Carlisle’s request had me muttering curses under my breath the entire drive to the hospital. Of all places. The scent alone was enough to fray what little control I managed to keep stitched together on a normal day. Hundreds of humans—bleeding, broken, breathing—packed into sterile white halls like livestock waiting for slaughter. Their heartbeats overlapped into a maddening rhythm, a percussion line beneath the fluorescent lights. My control was threadbare on good days.

This was not a good day.

But I wasn’t about to refuse Carlisle Cullen. He’d offered me something no one else ever had—restraint without chains, redemption without execution. Most would have put me down like a rabid dog and called it mercy. Carlisle called it faith. I owed him more than obedience; I owed him the effort.

I don’t know what made me stop at the nursery window.

Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was some faint, half-rotted echo of the human man I used to be—before battlefields and blood turned me into something sharpened and hollow. It had been decades since I’d allowed myself to think about my sister’s children, about the family I never saw grow up. Time blurs when you’re immortal. Regret doesn’t.

The nursery should have been the worst place for me—warmth, fragile bodies, the steady flutter of newborn hearts. Yet the thirst didn’t surge.

Something else did.

It struck low and deep, not hunger but recognition. A pull. I’d felt something like it once before, standing beside Maria as she built her armies from trembling fledglings. That magnetic snap of a bond forming. But this—this wasn’t possessive or strategic.

It was protective.

Fierce.

Clean.

My body went still, stone in the middle of a storm, while my mind did what it had always done—calculate. Assess threats. Map exits. Count variables. The sensation wasn’t like what Edward Cullen had described when he spoke of Bella Swan, nor was it anything like the intricate, electric connection I shared with Alice Cullen. That bond was bright and intimate, woven tight with emotion and inevitability.

This was different.

Simpler.

A charge.

The kind a commander feels when responsibility settles squarely on his shoulders—when lives fall under his protection and failure is not an option. Every good soldier knows that weight. It doesn’t ask whether you want it. It simply is.

Carlisle found me there, unmoving, eyes fixed on the small bundle behind the glass. I’m sure he saw the shift before I said a word. He always did.

The soldier in me was already adapting.

This wasn’t about romance. Not destiny in the poetic sense. This tiny human didn’t need a mate. They needed a guardian. Someone who understood violence well enough to prevent it. Someone who had waged war long enough to recognize its first whispers. Someone who could teach strength without cruelty.

For the first time since I’d torn myself from Maria’s blood-soaked ranks, the objectives were clear.

Protect.

Guide.

Prepare.

No moral ambiguity. No manipulation. No conquest.

Just purpose.

And as strange as it was to admit, standing there in a hospital that should have been my undoing, I realized something steadying: maybe I hadn’t been missing love or absolution all these years.

Maybe I’d been missing a mission worth fighting for.