His thumb shifts slightly against my skin, not restraining, just there. “I know,” he says. “That’s why I’m here.”
Something in my chest pulls tight. “What if I don’t stop?” I ask the question slipping out before I can stop it.
“You will.” There’s no hesitation, no doubt. “And if you don’t…” he adds, just as calm, “… then I will stop you. Think of this as your lesson in control.”
There’s no threat in his words.
Just fact.
Justcertainty.
The kind I’ve been trying to build for four days, and I still don’t trust myself.
My breath stutters.
Every instinct in me surges forward again, but this time it’s different, threaded with something steadier, something anchored.
Control.
I need to learn control.
I lean in again, slower this time, deliberate, choosing it instead of being dragged into it.
Then I bite.
The taste of him washes through me.
Not just warmth.
Not just blood.
Recognition.
Oh God, he tastes like home.
Lycan heat pours into my mouth, rich and alive, threaded with something ancient that hums against the hollow space left by my turning. It doesn’t feel like stealing. It feels like something opening, like a door I didn’t know existed, swinging wide inside my ribs.
Light explodes behind my eyes.
For a second, the world fractures into sensation. The forest sharpens. His heartbeat echoes through me, not just in my ears but in my bones, syncing with something deeper than hunger. Power unfurls down my spine in molten waves, and euphoria floods me so suddenly my vision sparks white at the edges.
I taste him again, and this time it feels like falling into warmth instead of chasing prey.
Mine. The word arrives from somewhere under language, where thoughts existed before they had vocabularies, and it does not come with warning or with argument. It does not feel like something I decided. It feels like something my body has known for longer than I have existed, and the terror of that—of my mouth on his skin, my body claiming him without my permission, my newborn instincts handing me a verdict I did not ask to issue—is larger than the blood itself.
Rogue’s breath shudders above me, one hand sliding into my hair, steady and unafraid. He doesn’t push me away. He doesn’tpull me closer. He simply stays, grounding me while something new sparks to life between us, bright and dangerous as a struck match.
The rush grows sharper with every swallow. The hunger shifts, turning from chaos into something focused and intoxicating. I feel stronger, clearer, more myself than I have since the turning, as though his blood doesn’t only feed me, it understands me.
And that’s when the danger hits.
Because it would be so easy to keep going.
So easy to disappear into the heat blooming inside me, to chase the connection pulling me deeper, to take until the world goes quiet.
A tremor runs through me.
No!
