Page 97 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

The clearing has gone quiet. Even the torches seem to crackle more softly.

“I can’t promise to be what your queens have been before. I can’t promise tradition or protocol or any of the things you think you need from me.” I take a breath. “But I can promise that I will show up. Every single time. For him, for this pack, for all of you. I will learn your traditions even if I can’t perform them. I will remember your names.” I catch Mira’s eye. “And your favorite romance tropes.” She beams. “And what matters to you. Because that’s what I do. I pay attention. I care. And I don’t give up on people I care about.”

Silence.

Then, from somewhere near the back, a single pair of hands starts clapping.

Mira. Of course it’s Mira, grinning like she’s just witnessed the greatest love story ever told, clapping with the unrestrained enthusiasm of a teenager who’s been waiting her whole life for this exact moment.

More clapping joins in. Then more. A howl rises from somewhere in the crowd, full-throated and wild, and suddenly the clearing is alive with the sounds of approval.

Aaron’s face has gone rigid.

“Sentiment,” he says, and the word lands flat and cold, cutting through the applause until it dies. “Pretty words. The pack has always been susceptible to pretty words. But words are not fitness, and affection is not law.” He begins removing his coat, folding it with terrible precision and handing it to a stone-faced lycan beside him. “The law says a contested claim must be tested. Since no one here seems inclined to honor procedure, I will do it myself.”

He looks past me. At Orion.

“Answer for your choice, my king. In the old way.”

And he moves.

I’ve seen Orion move fast. I thought I understood what lycan speed meant. I understood nothing. Aaron crosses ten feet of packed snow in the space of my heartbeat, half-shifted, claws where his hands were, gold flooding his eyes, and he is aimed at Orion with three centuries of grief and fury behind him.

My body decides before my brain does.

I step between them.

The clearing makes a sound, one collective indrawn breath, and Aaron pulls up short, close enough that I can feel the cold rolling off him, claws hanging at his sides, eyes blazing down at me from a face that’s no longer entirely human.

“Move aside, human.”

“No.”

“This is not your fight. This is the old law, king to challenger.” His voice drops, quiet and glacial. “Stand there and you will die where you stand.”

Everything in me is screaming. My heart is a drum solo. My knees have filed for independence. The clearing has gone so silent I can hear the torches breathing, and behind me Orion is a statue of leashed violence, vibrating with the effort of not moving, and I understand, in some wordless animal way, that he is trusting me with both our lives.

I plant my stupid heels in the snow.

“Then I’ll die standing here,” I say. “But I’m not moving.”

Aaron charges.

It’s a blur, it’s a wall of silver and claws and cold coming at me faster than falling, and every instinct I own howls at me to run and I don’t, I don’t move, I close my hands into fists and I stay.

He stops.

A breath from my face. Claw-tips level with my collarbone, near enough that the air of his halt stirs my hair. His breath frosts between us in the torchlight. We stand there, the human and the storm, and nobody in the clearing so much as exhales.

And in his eyes, this close, I don’t find rage.

I find grief. Old, fossilized grief, and underneath it something that is watching me very, very carefully. Measuring.

He was never aiming for Orion, I realize. This was always the test.

“You loved someone once,” I say quietly, just for him. “Someone who wasn’t pack.”

He goes very, very still.