The thermometer on the bathroom counter read ninety-six point four degrees.I stared at the tiny digital numbers, my vision blurring slightly as a fresh wave of tremors rolled through my shoulders. I blinked, trying to force my eyes to focus, but my pupils felt vast and unmanageable, swallowing the pale light of the Forks morning.
Sixty-two days.
That was how long it had been since the forest turned into a graveyard. Sixty-two days since Edward had looked at me with those cold, flawless eyes and lied so beautifully, telling me I wasn't good enough, that he didn't want me, before vanishing into the shadows like a ghost that had never truly belonged to the earth.
Charlie thought I was grieving. He thought the silent, catatonic shell sitting at his dinner table was just a heartbroken teenage girl who had been dumped by her first love. But heartbreak didn't make your bones feel like they were made of dry, hollow ice. Heartbreak didn't cause your heart to hammer against your ribs in a frantic, erratic rhythm, desperate for a rhythm it could no longer find.
I gripped the edge of the porcelain sink, my fingers slipping on the smooth surface.
My hands were shaking so violently that I could barely keep my balance. A cold sweat broke out across my forehead, yet underneath my skin, a deep, phantom fever was clawing its way toward the surface."It's a predatory tool, Bella," his voice echoed in my head. It wasn't the sweet, melodic purr I remembered; it was loud, crisp, and agonizingly clear, vibrating against the inside of my skull. "We are designed to draw you in. Everything about us is an invitation-the voice, the face, the smell."
I gasped, dropping my head between my knees as a wave of intense nausea hit me.
The invitation.
The realization didn't come to me in a flash of brilliance; it leaked into my mind slowly, like poison dripping into a well. I wasn't just sad. I was starving.For over a year, I had been wrapped in his arms. I had breathed in his scent-that intoxicating, impossible fragrance of freesia and fresh snow. I had pressed my lips against his frozen skin, drinking in the trace chemical markers of an apex predator whose very biology was engineered to paralyze and sedate its prey. I had been micro-dosing a supernatural narcotic every single day, and now, the supply was gone. Edward hadn't just broken my heart when he left me in that forest.
He had left an addict to starve.
"Bella?" Charlie's heavy footsteps thudded down the hallway, stopping right outside the bathroom door. "You okay in there, bells? You're going to be late for school."
"I'm fine," I choked out, but the words sounded hollow, raspy, and entirely wrong. I forced my hands into my jacket pockets, burying them deep so he wouldn't see the tremors. "Just... coming.
"I opened the door and walked past him without looking up, unable to bear the heavy weight of his worried stare. The human world felt so incredibly loud, so aggressive, and yet so entirely flat. The bright yellow walls of the hallway looked dull, painted in shades of grey. Everything lacked color. Everything lacked life. Without the blinding, neon light of the supernatural world to illuminate it, reality was just a quiet, fragile cage.
I didn't go to school.
Instead, I found myself steering the ancient Chevy truck toward the edge of town, the engine roaring in a dull, mechanical protest against the heavy downpour of rain. My hands clamped onto the steering wheel, my knuckles white as I fought the violent shivering that threatened to veer the truck off the asphalt.
The craving was a physical weight, pressing down on my chest until I could barely draw a breath. It was a physical ache in the back of my throat, a desperate, irrational need to feel the numbing chill of his skin against mine. My brain was screaming, firing on all cylinders, demanding a fix that no longer existed.
