“Jesus Christ,” I breathe.
“Yeah,” he says, and there is nothing left of the controlled, calculating VP in his voice at all. Just the man underneath, completely and entirely undone. “Fuck, yeah.”
He holds my weight without any sign of effort, lycan strength inexhaustible even now, and I stop managing every point of contact, holding onto him, and letting myself be held. The knot keeps its slow, deep pulse between us, sending waves rolling through me one after another that have no inclination to stop, and I have given up any pretense of dignity because there is no one for miles, and I am done.
His breathing at my temple is harsh and broken and gratifyingly ruined.
“Rogue.”
“I know.” His arms tighten further. “I know.”
“This is a lot.”
“Yeah,” he says, voice scraped raw, and presses his mouth to my temple. “It really is.”
The waves keep coming. The knot keeps its rhythm. Every small involuntary shift of either of our bodies sets off another cascade, deep, spreading and continuous, and somewhere in the middle of it all, my body stops being a source of terror, hunger, and loss of control and becomes something else entirely. Something that knows exactly what it’s doing and is doing it magnificently.
“Oh—” The word dissolves before it forms, and his name replaces it. Just his name, over and over, because it’s all I have left.
“Right here,” he says. His voice is nothing. Wreckage and warmth and a quiet certainty he isn’t going anywhere. “Look at me. Stay with me.”
The forest breathes around us, dark, indifferent, and enormous. Above us, the canopy frames a narrow strip of sky,and my vampire eyes read every star in it at a resolution no human eye could manage, each one sharp, distinct, and absurdly, impossibly beautiful. His heartbeat is in my ears, in my bones, and through the bond between us, steady and fierce, synced with something deeper than proximity.
He doesn’t speak for a long time.
Neither do I.
The cold settles back in slowly at the outermost edges, but at the center, where we’re pressed together, it is warm. Completely, entirely warm.
“You all right?” he murmurs eventually, lips against my hair.
I take genuine stock.
My fangs are retracted.
The hunger, the screaming, the four-day-old hunger that has been clawing at the inside of my skull since the turning, is quiet. Not suppressed or white-knuckled into submission but settled, like something that has been given exactly what it needed and knows it.
My body hums with a warmth that has a name neither of us is going to say out loud tonight.
“Surprisingly, yes,” I tell him. “Which is not a sentence I expected to say at any point this week.”
The knot holds us together in the dark for long, unhurried minutes more, and somewhere in those minutes, my heartbeat, the ghost of a human reflex, muscle memory rather than biological necessity, settles into a rhythm that is no longer panicked.
Slow.
Steady.
Something that feels, against all odds, like peace.
I press my forehead to his shoulder, breathing, warmth still pulsing through me. His hand moves through my hair in anunhurried way like he’s in no particular rush to be anywhere else in the world.
“By the way,” I say, voice still uneven. “You owe me a full explanation of the biological quirks. All of them. In advance. With a table of contents.”
“You handled it fine.”
“I handled it fine because I am adaptive and resilient. That’s not the point.”
“Charlie…”
