Page 82 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

“Bark is not food, my king. With respect.”

I consider firing him. I have considered firing him weekly since 1863. Instead I sit, because he is standing over the chair with the patience of a man prepared to wait out a glacier, and I eat what he brought without tasting it.

“You did the right thing,” he says. “Letting her go.”

“I know.”

“And it’s eating you alive.”

“I know that too.”

Theo is quiet for a moment. Then: “In 1863, you sat with me for three days while I decided whether I wanted to keep living. You didn’t argue with me. You didn’t leave. You just stayed where I could see you.” He picks up the empty dish. “I’m returning the favor. Move over if you want, don’t if you don’t.”

He stays for four hours. We don’t speak. It helps more than I will ever admit to him.

Before he leaves, he pauses at the door. “For what it’s worth. She drove up a mountain for you once already. People who mean never don’t say give me time.”

That evening I find the crack in the guest room ceiling has finally surrendered, water working through the plaster in a thin, steady line. I have known about that crack for six months. I stand under it for a long moment, watching it drip, and I cannot summon one molecule of care. The house is leaking. The house has been empty for three hundred years and it has never once felt empty until this week. I set out pots to catch the water, aligned in a precise grid because ritual is what remains when purpose is out of reach, and I check the locks in threes, and the silence where her voice should be is the loudest thing on this mountain.

The storm rolls in at dusk, and with it, impossibly, an engine.

I know that engine. Three cylinders firing fractionally out of sync, a fan belt six weeks from complaint. I have memorized that engine the way I’ve memorized everything about her, involuntarily and completely, and it is climbing my mountain in the dark, through the wind and the first hard curtain of snow, racing the storm to my door.

I am at the door before she’s out of the car.

She drove.

The words keep echoing through my head as I step aside to let her in, as she sets down the cat carrier and Mario emerges with a yowl of feline indignation, as she stands in my entryway looking windswept and nervous and impossibly beautiful.

She drove. Here. At night. On the mountain road she’s been terrified of since before I knew her.

I want to ask what changed. I want to pull her into my arms and hold her until the last two days stop feeling like a wound. I want to tell her that I’ve spent forty-eight hours doing nothing but respecting her request for space and it was the hardest thing I’ve done in three centuries.

Instead, I say: “The storm’s about to close the roads.”

“I know.” Her voice is steady. “I saw the forecast before I left. I drove up through the front edge of it.”

“The roads will be impassable by midnight.”

“I know that too.”

“You came anyway.”

“I came anyway.”

We stare at each other. The silence stretches, thick with everything unsaid.

Mario breaks it by stalking across my floor, jumping onto my couch, and settling into the center cushion with an expression that clearly communicates ownership.

“He missed you,” Fable says.

“He hates me.”

“He missed hating you. There’s a nuance.”

Something in my chest loosens at the familiar rhythm, the banter, the back-and-forth, the way she never lets me take myself too seriously. I’ve missed this. I’ve missed her.

“There’s a guest room,” I offer. “If you need somewhere to…”