“I never stopped.”
“Then nothing has changed.” Crave lets that sit for a moment. “Except now you’re the bridge between what I built and what she is. Between our world and the people we keep pulling into it without a handbook.” Something moves in his voice that might, in a different man, be called warmth. “The club needs that.Ineed that. Not a Bloodguard who’s torn in half. One who’s whole.”
There’s silence.
Then the sound of a forearm clasp, a brief, absolute gesture I’ve watched the brothers use when words aren’t the point.
“Good,” Crave says simply.
I’ve stopped moving without realizing it, standing perhaps ten feet away in the gray pre-dawn light of the churchyard, not hidden, not eavesdropping in any serious sense. When Crave turns back from Rogue’s direction, he sees me immediately.
Those silver-dark eyes find mine and hold them. Something passes through his expression—it is quick, unreadable, the calculation of an ancient mind doing what ancient minds do, processing variables, reading rooms. Then his chin tips slightly, inviting.
I walk toward him before my nerves can vote. “Crave…” My voice comes out steadier than I expected, and I’m grateful for it.
He waits.
I’ve been thinking about this since somewhere around the second fight of the night, since I looked at a starving young man in chains and saw myself, since I crouched in the middle of fifteen terrified people and found, to my own astonishment, that I knew what to do. Since I stood in the smoke and the silence after Valeria died and felt the sire bond snap and understood, finally, completely, that the question was no longer what I am.
The question was what I choose to do with it.
“I want to stay,” I say. “Not as a complication. Not as Rogue’s problem. Not as something you’re managing or containing or keeping an eye on.” I hold his gaze. “I want to earn my place here, if… you’ll have me.”
The churchyard seems even quieter.
Crave studies me. His ancient, silver-eyed assessment that doesn’t miss anything and doesn’t soften for comfort’s sake, taking me apart with the methodical patience of someone who has had centuries to develop and has never yet regretted the time it takes. I let him look. I’ve got nothing to hide and nothing to bargain with except exactly what I am, standing in a ruined churchyard at four in the morning with blood on my hands, a mate bond burning warm in my chest, and fifteen people insidewho are going to be okay, at least partly, because I was here tonight.
That is what I have.
It’s enough, or it isn’t.
Something shifts in his expression.
He looks at me for one more long moment, the president of Eternal Sins MC, an Original vampire who has outlasted empires, the most dangerous person I have ever been in a room with, and then the corner of his mouth moves in the way it moves when he’s decided something.
“Welcome to Eternal Sins MC, Charlotte,” he says, quietly, without ceremony. The way the truest things are always said. “You’re family now.”
The word lands in my chest like the last piece of something I didn’t know I’d been holding incomplete.
Family.
Not chosen for me.
Not done to me.
Not an accident of biology or Blood Magic or two centuries of someone else’s revenge playing out through my unlucky life.
Chosen.
Behind me, I hear Rogue let out a breath that sounds as if it’s been waiting somewhere in his body since the night he found me at the gates, bloody, terrified, and certain I was alone in the dark.
He was wrong about that, it turns out.
I was waiting to find my way home.
Somewhere across the churchyard, Scorch lights a new cigarette, the cherry of it a small, warm point of amber in the gray predawn. Dread makes a sound that I’m choosing to interpret as approval. Hades tips his chin at me with a solemnity that suggests he’s stood at enough endings to recognize the shape of a beginning.
The sky at the horizon is turning pale.
