“With a pack of four Alphas whose scent compatibility with your biology you’ve already demonstrated is—and I’m quoting your own description from twenty minutes ago—” she made air quotes, “‘literally dizzying.’”
“Correct.”
“This is fine.” Her tone suggested it was the opposite of fine. “This is completely fine. What could possibly go wrong.”
“The only saving grace,” I said, and I offered this detail the way you offered a lifeboat to someone watching a ship sink, “is that I only cycle three times a year.”
Candy’s head snapped up. The motion was so abrupt it looked less like a voluntary movement and more like a marionette whose operator had yanked a string.
“How in the—” She stopped. Recalibrated. Started again. “How in thefucking lucky shitdid you manage that?”
I shrugged. The gesture was serene. Angelic, even. The physical embodiment of a woman at peace with the biological hand she’d been dealt.
“I’m God’s favorite.”
“BULLSHIT!” The word detonated from Candy’s mouth with the percussive force of a starting gun. She jabbed afinger at me. “You don’t evenpray. I have never, in the entire history of our friendship, witnessed you engage in any form of spiritual practice beyond swearing and occasionally looking at the ceiling when you’re frustrated.”
I maintained the serene expression with the discipline of a woman who had been trained to hold a spiral edge for six seconds without wavering.
“I did pray once,” I said. “In the hospital. I told God that if I got out of that bed and back on the ice, I’d buy a Bible and start reading Genesis.”
A beat.
Candy pinched the bridge of her nose. The gesture was accompanied by a slow, pressurized exhale that suggested she was managing a revelation she wished she could un-receive.
“Sothat’swhat that Amazon order was.”
“Hey.” I raised a defensive palm. “I am holding myself accountable. I purchased the Bible. It’s on my nightstand. It’s been there for eleven months. I even opened it once.” I paused. “I don’t think I’m getting far in the reading department, though. Genesis has a lot of…” I searched for the diplomatic term. “Begetting.”
Candy rolled her eyes with the comprehensive, full-orbital commitment that our friendship had refined into an art form.
“That doesn’t stop you from reading the most smutty garbage on the market.”
“Excuse me.” I pressed a hand to my chest with the wounded dignity of a woman whose literary preferences had been impugned. “It is notgarbage. It is sophisticated adult fiction with complex character dynamics and emotionallyresonant relationship arcs that happen to include”—I waved my hand—“explicit intimacy.”
“You read a book last month where the main character had sex on a Zamboni.”
“It was a very well-written Zamboni scene. The author understood the mechanical challenges.”
Candy closed her eyes. Opened them. The expression on her face suggested she was re-evaluating every life choice that had led her to this specific conversational coordinate.
“Listen,” I said, and the word carried the instructive, unapologetic energy of a woman about to defend her lifestyle with the conviction of a closing argument. “Taunt me with a good ten-thousand-word scene showing me all the positions I get to try, or a cozy game like Poketopia with the volume off and fake rain playing on my laptop, and I amsetfor a weekend indoors. Those are the two modes. Romance novel filth or simulated countryside with ambient weather. There is no in-between, and I refuse to apologize for either.”
Candy shook her head with the fond, exhausted resignation of a woman who had accepted her best friend’s eccentricities long ago and had simply learned to navigate around them like furniture.
“Lord help the pack that keeps you.”
The sentence landed differently than she’d intended.
The wordpacksat in the air between us with a weight it hadn’t carried twenty-four hours ago—before Maddox Hale had walked into an arena and claimed me, before Luka had volunteered as a fourth member, before the word had transitioned from abstract future concept to immediate, logistical, registration-deadline reality.
Candy felt it too. I could see the adjustment in her expression—the slight widening of her eyes, the flicker ofrecognition that her joke had accidentally brushed against a live wire.
She leaned into itanyway, because Candy Hollister Holmes did not retreat from live wires. She grabbed them with both hands and made them her accessory.
“Then again,” she said, tilting her head with the investigative energy of a detective reopening a cold case, “you’rethe one attracting all the exes into the yard.”
I groaned. The sound originated from a depth in my chest that was reserved for conversations I’d been hoping to avoid and knew I couldn’t.
