The church behind us is a ruin.
Twenty-three-year-old Charlotte Harris, who worked at a coffee shop, had questionable taste in lookout hookups, and died in the dark on a hillside overlooking a city that never knew she existed, is gone.
I don’t mourn her the way I used to.
She did the best she could with what she had.
What came after her is standing in a churchyard with blood on her hands, a family at her back, and the whole long, dark road of what comes next stretched out ahead. Full of wars still taking shape, with debts still coming due, and fifteen people who are going to need someone who understands what they’re surviving.
And beyond the wars, beyond the debts, beyond the immediate wreckage of tonight, there is so much I don’t know yet. A dragon who puts out his cigarette for people who need steadying. A necromancer who speaks to the dead with the same quiet courtesy he extends to the living. A dread harbinger who chose compassion over cruelty when it mattered. A Blood Witch who burned two centuries of someone else’s poison out of fifteen strangers without being asked. Centuries of history and power, and a chosen family that I am only just beginning to read the first page of.
Rogue’s world.
My world now.
And Rogue himself, the man I know in crisis, in darkness, in the stripped-back language of survival. The man who sat across from me in a cabin at three in the morning and talked me back from the edge of my own nature without once making me feel like a burden for needing it. There is a whole version of him I haven’t met yet. The version that exists in ordinary hours. His history, his pack, the family that made him the shape of steadiness that he is.
I wantall of it.
Every quiet detail.
Every story that starts before I arrived in it.
The mate bond hums warm against my sternum, and I let myself feel the full weight of it without flinching. It came with losses built into it. The Bloodguard line ends with Rogue, the last of something ancient and irreplaceable, and the biology of what I am now means the loss of being able to have children. No small, loud extensions of the two of us sent out into the world to carry the line forward.
The grief of that is real.
But grief and hope are not mutually exclusive. Two and a half centuries of Valeria proved that much in the worst possible way. What you do with the space loss leaves behind is the only part that belongs to you.
And the world is very old, very large, and is full of packs that fracture and children who fall through the gaps, orphaned wolf-blood looking for somewhere solid to land. The Bloodguard line ending doesn’t mean the Bloodguard legacy has to. It means the next chapter of it gets written differently.
Rogue hasn’t said any of this.
Neither have I.
But the bond carries it between us anyway, in the language of two people whose futures have become genuinely, irrevocably shared, patient, certain, and unhurried, the way all the truest things are.
The sun is coming.
I turn my face toward it, Rogue’s warmth at my back, the Eternal Sins brothers at my shoulder, and all the long, extraordinary, unwritten years of what comes next.
Behind me, I feel him shift, wolf-steady, easing into it rather than bracing for it.
Rogue.
Bloodguard.
Guardian.
A man built by oath, instinct, and centuries of standing between the people he loves and everything that wants to destroy them, who fell out of the careful, solitary structure of his own life and landed, not in ruin or loss, but here.
Exactly here.
Brothers at his back who would burn the world down on his left and rebuild it on his right without being asked. And a partner at his side who understands, better than most, what it costs to survive the falling.
The guardian fell.
But he landed exactly where he was meant to.
