Page 75 of The Fated Hunter Wolf

“Define eating.”

I stopped in front of her chair, and she finally lifted those eyes. She scanned my face with the kind of clinical detachment that made me want to bare my throat just to get a reaction.

“Feels like my bones are trying to crawl out through my skin,” I said.

She closed the book with a soft thud. “Withdrawal.”

“From what?”

The look she gave me could have melted steel. “You know from what.”

Fuck.

“One feeding doesn’t create addiction,” I said, but I didn’t believe it.

“Doesn’t it?” She unfolded herself from the chair with predatory grace, and every instinct I had screamed at me to either run or submit. “Your wolf seems to disagree.”

As if she’d called him, my wolf surged forward, desperate to close the distance between us. To press his neck against her and to have her taste him.

The craving hit me so hard I actually staggered.

“This is insane,” I managed.

“This is biochemistry.” She drifted past me toward the kitchen, and I caught her scent, honey and rain with that tinge of silver now, and my mouth watered. She disappeared inside. “Your body adapted faster than either of us expected.”

“How long until it stops?”

Silence from the kitchen. Then the sound of running water, and she appeared in the doorway with a glass that might as well have been filled with false hope.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never bonded with anyone through feeding before.”

Bonded.The word hit hard.

She handed me the water, and when our fingers brushed, electricity shot straight to my core. My body recognized what it needed and was demanding I get it.

I drained the glass in three gulps, but it was like trying to satisfy hunger with air.

“How often…” I started, because I needed to know what I was dealing with. “How often will I need…”

“I don’t know.” She leaned against the doorframe, studying me with those too-knowing eyes. “Judging by your current state, more often than either of us probably wants to admit.”

“Define more often.”

“Every few hours, maybe? At first?” She shrugged, but there was a crease between her brows that betrayed her concern beneath the casual gesture. “It might level out, eventually. Or it might get worse.”

“Worse how?”

“More frequent. More intense. More…” She gestured vaguely at my current state of barely controlled need. “This.”

Outstanding. I’d traded the hollow ache of a fated mate bond for full-blown supernatural dependency. Those three hours after feeding had been the best I’d felt since this whole mess started.

Logan’s truck rumbled up the dirt road.

I moved to the window, and sure enough, there was my brother’s beat-up four-by-four kicking up dust clouds like it was fleeing the apocalypse.

Sable materialized beside me, silent as smoke. “He brought backup.”

Kenza was in the passenger seat, and in the back was Killian. Our best enforcer.