Page 79 of Hungry Like the Wolf

Because as wrong as it had felt losing Nadja, it also felt wrong to leave them behind.

“Give me the number for your phone, JJ.”

Robbie grabbed a ballpoint pen from the junk drawer and wrote down the number JJ gave him on his forearm. JJ clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“I can’t stop you. I wouldn’t try. She’s?—”

“She’s still here,” Robbie said, his mind still whirling with the wonder of that truth.

He was going to yell at her and kiss her and yell at her again and then fall to his knees and bury his face in her belly and beg her to let him stay if she wouldn’t come back with him. He would beg her to let him feed her. He would feel his skin between her teeth and weep from the sheer joy of it all.

“I’ll call you. I promise,” he said, squeezing Rose’s hands before putting down his giant water bottle and wrapping her in a hug. “I won’t be gone long.”

With or without Nadja, he’d be back. He wouldn’t force her to stay with him if she didn’t want to. He loved her too much to cage her. And if she didn’t want him, if he was wrong and she hadn’t left him for some self-sacrificing reason, but because she didn’t want to be with him, well, it would gut him, but he’d live. He’d mourn her for the rest of his days, but he would be able to live knowing that somewhere in the world, she was alive and she was okay.

But he had to know, and to know, he had to leave.

“I love you,” he said to Rose, to them both, and she nodded against his chest, this woman who had been like a surrogate mother to him during his grief.

JJ squeezed Robbie’s shoulder again and nodded. “We’ll be here when you get back.”

Robbie released Rose, grabbed his water, and raced out the back door, jogging to where the cars were parked. He slid behind the wheel of the car Callum had bought for him and put it in gear. The engine hummed quietly and the air blew, and somewhere between the pack and World’s End, one of his mom’s favorite songs came on the radio.

It was a slow song, low and sad, but with a beat that persisted even though the melody dipped and lilted. He tapped his foot to that beat, and to the beat of the next song, feeling the building rhythm. Singing was beyond him, his heart too fragile, too full of hope and fear, but it beat in time to the music anyway as he drove toward an answer, toward her.

CHAPTER 33

Hank Dove sat in the chair across from Nadja, here for his weekly therapy session. She glanced at the clock on the wall. It was 7:30. She closed her eyes briefly. Thirty more minutes. She had to last just thirty more minutes, and then she could lie down. And if she didn’t have the energy to make it home, she could sleep on the floor. She’d done it before.

It was hard to focus on what Hank was saying, and she kicked herself internally. She knew she wasn’t supposed to have favorite clients, but Hank was her favorite nonetheless. He was kind, and while his voice was as deep as an ocean trench, he was soft-spoken. Deferent. Thoughtful.

Distantly, she realized that he had stopped talking to her. She looked up and saw Hank staring at her, his brow furrowed.

“Nadja, are you okay?”

“Mm-hmm!” she said, so high and thin that it sounded like air being let out of a balloon. She took a fortifying breath and looked him in the eye. “I’m fine, Hank.”

But she wasn’t fine. Her ears were ringing and black spots danced in front of her vision, the spots growing bigger and denser with every passing minute.

“I don’t really know what the etiquette here is, but I don’t believe you. I think you need to go to the hospital.”

“They can’t help me,” she said, gripping the armrests of her chair, as if that would steady her. It only made the spinning feeling worse.

Her throat burned with tears. This conversation was so similar to the one she’d had with Robbie. The difference was that while Hank was concerned, Robbie had been nearly frantic. Robbie had wanted to throw her over his shoulder and run to the hospital.

“Is there someone you can call to take you?” Hank asked, crossing the space and crouching down in front of her chair. “I would really like to check your heart rate, Nadja. Can I do that?”

She must have nodded because she felt the dry heat of Hank’s fingers against the inside of her wrist, his thumb pressing gently opposite. He looked at the clock on the wall.

“This is unnecessary, Hank.” But she didn’t push him away and he didn’t leave. He kept holding her wrist and staring at the clock.

But there was no way to tell Hank what she needed, what she was. It wasn’t that she thought the information would scare him. His partner’s best friend was a selkie who was married to a vampire. Hank knew all of this and accepted it with the casual ease of a person who also knew someone who went to same high school as a new acquaintance. But he didn’t know that she knew all of that. He didn’t know what she knew or what she was and she wasn’t about to open that Pandora’s box.

Not to mention that to tell him about how she fed or, rather, how she wasn’t feeding, would be crossing almost every single professional boundary she had.

She couldn’t tell him that her last feed, her last real feed had been the morning she’d left the pack. She’d tried to log onto Voyours when she’d returned to World’s End, to knit topless for Geoff while telling him all the ways he had disappointed her so that he could get off. She’d tried so hard but had ended up shutting the lid of her laptop before he really got going and subsequently refunding both his booking fee and tip.

Geoff’s aroused energy had reminded her of the time that Magda tried a new flavor of sparkling water and spat it all over Dick Van Dyke, her ancient Bassett hound. “Limoncello, my ass,” she’d grumbled. “It’s like they asked a person who’s never had limoncello to describe limoncello and then made that. What garbage.”