She settles cross-legged opposite him, her jacket pulled tight around her frame, eyes narrowing as if she’s waiting for instruction.
None comes.
Kade simply sits there, spine straight, hands resting loosely against his knees, his presence settling into the quiet like a boundary drawn in the dirt.
Charlie tries to resist it at first. I see the tension rolling through her shoulders even from the porch, the restless twitch in a body that wants to move, to pace, to fight against the stillness pressing in from all sides. Her breathing sharpens, then steadies, then falters again as the silence stretches.
Every part of me hates watching it.
Nine days of seeing her unravel have rewired something in my chest. Every time she tenses, every time her breath stutters, some instinct in me braces for the moment she breaks again.
Kade never breaks the silence.
He holds that space the way a mountain holds the wind, patient and immovable, until the storm burns itself out.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the tension drains from Charlie’s shoulders, and I feel my own breath loosen with it. By the time they return to the cabin hours later, frost clings to the collar of Charlie’s jacket, and her hair smells faintly of pine and cold earth. The frantic edge that’s been living behind her eyes since this began has dulled just enough to notice.
Kade pours himself coffee as if the morning has been no different than any other.
I know better.
The woods slowly wake around us after that. Sunlight filters through the branches, scattering pale gold across the clearing while the last brittle fragments of ice slide from the roof and shatter against the ground below. Charlie lingers near the edge of the trees for most of the morning, moving restlessly but without the sharp, brittle tension that had been driving her before.
I’m halfway through splitting a stack of logs beside the cabin when Brynn drifts past me. She doesn’t say anything as she goes, but I know the look in her eyes. Brynn has always been able to read a battlefield faster than the rest of us.
A few minutes later, Charlie’s voice carries through the trees.
“I can’t,” she says, the words tight with frustration.
The axe rises over my shoulder.
“I’m losing it.”
The blade bites clean through the log.
“I’m barely holding it together.”
Another crack of splitting wood echoes through the clearing.
“I’m a monster.”
My grip tightens on the axe handle.
I’ve heard those words from her too many times in the last week. Every time she says them, it feels like watching someone carve pieces out of themselves with their bare hands.
Brynn lets the last word hang in the air long enough to settle.
Then she answers, calm and unhurried, “You’re a vampire.”
The forest goes quiet.
Charlie says nothing.
“Own it,” Brynn continues, her voice steady as the ground beneath our feet. “But you control the beast. It doesnotcontrol you.”
I pause with the axe resting against my shoulder, listening.
Brynn has always had a way of saying things that cut straight to the bone without drawing blood.
