“Crave—”
“She’s proven herself.” His gaze holds mine, steady and without apology. “In the compound attack. With the captured scions. She did what none of us could have done, because she reached them from the inside. We may need that same ability to reach Valeria’s scions before we lose them entirely.” He pauses. “She comes, Rogue. You keep her in your sightline. You do not let that sire command get a foothold. Do you understand me?”
The directive is clear. The responsibility lands squarely on my shoulders, which is exactly where Crave intends it to sit.
I exhale through my nose.
He’s not asking.
He’s making a demand as my Bloodguard.
Asshole.
“Understood.”
Charlie doesn’t look triumphant. She looks like someone who knows what they have just signed up for and isn’t taking it lightly. The gravity of it sits on her the same way it sits on the rest of us, and somehow that makes it easier to bear.
“Gear up,” Crave says again, standing, and just like that, the meeting is over.
The next twenty minutes are a controlled kind of chaos, the familiar ritual of preparation that every brother moves through in their own way, the compound shifting from stillness to readiness with the quiet efficiency of people who have done this before.
Scorch moves through the space nearest the door, rolling his shoulders in slow rotations, that familiar loosening motion, like he’s shaking something out of his joints that’s been sitting there too long. The veins along his forearms pulse faintly with heat, molten threads rising to the surface as his dragon stirs, and I watch him take one long drag from his cigarette before grinding it out under his boot and leaving the butt on the floor for someone else to deal with—his version of a pre-mission ritual.
Nobody says a word about it.
Near the wall, Dread stands with his eyes closed, one hand wrapped around the bronze coin he keeps in his pocket, the one with his mother’s name worn nearly smooth on one face. His jaw moves faintly, the way it does when he’s pulling himself back from the edge, anchoring to the human parts of himself before the divine takes over entirely. The air around him is cool and slightly charged, the Dreadfield contained for now, barely.
The vest Hades pulls on, at first glance, looks like plain black leather. It isn’t. I’ve seen it up close. The bone-pale material woven into the inner lining isn’t decorative. It’s necromantic armor, fragments of something old and consecrated, stitched into place with thread that hums at frequencies the living shouldn’t hear too closely. He runs one thumb along the collar seam with the focused care of someone checking that every death ward is seated correctly, his expression as calm and unhurried as it ever is, like a man making sure he remembered his keys before walking out the door.
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 itinto 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 arebothsurviving 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.
