Page 98 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

“Esme told me there was a woman. Long before my time.” I keep my voice gentle, under the reach of the crowd. “And everyone here can smell the rest of it on you. The way you look at me, it isn’t just tradition. It’s grief. You see something in me that reminds you of her, and it’s easier to hate me than to feel that.”

His jaw tightens. The claws at his sides tremble, once. For a moment I think he’s going to deny it, snarl, reassert the challenge.

Instead, his expression cracks.

“I don’t know what happened,” I continue. “I don’t need to know. But I’m not her. And whatever you lost, you won’t get it back by keeping me out. Whatever she was to you… she wouldn’t want you to spend eternity being bitter about what could have been.”

His eyes are wet.

Three hundred years old, this sharp-edged man who has been making Orion’s life difficult since before America was a country, standing a claw’s length from my throat with tears freezing on his lashes.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him. “I’m going to be here, being human and chaotic and all the things you think disqualify me. And maybe, eventually, you’ll see those things don’t make me unfit. They just make me different.”

For a long, suspended moment, nothing happens.

Then the claws recede. The gold drains from his eyes. And Aaron, elder of the Hartsgrove pack, keeper of more procedure than any living soul, bows his head.

“She stood,” he says, not to me, to the clearing, and his voice cracks on it. “The claim is tested. She stood.”

Then, quietly, only for me, the words pulled from somewhere deep, from something he’s been carrying for a very long time:

“My queen.”

The clearing erupts.

The next hour is a blur of faces and congratulations and pack members pressing drinks into my hands. Theo appears at my elbow, his expression carefully neutral except for the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth.

“My queen,” he says, bowing his head.

“Please stop.”

“I’m afraid I cannot.”

“You can. You’re choosing not to.”

“An important distinction.” The smile spreads. “My queen.”

“I’m going to make that phrase illegal.”

“Good luck enforcing it. My queen.”

“I hate you.”

“With respect, my queen, you do not.”

Mira tackles me in a hug that nearly knocks me off my feet, babbling about how that was the most romantic thing she’s ever witnessed and she’s definitely putting it in her book and did I see Aaron’s face and…

“Breathe,” I tell her. “Oxygen is important.”

“I can’t breathe, I’m too excited! You just told off a three-hundred-year-old lycan elder and he cried!”

“I didn’t tell him off. I just… talked to him.”

“You made him feel feelings! In public! That’s basically supernatural warfare!”

Winnie appears at my side, looking like she wants the ground to swallow her whole.

“I am so sorry,” she says, for what might be the fifth time. “I never would have said anything if I’d known you didn’t know. I just assumed, everyone assumed, I had too much punch and I wasn’t thinking…”