“Good.”
The word stops me cold.
His gold eyes are steady in the dark, watching me with an attention that is completely, unsettlingly unruffled, and the lack of defensiveness in him is somehow more infuriating than an argument would be. I step forward, my body moving before I entirely plan it. The anger and the hunger and the four days of white-knuckled restraint all rise at once into something that needs somewhere to go.
“Good?” I repeat, stepping closer, my anger building even more.
“Your fangs are down,” he says. “Your eyes are red. Your hands have been clenched for thirty seconds, and you’re putting out enough predator energy right now to make most wolves back up, and you haven’t once looked at my throat.” He tilts his head, and the motion exposes the line of his neck with a casualness that registers somewhere in the back of my brain as either extremely brave or extremely stupid. “That’s not the bloodlust. That’s anger. Yours… controlled…” He pauses, the corner of hislips turning up in satisfaction. “We lost the deer on purpose, Charlotte.”
Every word lands with the weight of the ground dropping out from under me.
I stare at him, and the fury doesn’t dissolve. It transforms, and the transformation is fast, electric, and runs from my chest all the way down to the soles of my feet.
He set the collision up.
He watched me track, waited until I was close enough that losing the target would hurt, because the point was never the deer. The point was what losing the deer would do to me.
Which means he’s been watching me. Not supervising but learning, which is either horrifying or…
“You absolute—”
He catches me as I shove him. His hands close around my wrists with lycan certainty, not harsh, not gentle, just there, and I don’t shake them off.
I pull against him instead.
Hard.
He doesn’t move.
The immovability of him hits like a wall, and with it lands every piece of information I’ve been refusing to process for the last five minutes. His shift tore completely through his clothes, and he stands before me in nothing but moonlight and the finished lines of a body built before I was born. The heat coming off him in the cold air is becoming a serious fucking problem, and I keep making the extremely questionable decision not to think too hard about why.
“You lied to me,” I say, but the words land softer than I mean them to.
“I didn’t lie.” His voice drops low, roughened by something he’s trying not to show. “I redirected.”
“That’s the same thing.”
A faint breath of amusement ghosts across his mouth, gone almost before it forms. “And yet you came back.” His gaze drags over my face, slow and deliberate, like he’s reacquainting himself with every line. “Furious, alive… still you.” His grip loosens a fraction, not letting go, just shifting into something that feels less like restraint and more like contact. “There she is.”
The space between us tightens.
Anger and hunger twist together until I can’t tell which one is louder.
Rogue doesn’t move away when I step closer. He plants himself like a wall of muscle and willpower, wolf riding just beneath his skin. His eyes glow faintly, not fully shifted, but close enough that the air between us tastes charged. Every breath he takes sounds deliberate, like he’s holding back something bigger than either of us.
“You think I needed saving?” I snap, voice rough from the edge of the hunt still clawing through me.
“I think you were about to cross a line you can’t uncross,” he answers quietly, and the calm in his voice makes something in me snap harder than if he’d shouted.
I shove at his bare chest.
He doesn’t budge.
The lycan in him answers the vampire in me without words, stance widening, chin tipping down just enough to make it clear he’s not backing off. It isn’t dominance. It’s grounding.
The forest seems to lean closer as I glance down, finally realizing that he is completely naked. My eyes widen, dropping before I can stop them, taking him in in one involuntary sweep before I wrench my gaze back to his face. “You’re naked!”
A small smirk touches his lips. “Observant.”
