I smiled at Ludmilla. “Don’t worry about it. It’s just a message.”
Clutching my phone over her tattooed chest, she beamed up at me. “Thanks again! Let me know when he answers, will you, please, please, please?”
Maybe I should’ve introduced Ludmilla to Lachlan. They both liked Sabrina Carpenter.
“Did he answer?” Ludmilla asked me for the—I counted with my fingers—sixth time. I peered at the phone.
Zero messages.
Again.
“Not yet.”
She huffed out a weary exhalation, pulling at her pink locks.
Putting on my green parka, I hopped off my stool and decided to head back home to take Zeus out before my private after-party, featuring pillows and fluffiness. And my ice mask.
“So, who is this guy?” The question was genuine. I always found it fascinating how people developed the capacity to obsess over someone. Obsession was just dopamine sprinting through the nucleus accumbens while the prefrontal cortex tripped trying to keep up. It was the brain mistaking a person for a reward, rewiring itself like an addict chasing the next hit—exceptthe drug was a voice, a smell, a text message at 2:00 a.m. I’d seen it on fMRIs. The same circuits lit up for cocaine.
She waved her hand, spilling her lemon beer.
“Never mind. Bye!” As she walked away, I heard her growl under her breath, “Thanks for nothing.”
Not very nice.
When I got back to campus, I was so tired that my feet dragged, refusing to fight gravity. The night was quiet, with few people around. Bats swayed through the wind as forest animals slept amidst the trees scattered across the campus. Being a werewolf university, endless expanses of forest and greenery were as much a necessity for us as a commercial hub would be for a human community.
Once I reached our building, I listened to the steady breathing, snoring, and the muffled mumbling from a few werewolves asleep in their rooms. My brother wasn’t home, so I sent him a quick goodnight text.
I stalled in my steps. There was one soul that lay wide awake. A heartbeat, one as frantic as the beating of a hummingbird’s wings trying to flee an impossible-to-escape danger.
Heartbreak.
Makena.
Hurrying in, I followed her scent.
I shivered at the look of her. Makena—my strong, independent friend, always wearing a confident smile, always with whoever she wanted at her feet—was now curled up on her bed in the fetal position, clutching her chest.
Her blanket, sprinkled with depictions of miniature strawberries, covered her shaking form like a hug she needed but had yet to receive.
“Mak.” I sat on the edge of the bed. Based on her swollen face, she must have been crying for a while. I could almost trace the dry rivers of tears tracking down her cheeks.
“It hurts so much, Ivy,” she sobbed. “So much that I wish I’d never met him. I wish he was nothing to me.”
Then I noticed it. A large, red, pulsing bruise on her chest, like a blooming rose of pain and betrayal. She had internal bleeding, her heart crying blood. A clear sign of a werewolf’s fated mate cheating.
“Let me get my stethoscope and?—”
“No. No need.” She let out a shaky exhalation. “Don’t worry, it’ll pass soon. It always does.”
I drew in a gasp as waves of concern swept through me. “How many times has he?—”
“Less than I have.”
I thought about Killian coming out of Makena’s bedroom, then later, how Gaius had been massaging his chest. Just because you found your soulmate, it didn’t mean things would be easy.
“Lie down with me?” She patted the spot next to her.
