“You absolutely did!” She wraps both hands around the glass, and something in her expression has shifted into territory that is openly curious and trying not to show it. “Interesting.”
“Drink your water.”
“I don’t need water!”
“I know.”
She drinks it anyway, watching me over the rim.
***
The third day starts the same as the first two, but by midmorning, something has shifted between us in a way I can’t fully quantify. The resistance is still there. Charlie would resist breathing if she thought I was the one who’d suggested it, but there’s less friction underneath it, less of the defensive edge that has been present since she woke up in this cabin and decided that compliance would be negotiated on her terms rather than mine. She pushes back on every instruction, committed to the idea that accepting it would be surrender, and she refuses. She argues every exercise on principle, wins none of the arguments, completes every exercise anyway, and considers this a draw.
It’s wearing down something in me that I’ve spent two centuries building, and I’m choosing not to think about what that means.
The sparring is technically her idea. She announces it sometime after midday, voice calm in that deliberate way she uses when she’s already decided something is happening, whether I agree or not. Meditation is helping her nervous system, she says, but not the aggression that spikes when the hunger hits. If control has to hold under pressure, then she needs pressure.
The logic is sound.Annoyingly so.
She steps out of the cabin first, pushing through the screen door with her shoulder, boots crunching over the gravel path that curves toward the clearing behind the treeline. Pine shadows cut across the ground in long bands, sunlight slipping between branches and catching in the blonde strands of her hair.She rolls her wrists as she walks, loosening up like she’s been waiting all day for this moment.
The air smells like sap and distant rain, and underneath it all, there is her, that new-vampire sharpness threaded with hunger she’s holding on a leash that gets shorter every hour. My wolf notices before I do. Muscles tighten, instinct nudges forward, protective and territorial in ways I keep buried under layers of discipline.
She turns when she reaches the clearing, already moving into stance, already watching me with that stubborn spark that says she’s not here to be handled gently.
“Stop holding the leash so tight,” she says.
I huff out something that might be a laugh. We both know I will, just not in the ways she expects. I step into the circle with her, boots sinking slightly into soft earth. Close enough now to see the faint tension along her jaw, the way her shoulders sit a fraction too high from the sun, and the hunger gnawing underneath her composure. She lifts her hands, eyes bright, waiting.
I let the silence stretch a second longer than necessary. Let the weight of it settle between us. Let my control lock into place.
Then I nod once.
And we move.
She’s fast, new scion fast, the turning having added speed to a body already built for movement, and she commits to every strike with a completeness that suggests she’s been in enough real situations to know the difference between practiced aggression and applied force. I’m faster, stronger, and more experienced in the gap between us by a distance she won’t close in a week and probably won’t close in a year.
But I’m not here to win.
I’m here to push, apply pressure, and make her access control at the moment it’s hardest to access.
What I’m not accounting for is the moment she stops fighting me and starts fighting at me. All her defenses folding inward in a frustrated rush, the movement brings her closer than training requires. I check her momentum with my hands, and her palms hit my chest, and neither of us moves for a beat too long.
She’s breathing hard, unnecessarily, the ghost reflex firing hard under exertion, and her eyes are too bright, her hair is a disaster, and she’s close enough that her scent reaches me with the layered complexity that my wolf jots down for later without asking my permission.
She looks up.
I look down.
She closes it first, which I wasn’t expecting, her chin tilting up by fractions until her mouth finds mine with an accuracy that suggests she’s been mapping the distance for longer than this moment. The kiss arrives not soft but certain, like a decision rather than a tentative question, and everything in my body that has been exercising professional restraint for three days does not handle it gracefully.
I answer it.
No version of me doesn’t answer it.
My hands move to her face, tilting her back into the contact with more force than is strictly necessary. She makes a sound in her throat that I’m going to be processing long after this moment ends, pressing harder into the kiss with urgency that has been held back under pressure until the pressure exceeded the holding.
For several seconds, there is nothing but this.
