Page 64 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

Her body goes still. Not frozen, just… paused. Like a recording that’s been stopped mid-frame.

“Your hands shake near car keys,” I continue, keeping my voice gentle. “You grip the door handle like you’re expecting impact. You don’t breathe normally until you’re back on solid ground.”

“That’s…” She swallows. “That’s just leftover stress. From the crash.”

“Is it?”

Silence.

I set down the knife. Turn to face her fully, giving her my complete attention. She’s not looking at me anymore, her eyes are fixed on some point over my shoulder, and her expression has shuttered. Closed off. Protected.

“Who hurt you, Fable? What was the drive that day for?”

The question hangs between us. Heavy. Important.

I don’t know. That’s the thing that keeps me awake. I don’t know what made her afraid of cars before the crash. I only know that the fear predates the accident, that it lives deep in her body, that something happened long before I found her bleeding in that wreckage. And I can’t fix what I don’t understand.

“I don’t…” Her voice cracks slightly. “I can’t…”

“You don’t have to tell me.” I move closer, slowly, giving her time to retreat if she needs to. “Not yet. And not ever, if you don’t want to. I just want you to know that I see it. That I’m here, whenever you’re ready. That there’s no pressure and no timeline and no expectation.”

She looks at me then, and there’s a look in her eyes I can’t quite name, gratitude, maybe, or relief, or just the simple recognition of being seen without being pushed.

“Pass the salt?” she says.

It’s not an answer. It’s a deflection, elegant, practiced, probably automatic at this point. A door closing gently but firmly.

I pass the salt.

I don’t push.

We eat dinner in comfortable silence, the weight of unasked questions hovering between us, and I tell myself that patience is a virtue. She’ll tell me when she’s ready. I have time. I have centuries of time.

Theo’s voice reaches me through the pack link, clipped and reluctant.

Aaron set the date. He didn’t ask you first.

A cold weight settles in my chest.

The gathering is coming. The pack will demand answers. And Aaron will use every tool at his disposal to challenge my choice, to make Fable feel unwelcome, to turn my people against the woman who doesn’t yet know what she is to me.

Time, it seems, is running shorter than I thought.

14

— • —

Fable

Four days later, the whole town smells like woodsmoke and fried sugar, because Hartsgrove does autumn the way Orion does grocery shopping: aggressively, thoroughly, and with a commitment level that borders on unhinged.

Main Street has been closed to traffic and colonized by an army of striped tents. There are hay bales on every corner. There are pumpkins on the hay bales. There are tiny pumpkins on the regular pumpkins, which feels excessive, and somewhere a bluegrass band is playing with the enthusiasm of people who have been waiting all year for this exact Saturday. The air smells of woodsmoke and fried dough and cider, and strings of lights zigzag overhead between the lampposts, waiting for dusk.

I closed the store at four.

On a Saturday.

I want that on the record, because Fable Larkin does not close early. Fable Larkin has a laminated schedule. But a three-hundred-year-old lycan king showed up at my register at three forty-five, held me in that steady gray gaze, and said, “There’s a festival. You have a coat. I’ve already flipped your sign,” and apparently that’s all it takes to dismantle six years of routine. I’m choosing not to examine what that says about me.