Page 34 of Hunted

I choked. Hayden shot me a suspicious look, but passed me a napkin.

“Do we have to do this here?” I mumbled.

“Yes. You’ve been avoiding this conversation for months.”

I shoved my paper cup of ice cream aside, hating the direction this conversation had suddenly taken.

“Okay, well I guess that gives me my answer.” When I said nothing, Hayden continued, “You get why I’m worried, right? You know what could happen if you aren’t careful—”

“We’re not.” I shook my head, heart hammering so hard my head was starting to hurt. “I mean, we can’t sleep together, not exactly. It isn’t safe.”

I thought about how much I had once wanted her to ask me that same question. Are you sleeping with River? Except not the way she had just now. Not an accusation. Not a shameful secret. Not with the slight reproach in her eyes I was seeing now, but the way my ride-or-die best friend and sister would have asked under any other circumstances, wanting me to spill all the deets.

Hayden was the one I went to when someone wrote that I was bipolar on the school bathroom wall in tenth grade. She was the one I called when my meds needed refilled, I hadn’t gotten paid for the month yet, and I felt too guilty to ask Piper to bail me out yet again. She was the one who had held me fiercely when we were kids and our father hadn’t come home, my anxiety attacks spiraling through the roof when there was a drunken fight or gunshots outside our trailer or a thunderstorm lashing the thin walls, her magic once-in-a-lifetime voice crooning pop songs off the radio into my hair until I fell asleep.

That overprotectiveness was snarled in the thorny roots of our childhood, a past where she had felt she had to be both sister and protector because our father had been unable to do so due to his addiction and mental health issues. Worse, I knew somewhere buried deep was the silent fear she would never voice. That if she ever let her guard down, turned her back at the wrong moment, stopped protecting me for just an instant, I could wind up just like our father, strung out on drugs and lost to the world.

Hayden narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean not exactly? And please don’t turn this into some matter of degrees thing because oral definitely counts.”

“Oh my god. Could you say that any louder? Maybe make it the cover for your next album while you’re at it.” I shot an apologetic look at the mom at the next table who, with a glare, collected her two toddlers and went to find someplace else to sit.

“Oral Definitely Counts does have a ring to it.”

I kicked her under the table, pointing from my eyes to hers. “Focus. You have dick on the brain. We haven’t been together physically yet.”

“Then how—” Her eyes widened. “No.”

“Okay, for the record? This is why I don’t tell you things. I knew you’d freak out.”

“You’re still letting him project into your dreams? I thought that weird connection you two had ended months ago when he released your memories. Or I guess I hoped that Cal was helping you disentangle it.” She frowned. “Does Cal know you’re having freaky projection sex with him?”

“Can we not talk about my therapy sessions, please? It’s already weird enough that Cal is River’s brother.”

Hayden blew out a breath, sending dark tendrils of hair trailing past her cheek. “God, I hate what he did to you. There are nights I lie awake at the full moon when my wolf is barely in control, staring up at the ceiling, picturing how much I want to get his wolf in a cage and rip him to shreds for hurting you.”

I reached for her hand. My sister’s fingers were rough and calloused. Guitarist’s hands. I rarely ever saw them still. She was always writing songs in her head, her fingers flying over an invisible fretboard as she composed. I wasn’t the only one who lived with anxiety. It was just that mine was the only one we talked about, and the fact that River had messed with my memories and potentially caused a setback made Hayden absolutely loathe him.

My sister hated our fucked up sick connection where he preyed upon my vulnerability, as she put it. Okay, so Hayden wasn’t exactly shipping Team #Rivellie. It was whatever. Actually, it killed me not to have my sister behind me. We had been through everything together. I wanted her to support me, to ship me and River, but I got why she worried. I was working on her. She could be bought with cat bling from Etsy and Lacey Blair’s super dark chocolate cupcakes, the ones that were so gooey and molten they needed a warning label.

I wanted to be with River. I just didn’t want to be changed. I’d seen what it had done to my sister, had watched her be hunted, had seen what shifters and vampires went through as the government tried to eliminate them. I just wanted him.

In the quiet moments when I lay awake at night, I pictured being a wolf, pictured lying in his arms, as his mate. But then my anxiety flared and all the ways everything could go wrong threatened to steal the breath from my lungs. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take the risk—not knowing that my preexisting mental health conditions, my anxiety and depression, predisposed me to a higher chance of going feral after I was changed. Not after what I had endured after River had erased my memories, the blackouts, nightmares and confusion. I couldn’t risk that letting him turn me into a wolf would mean I would forever lose myself, turning me into a monster that no meds, no psychiatric treatment, and no locked padded room with all the resources my sister and mate had to offer could contain.

I had struggled with anxiety and depression my entire life.

I couldn’t risk losing me.

“I love you so much, Hays. You have always been my greatest defender. But things with River are complicated and I need you to give me space to figure out how I feel about him.”

She pulled away, a line forming between her brows. “So, devil’s advocate—how do you know he’s not still all up in your head?” She waved a hand. “He could be messing with your memories, influencing you when you aren’t even aware of it, manipulating you to make you think you want to do things when really you don’t.”

“He isn’t.”

“Okay, but if he was, would you be able to tell? Just think about what I’m saying for a second. Pretend it isn’t River that we’re talking about, but Rossi. If the tables were turned and I was having freaky projection sex with Matteo Rossi, after he’d erased my memories and caused me to have blackouts, anxiety, confusion, nightmares—”

“It’s not the same,” I snapped, raising my hand to block the glare from the sun as a truck backfired. “And I can’t believe you would compare him to Rossi—”

“Get down!” Hayden shouted as an older model truck rammed the concrete bollard set up in front of the line of food trucks.