Page 10 of Bad Girl
He was looking at me.
The growl came from somewhere low and chest-deep, nothing like a domestic dog’s warning bark. This was something older. Something that understood exactly what it was doing.
He bolted again.
Straight toward me.
I turned and ran.
Death.
The trees blurred. My lungs burned. I was going to be mauled to death in a Croatian national park and no one knew where I was — I’d told no one, I had no guide, I had a colour-coded map that had been completely useless, and I was going to die out here and feed the forest and my parents were going to receive decomposed parts of me through some sort of international—
His teeth sank into my calf.
The pain hit a half second after I hit the ground, white and total and overwhelming. He was shaking his head, tugging and tearing with a viciousness that my brain couldn’t fully process. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t think. I could only reach.
My hand found a piece of wood. Thick. Heavy enough.
I swung it.
He didn’t budge.
Up close he was massive—not husky-massive, something else entirely, something that didn’t have a breed name I could access right now—and the stick barely registered. I kicked with my free leg, swung again, felt my head bounce off the soft ground as I struggled.
I couldn’t catch my breath. Between the pain and the movement and the crushing weight of pure animal panic there was no air left anywhere.
The growth caught me as I started to lose consciousness. Soft underneath. Almost kind.
Would it eat my organs first?
Was it worth eating healthily all those years just to become dinner?
The tugging on my leg stopped.
Yeah. Bones were hard to chew.
Thankfully, the darkness took me and I didn’t fight it.
Chapter 6
Nika
I reached for my glasses with a groan.
My hand moved across the nightstand—cool surface, unfamiliar texture—and found nothing. Then something was pressed into my palm. I blinked against the light, slow and reluctant, until a woman came into focus. White uniform. Dark hair pulled back. Holding my glasses out with the practiced patience of someone who’d done this many times before.
“Doktore, budna je.” Her voice was urgent, low.
I caughtdoktore. Doctor. That was about as far as my Croatian stretched.
“Ah, she awakens.”
The second voice was English—accented, warm. I turned my head too fast and regretted it immediately. The room tilted. Pale walls, the soft beep of something monitoring something, afternoon light pressing through half-closed blinds. A small hospital room. Clean. Quiet.
A woman in a white coat stood at the foot of the bed, clipboard in hand, looking at me with measured calm.
I relaxed slightly against the pillow.
