Page 32 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

Worth it.

The gun swung toward her. Barrel dark and terrible, finger on the trigger, and in that fraction of a second I didn’t think, didn’t calculate, didn’t do anything except move. Centuries of control, of measured responses, of never acting without consideration, all of it gone in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

She’s safe. The rest is details.

I reach through the bond I share with my beta, not the mating bond, never that, not yet, and think: Intruder. Armed. Headed northwest through the territory.

Theo’s response comes immediately, a pulse of acknowledgment that requires no words: On it. Pack’s already tracking. He won’t get far.

Don’t hurt him. Just… adjust his memory. Standard protocol.

Understood. A pause. Then: You okay?

I’m fine.

You took a bullet.

I’ve taken worse.

In front of her.

I don’t answer that. Don’t have an answer for it. Because yes, I shifted in front of her, and yes, she saw everything, and now she’s standing in my living room with my cat pressed to her chest, a furry orange shield, and her eyes are too wide, and her mouth is open but nothing’s coming out, and I have approximately thirty seconds to explain why I just transformed into something from her nightmares.

Except I don’t think I’m in her nightmares. I don’t know what I am to her. That’s the problem.

Mate.

The word pulses through me, a second heartbeat, the same way it has since the moment I pulled her from that wreckage. Since before she opened her eyes. Since she looked at me with blood on her face and called me pretty like it was the most obvious observation in the world, like of course I was pretty, why wouldn’t I be, she was dying and she wanted to say something nice.

If she rejects the bond, I will still guard her door until I die. That’s not devotion. That’s a symptom. That’s the obsession of waiting three hundred years for something you weren’t sure was real, and then finding her, and then nearly losing her to a man with a gun before you’ve even had the chance to…

“I can explain,” I say, because the silence is stretching too long and she still hasn’t moved. “What you just saw. What I am. I can explain all of it.”

She throws a pillow at my head.

It’s a good throw, solid arc, surprising velocity for someone who claims to have no upper body strength. I catch it on instinct, which is probably not the reassuring display of humanity I was going for, and she makes a sound that’s somewhere between a laugh and a scream.

“WHAT THE FUCK.” Her voice cracks, climbing octaves I didn’t know human vocal cords could reach. “What the, you just, you turned into a…”

“A lycan,” I say, keeping my voice calm. Steady. The same tone I use with spooked animals and newly turned members of the pack who don’t yet know how to control their shifts. “A shifter. It’s different from a werewolf.”

“THOSE EXIST?!”

“Yes. And I’m the king of my…” I catch myself before the word pack can slip out. She’s not ready for that, not ready for any of this. But I can at least control the dosage, the flow of impossible information. “Of my people. The ones who live on the mountain.”

“Your PEOPLE.” She’s clutching Mario so hard he squeaks. “You have PEOPLE. You’re the KING of PEOPLE who turn into WOLVES.”

“Lycans.”

“I don’t CARE what you call them!” Her voice is climbing again, approaching a register that only dogs, and apparently lycans, can hear. “You just, you transformed, there was FUR and TEETH and…” Her gaze drops. Snaps back up. Her entire face goes crimson. “You’re NAKED.”

I look down. She’s not wrong.

“The shift doesn’t preserve clothing,” I explain. “It’s an inconvenient biological limitation. Something to do with the molecular structure of organic versus inorganic matter. The science is actually quite fascinating if you…”

“Put on PANTS.”

“I don’t have any pants in this room.”