She hadn’t eaten in three nights.

Not out of principle—Cate had long since given up the fantasy of morality. No, she hadn’t fed because she was bored. The city had grown stale. Everyone tasted like nicotine and synthetic serotonin. The wine had soured.

So she’d come to the edge of the forest, her sanctuary, where blood ran clean and prey ran fast. Just as she caught the scent of something promising—a college boy, maybe—another scent cut through the air like a blade.

Wet pine. Burned cedar. Sweat and something feral. Less copper than a human, more smoke and blood and beast. Wild. Unrefined.

Cate halted mid-step. Wrinkled her nose. Then continued to stalk the edge of the clearing in silence.

Her prey bolted at the last second. Gone before Cate could so much as part her lips.

And there, standing at the center of her feeding grounds, was the thing.

A girl. Or someone trying very hard to pretend she was just a girl. Combat boots caked in mud, jeans ripped at the knees, and a hoodie that had seen better years. Her gait was lazy, loose-limbed. Dangerous in that unbothered way that made Cate's fangs ache.

Cate should leave. Should vanish into shadow, find some drunk twenty-something outside a bar, and forget about this wolfish girl with dirt under her nails and a smirk that’s already under Cate’s skin.

But she doesn’t.

“You scared her off,” Cate said coldly, stepping into the moonlight. She wasn’t hungry enough to kill for it—but she was pissed enough to make someone pay.

“Her?” The girl blinked, tilting her head like a curious wolf pup.

Which, Cate supposed, wasn’t far off.

Cate narrowed her eyes. “My dinner.”

“Oh.” The girl winced. “Shit. Sorry. I thought she was lost. I kinda…pointed her toward the highway.”

Cate exhaled through her nose. “How thoughtful. Unfortunately, that leaves me famished. And very annoyed.”

The girl scratched the back of her neck, suddenly sheepish. “Look, I didn’t mean to mess with your...vampire Uber Eats. But, since I spooked your dinner…you can take a little off me if you want.”

Cate’s eyes flickered, “You’re joking.”

“Nope,” the girl shrugged. “A few ounces won’t kill me. You look like you haven’t eaten in days, so. Go for it.”

Cate stared at her.

No one ever offered. Not without strings or spells or trembling, mortal desperation. And definitely not some wandering mutt of a girl who looked like she’d gotten into a fight with a tree and lost.

But she was starving.

“Fine,” Cate said, stepping closer. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

She gripped the girl’s chin with one hand, tilting her head gently to the side. Her skin was buzzing beneath Cate’s touch like a live wire.

And when Cate sinks her fangs in, it’s rapture.

It hit like a freight train, hot and savage and electric. Nothing like the lull of human blood, but a violent, living current. This was chaos and sunfire crashing into her at once. It was lightning in her spine. Fire down her throat. If human blood was wine, this was absinthe laced with gunpowder.

Cate sees stars. Her knees buckled. She clutched the girl’s jacket for balance, riding the high like it might throw her. Cate broke away with a gasp, lips smeared red, her vision blurred at the edges like someone had ripped reality at the seams.

The girl was watching her. Amused.

“Not bad, huh?”

Cate wipes her lips with the back of her hand. Her mouth tingled. Her body still hummed from the hit. No one had ever made her feel like that.

“Absolutely insufferable,” she says, voice wrecked as she licks at the corner of her mouth. “Come back tomorrow. And bring protein. No more gas station jerky. You taste like a frat boy’s gym sock.”

The wolf grins. “You trying to fatten me up?”

Cate turns, her whole body humming. “I like my prey well-fed.”

And just like that, she’d acquired a mutt. A warm, scruffy, foul-mouthed drug of a mutt who smelled like thunderstorms and made her feel alive again for the first time in a century.

God help her.

She might actually keep it.