Chapter Eight

The sun was fully up by the time I reached Hilda’s street, and I felt every hour of the night before in my bones.

I’d walked most of the way. The hotel had been closer to town than I remembered, or maybe shame just made distances shorter. Either way, I slipped through her gate with my heels in my hand and my dress wrinkled beyond saving, praying she was still asleep.

She was sitting at the kitchen table with two cups of tea already poured.

“Well, well.” She didn’t even look up from her cup. “The dead walk among us.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m just saying. I got a five-word text at midnight and then nothing. I nearly called the border patrol.” Her mouth curved. “Then I remembered the way that man was looking at you and decided the border patrol would only be in his way.”

Heat crawled up my neck. “Hilda.”

“Was he kind to you?”

The question was gentler than the teasing, and it caught me off guard. I thought of him asking, over and over, if I was sure. Checking. Making the choice mine every single time, like my choices were something worth protecting.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “He was kind.”

“Good.” She pushed the second cup toward me. “Then I don’t regret the thumbs-up. Sit. Drink. You look like you fought a storm and lost.”

I sat. The tea was chamomile and honey, and the first swallow loosened something in my chest. For a few minutes we just sat there in the morning light, and it was almost possible to pretend I was a normal girl who’d had a normal wild night, with nothing hunting her and nothing broken inside her.

“So,” Hilda said. “Does this mysterious Jake have a last name? A pack? A—”

She stopped.

Mid-sentence, mid-breath, she just stopped. Her nostrils flared. The teasing drained out of her face so fast it left something cold behind.

“Hilda?”

She leaned closer. Inhaled again, slow and deliberate, the way she did when she was working, when a patient came in and she was reading their body before they said a word.

“Stand up,” she said.

“What? Why—”

“Merliya. Stand up.”

I stood. My heart had started to pound without my permission. Hilda circled me once, and I watched my oldest friend turn into a healer in front of my eyes, her gaze going clinical, cataloguing me like a chart.

“You showered at the hotel,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“No, I— I left before he woke. Why does that—”

“Because there’s a scent on you that a shower wouldn’t have hidden anyway.” She stopped in front of me. Her hands, when she took mine, were careful. Too careful. The kind of careful she used for delivering bad news. “It’s faint. A day old, maybe less. Most wolves would walk right past it. But I’ve spent ten years with my nose in birthing rooms, and I know what I’m smelling.”

“Hilda, you’re scaring me.”

“Merliya.” Her thumb pressed against my pulse, and I realized she was counting it. “When did you last have your heat?”