Page 86 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

Her feet are pressed against my shins. They’re freezing, she runs cold and I run hot, which she’s already pointed out is “convenient” in a way that made me laugh for the first time in days. Her breathing has evened out, but I can tell she’s not asleep. Just… thinking.

I check the door locks by habit. Front door. Back door. Study window. Three times each. And I hear her counting along under her breath, a quiet accompaniment to my ritual that makes something in my chest crack open.

“You count too,” she says.

“What?”

“The locks. You always do them in threes. I noticed.”

“You told me once it was beautiful,” I say. “How my brain works. That night in your apartment.”

“I meant it.” Her voice is soft in the dark. “I still do. Even more now that I know what all the counting keeps at bay.”

I’ve spent three hundred years with people who tolerated my rituals at best. She’s the only one who ever looked at the counting and the locks and the grids and called them beautiful, and hearing her say it a second time, here, after everything, undoes something in me I didn’t know was still knotted.

“Were you following me that day?” Her voice is quiet in the darkness. “Or were you just… there?”

19

— • —

Fable

The question hangs in the dark between us, and I feel him go still beside me.

“Pack patrol route,” he says finally. “I run them twice a week… checking the territory, making sure nothing’s crossed boundaries that shouldn’t be there. That day, my route took me along the mountain highway.”

“So it was coincidence.”

“I used to think so.” His voice is quiet. Honest in a way that feels like trust. “I told myself fate had nothing to do with it… that I was just in the right place at the right time, doing my duty, and you happened to be there.”

“And now?”

“Now I’ve stopped pretending I know the difference.” He turns to face me, and even in the darkness, I can feel the intensity of his gaze. “Between fate and choice. Between destiny and accident. What I know is that I saw your car spinning off the road, and I didn’t think about patrol routes or pack duty. I just ran. Faster than I’ve ever run in three hundred years. Because something in me knew, knew before I even saw your face, that I had to get to you.”

I let the words settle over me: a blanket, snow falling on bare ground, something beginning instead of ending.

“Do you believe in fate?” I ask.

“I believe in you.”

It’s not an answer. It’s something better.

I wake to snow-light.

The storm has stopped sometime during the night, leaving the world outside the windows wrapped in white. Sunlight filters through the glass, diffused and soft, turning everything pale and luminous. The trees beyond the window are heavy with snow, branches bowing under the weight. The mountains in the distance have vanished entirely behind curtains of white, and the silence is so complete I can hear my own heartbeat.

And the bed beside me is empty.

For one terrible moment, my heart seizes, old fears surfacing, old wounds reopening, but then I hear movement from the kitchen, catch the scent of something cooking, and remember where I am. Who I’m with.

I slide out of bed, his bed, with sheets that smell like him, like pine and something wilder, and pad toward the kitchen on bare feet. The floor is cold, and I’m wearing nothing but one of his shirts, stolen in the dark last night when I got up to use the bathroom. It falls almost to my knees. The sleeves hang past my fingertips.

I feel ridiculous.

And underneath the ridiculous, there’s something else. A feeling I don’t have a name for yet.

Orion is making crêpes.