Page 105 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

“I’m telling you the road exists. It isn’t simple, and it isn’t soon, and it asks more of both of us than a bite. And before your FAQ brain gets there: no, it isn’t the turning ritual. No one has to survive becoming a lycan. It binds what we each already are.” The old fear flickers through the bond, there and mastered. “But I couldn’t lie here holding you and let you believe I intend to simply watch you go someday and call it fate. You deserved to know there’s a door.”

I look at him. Three hundred years old, terrified under all that stillness of a someday that’s decades away, and telling me anyway, at one in the morning, because he promised.

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay?”

“We’ll cross that bridge later. Together.”

“Just like that?”

“Orion. Tonight I gave a speech to a clearing full of lycans, got charged by a man older than the United States, was chased barefoot through a moonlit forest, and received a magical hickey with a howling audience. My capacity for life-altering revelations is at maximum. The bridge will still be there tomorrow. And the day after. That’s apparently the entire point of the bridge.”

His laugh moves through both of us, body and bond at once.

“Bridge later,” he agrees. “Together.”

I press my face into his neck and breathe him in. Feel his heartbeat through the bond, echoed in my own chest. The moon is bright outside the windows. The snow still glitters. And somewhere in the house, Mario is probably plotting elaborate revenge for being excluded.

I don’t care about any of it.

Mine, I think, and push the feeling toward him.

Yours, he answers.

22

— • —

Fable

Five months later, with spring finally breaking over the mountain, Fable Tales has a new reading nook.

It’s in the back corner of the store, where the chaos shelf used to be before Orion alphabetized it into submission. The pack volunteers who built it worked for three weekends straight, refusing all payment despite my increasingly creative attempts to compensate them.

“You’re our queen,” Theo said firmly, sawdust in his hair and a level in his hand. “Queens don’t pay for labor.”

“I’m not a queen. I’m a bookseller.”

“You’re both. Accept it.”

“What if I made you cookies?”

“Cookies are acceptable tribute.”

So I made approximately seven hundred cookies, chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, and the peanut butter ones Mira specifically requested, and the pack built me a reading nook that looks like it belongs in a fairy tale.

Built-in bookshelves line two walls, stocked with my personal favorites. Soft fairy lights drape along the ceiling like captured stars. And a window seat stretches beneath the glass, covered in cushions I picked specifically because they match the exact shade of orange Mario’s fur gets in the afternoon sunlight.

He has, predictably, claimed it as his throne.

He presides over the store from his cushioned perch, a furry dictator, accepting tribute in the form of chin scratches from approved customers and hissing at everyone else. The regulars have learned to approach with appropriate deference. The newcomers learn quickly.

Above the register, Ishmael circles his bowl, five months old and thriving out of pure spite, safely beyond the reach of the orange dictator, who has classified him as a long-term project. Mr. Darcy the wolf occupies the one corner of the window seat that Mario permits him, worried button eyes surveying the store.

“He bit Mrs. Patterson again,” I report, shelving a stack of new releases while Orion reorganizes the inventory spreadsheet he insists on “helping” me maintain.

“Mrs. Patterson keeps trying to touch his belly.”