute conviction. I drag myself back along that thread with both hands, gasping, my fingers digging into his forearms where they lock across my chest.
Sloane hasn’t stopped working.
She’s pale.
Sweat-sheened at her temples, her jaw set with the ferocious concentration of someone pushing through a door that doesn’twant to open. The crimson-gold light in her veins has gone brighter, almost painful to look at directly, and when she finally speaks, her voice carries that layered, resonant quality, the echo of Lilith beneath her own words.
“I have it,” she breathes. “I have it. She’s at an abandoned church. Outskirts of the city, north side, the old industrial quarter—”
Suddenly, the connection snaps.
It doesn’t fade.
It breaks, clean and violent, like a cable under too much tension, and the recoil hits me somewhere behind the chest with enough force that my vision whites out entirely for several seconds.
My body stops holding itself upright.
Rogue catches me before I hit the floor. He turns me into him, both arms gathering me against his chest, one hand cupping the back of my head, and he holds me the way you hold something you almost lost and cannot believe you still have.
My hands are shaking.
Not a gentle tremor. It’s a deep, bone-level shaking that I cannot stop and cannot slow, the kind that comes from somewhere deeper than cold, from the memory of standing on the edge of something dark and feeling it pull you under.
“She’s strong,” I manage, my voice coming out rougher than I expect, scraped raw. I press my face into Rogue’s shoulder and breathe him in, leather, pine, and something warm and wolf-wild that my vampire nature has mapped as safe, as mine, as the scent of a person my blood trusts more than it trusts its own sire. “She’s so strong. I almost… fuck, I couldn’t—” My throat closes around the rest of it.
Rogue’s arms tighten. His mouth drops to the top of my head, and for a moment neither of us moves. Around us, the candlessnuff out one by one, the ritual dismantling itself now that Sloane has what she needs.
Oracle says something quiet to Hades about the location, and Crave’s presence is that enormous, watchful stillness that means he’s processing, calculating, and deciding.
None of it touches me right now.
Right now, there is only Rogue’s heartbeat against my cheek. A sound I have spent weeks learning to hear as an anchor rather than a temptation, and tonight the distinction has never felt so crucial.
“You did it,” Rogue says, low against my hair. He pulls back enough to look at me, and his golden eyes are doing that thing where they go very still and very intense, where all the restless wolf-energy in him narrows to a single focused point. One hand cups my jaw, his thumb tracing my cheekbone. “You heard her and you fought her. Do you understand that?”
“She almost had me. I almost attacked Sloane.”
“Almost.” His voice is even, absolute. “You still fought.”
There’s a warmth radiating from him that moves through every point of contact between us, his whole self aimed at mine like a question with only one possible answer. The sire mark in my blood is quiet now. Pushed back behind the stronger signal of whatever this is between Rogue and me, this fated, impossible, infuriating thing that turned out to be the one piece of me Valeria could not touch.
“That’s all that matters,” he says.
Across the basement, Crave speaks for the first time since the ritual began, his voice measured, iron-edged, shaped by years of planning for war. “An abandoned church, north side, industrial quarter.” He looks at Sloane, who nods, still pale but steady, still standing. “Then that’s where we go.”
