Page 13 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

Through all of it, Orion waits.

He doesn’t sit down. Doesn’t pull out his phone. Doesn’t show any sign of impatience or boredom or anything, really, except that steady, attentive calm that’s starting to feel less like a personality trait and more like a superpower.

Normal people fidget. Normal people check the time. Normal people don’t stand perfectly still for forty-five minutes like really expensive statues.

“You’re very patient,” I say, as Debra hands me yet another form to sign.

“I have practice.”

“Practice at what? Standing in hospital rooms? Waiting for strangers to finish paperwork?”

“Waiting,” he says simply. “In general.”

That’s cryptic. That’s extremely cryptic. Add it to the folder.

Finally, finally, I’m allowed to leave. Debra wheels me to the entrance in a wheelchair that I insist I don’t need but apparently hospital policy requires, and Orion walks beside us the whole way, matching his pace to the wheelchair’s trundle.

His car is parked in the pickup zone. A black SUV, sleek and expensive-looking, the kind of car that costs more than my entire building and probably has heated seats and a sunroof and some kind of built-in coffee maker.

Of course he drives a car like that. Of course he does.

He opens the passenger door for me, and I pause, one foot on the running board.

“I can do this myself.”

“I know you can.”

“I’m not an invalid.”

“I know you’re not.”

“I just don’t want you to think…”

“Fable.” His voice is gentle but firm, cutting through my rambling. “Get in the car.”

I get in the car.

The seat is leather, soft, expensive leather that smells new even though the car clearly isn’t, and there’s a heated seat button that I’m definitely going to press the moment he’s not looking. The interior is immaculate, not a crumb or a receipt or a forgotten coffee cup in sight.

His car is as neat as his sweater. As controlled as his voice. As unnervingly perfect as his stupid face.

Orion slides into the driver’s seat, and the engine starts with a quiet purr that’s nothing like the concerning noises my Subaru used to make. Used to, because my Subaru is sitting in an impound lot somewhere, crumpled and waiting for an insurance adjuster to decide whether it lives or dies.

Don’t think about that. Don’t think about the car. Don’t think about the crash. Just focus on getting home.

He pulls out of the hospital parking lot with the careful precision of someone who has never once exceeded the speed limit, and I immediately wrap my hand around the door handle and hold on tight.

The familiar panic is there, the tightness in my chest, the shortness of breath, the certainty that every other car on the road is about to swerve into my lane, but it’s muffled somehow. Distant. Like it’s happening to someone else, someone I’m watching from very far away.

The drugs. It’s just the drugs they gave you. The painkillers are taking the edge off.

Except I don’t think they gave me anything that strong. I think I just took regular Tylenol. I think the muffled feeling is something else, a fog I can’t quite identify.

Orion notices me gripping the door. I know he notices because his hands adjust on the wheel, movements becoming even slower, even more deliberate. The speedometer creeps down from thirty-five to thirty to twenty-eight.

His hands stay easy at ten and two, and some traitorous corner of my brain, the corner that’s definitely concussed, notes that they’re beautiful hands. Broad palms. Long, capable fingers. The kind of hands that could span the full width of a hardcover spine.

You are in shock and cataloging your kidnapper’s hands. New low, Fable. New low.