CHARLIE
He pulls me back in, the kiss turning fierce and consuming, the wolf finally stepping closer to the surface. Not out of control, but just enough that the air crackles with it, power pressing against power as he meets me with equal force.
His forehead presses to mine for a split second, breath ragged, eyes searching my face like he’s checking whether I’m still here or already slipping into hunger.
“You don’t want blood,” he says quietly. “You want control.”
The words land between us like a blade.
My nails dig into his shoulders, frustration and need crashing together as his mouth finds mine again, slower now but no less fierce. It feels like two storms colliding rather than merging, sparks flashing every time our lips meet, every time the wolf steadies the vampire instead of running from her.
For a heartbeat, everything narrows to breath and heat and the low, rumbling sound of him refusing to let me fall apart.
Predator meets predator.
And neither one backs down.
His hands shred the fabric between us with the thoughtless efficiency of claws that have half-forgotten they were ever meant to be fingernails. The cold night air hits my skin and does nothing, because the heat between us is its own climate, self-generating and increasing, and when his large, callused hands find the bare skin of my waist, the contact registers somewhere far beneath coherent thought. My fingers trace the ridge of his left shoulder, a scar there, old and deep, the kind that means a story, and he goes very still when my fingers find it. I don’t ask, not yet. But I file it—this man has marks I don’t understand, andone day, if this lasts, I’m going to want to hear about every one of them.
He backs me against the broad trunk of a pine, the bark biting into my shoulders through the ruin of my shirt, and the pressure of his body against mine is not careful, is not managed, is not anything resembling the consideration human bodies typically require from each other.
This is two predators who have recognized each other and have run out of reasons to keep pretending otherwise. My legs wrap around his hips with a grip that would be impossible at human strength, and the snarl that tears out of him is pure wolf, barely a man-sound at all, and it does spectacular things to my nervous system.
We move together in the dark, driven by a desperation that has four days of accumulated tension behind it. None of it is soft, none of it is careful. It is claws and friction, and the feral edge of two predators who have finally stopped pretending distance is enough.
My fangs find the curve of his shoulder.
For one suspended heartbeat, I hover there, breath unsteady. Four days of restraint tighten through my chest, every moment I have stood close enough to feel his pulse and chosen not to take it, pressing in all at once. The scent of him floods my senses now, stronger, sharper, impossible to ignore.
I feel the exact point where instinct tips toward action.
And I stop.
My jaw tightens, and I pull back a fraction, forcing distance between us, the effort of it immediate and real, like dragging myself back from the edge of something I know I won’t come back from clean.
“Shit—” I manage, breath catching. “I nearly bit you. If I started—”
His hand comes up, steady, grounding, fingers settling at the back of my neck.
“Charlotte,” Rogue says quietly.
Not a command.
Not pressure.
Certainty.
“I trust you.”
The words land somewhere deeper than they should, and my gaze flicks to his, searching for hesitation, for doubt, for anything that gives me an excuse to step away.
There isn’t any.
“You can take a little,” he adds, just as steady. “You stop when I say stop.”
I hesitate, furrowing my brows at him like he’s gone completely mad.
“That… that’s not how this works,” I say, quieter now, more honest than I meant to be. “It doesn’t just… stay small.”
