Page 75 of Hungry Like the Wolf

Robbie felt as if he were hearing the remaining proceedings from underwater. There was a loud whooshing in his ears, and everything felt very distorted. He was so frozen by his shock that he didn’t notice Agatha’s approach until she carefully lowered herself to sit at the opposite end of the couch.

The meeting was over. Agatha’s daughters were braiding JJ’s hair. The pack began shuffling out of the hall, though some stayed, sitting at round tables and drinking coffee out of white diner mugs. When he’d first arrived, they’d stowed the tables after every meeting, but since Robbie had come, since he’d started cooking for the pack, the tables stayed out so that people could eat together whenever they felt like it. Rose was wiping down the table where several children had been coloring, washing away little scribbles of marker that had escaped their coloring sheets.

Robbie turned to look at Agatha. She was older than JJ, he knew that much, and her eyes were wreathed in tiny wrinkles.

“Why?” Robbie asked, his voice a dry croak.

Agatha smiled softly. “Because you’re pack.”

“I’m an unmated male.”

“That’s not what the gossips are saying.”

“What are they saying?” he couldn’t help but ask.

“That you met your fated mate, and then fate took her away from you.”

He swallowed against the lump in his throat, a lump he worried would never go away now.

“We never made it official. So she’s not my mate.”

Agatha leaned back against the couch, looking less guarded than he’d ever seen her.

“She’s still your mate, whether you bit her or not.”

“Well then, fuck me, right?” Robbie said with a humorless laugh.

She snorted. “I guess so.”

Agatha twisted the fabric of her dress in her hands and bit her lips back. Robbie rubbed his hand up and down the rough fabric of the couch’s arm.

“Can I ask you something?” Agatha said after a moment.

“Sure,” he said.

She took a deep breath. “What does it feel like?”

“Hell,” he said humorlessly.

“Not now,” she said with an eye roll. “What did it feel like before?”

Robbie thought back to the morning before, to waking up with Nadja’s hair in his mouth and then skimming his fingers over her skin, which had gleamed like a pearl in the pre-dawn light. He remembered how quiet his brain had felt, how at peace, how at home. And then she’d opened her eyes and looked at him and it had felt as if his heart would stop beating in his chest, preserving that moment forever, the heartbeat where she smiled at him in the early morning just before he kissed her, ignoring every one of her protests about morning breath because he didn’t care about anything but loving on her.

“It felt like—” he began, unsure whether or not he even had the words. “It felt like home. Like no matter where I might be, no matter what happened around me, as long as she was there, I’d be home and I’d be okay. It felt safe. It felt like I’d known her my whole life but was so damned lucky to have found her at the same time. Like she was a part of me, and if she ever left, I’d be changed forever.”

When he looked up, he saw tears in Agatha’s eyes. “That’s what I thought.”

“Did you—” he started but froze, remembering JJ’s warning to never ask Agatha about her past. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ask.”

“No,” she said and then blew out through pursed lips. “It’s okay. I can talk about it now. No, I didn’t have that. I thought maybe I did at first, but… I was wrong.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, because what else could he say?

“He was mean. He hurt me in a thousand different ways, but every time I thought I’d had enough, he’d be like he was at the beginning. Gentle and sweet or, I dunno, not sweet, but nice at least. And I hate that I stayed for ‘nice’ for as long as I did. I do. I hate it. But he told me we were fated. He told me he knew it, and that was that. I was stupid and in love and I believed that if he knew it, then it must be true. I don’t know if he was lying or if he was just wrong, or both, but I wasn’t his fated mate. You wouldn’t treat your fated mate like that. You wouldn’t treat anyone you really loved like that.”

She seemed to deflate into the cushions next to Robbie.

He looked down at the floor and slowly, so slowly, he slid his hand across the cushion until it rested in the middle of the space between them. She looked at his hand, and just as slowly, she reached out with her own, until her pinky finger curled over top of his.