"Oh my god," Lattie breathes out as soon as I drop the phone from my ear. "Will you let me meet him?"

I deflate and give her a tilted look. "Behave," I warn, as though that's the condition she has to meet before meeting Zakai. In reality, I know I'm powerless to stop her.

"Always," she smiles sweetly, handing me a rose gold tray of warm pastries. "The rest are baking, but they can start with these."

With that I take the excuse to slip away from any further questions and serve the table of drunks. I deliver their pastries, and in the process of handing out their waters, the bell above the door chimes soft and sweet, echoing throughout the lonesome cafe.

"Sit wherever you'd like, I'll be with you in a mo-" All of my muscles freeze and my words break off in my mouth as my eyes fall upon our newest customer.

I all but run to Zakai, throwing the rose gold tray onto a nearby table. When I reach him, there's a hesitation, a flinching from both sides until we finally clutch each other's forearms tight, too withdrawn for a hug but desperate nonetheless to know if this is real: if this is actually life; if this is how he looks, how I look; if this is the here and now, the present rather than a morphed past.

That night on the bridge felt like a dream: seeing him, holding him, smelling him, hearing him. It felt like I had finally fallen back to sleep after five years awake, like I had fallen back into the imagined world that is my past. But that night on the bridge was too perfect, too good to be real, and now I'm meeting Zakai for the first time in a long time all over again. Perhaps this time I'll be awake. Perhaps this time I'll realize him as reality rather than a dream.

Because this is reality. He is here, standing in front of me, beaming at me, a grown up version of my lost best friend gripping down on my arms as if I were going to be the one to vanish, not he.

"How did you get here so fast?" I ask, staring at his smiling face and anticipating eyes. To get here so soon after our phone call he must have been nearly standing in the parking lot. He couldn't have hurried here: unlike on the phone, he isn't presently out of breath.

We slowly and awkwardly release each other.

"I was close by," he says, taking me in from head to toe. As he does, I study him in turn.

I spy the smallest slither of bark in his hair. I spot a tinge of tan dirt smudged on his neck, in the shallow dip at the center of his throat. I smell the place on my sleeve where his palms had touched, and filling my nostrils is the fresh, cool scent of the moist earth his paws had traveled over.

"You were hunting." I'm blunt.

He hesitates, but nods. "I wasn't going to say anything."

A twinge of some old, awful thing tugs in my chest.

Hunting.

To feed the pack was the duty of pack. Everyone hunted, everyone pulled their weight, filled their own bellies and many more. They had claws to do it with; four legs for pursuit and forty-two teeth for death.

I had nothing.

"Leila." My old friend—the former half to my whole—reaches for me. I brush his hand away as casually as I can and smile at him.

"It's okay. Come on, let's sit." I lead him to a table far from that of the drunken customers. It's a booth across the dining area, where our words won't disturb them. Zakai slides into the side of the booth that faces their direction.

"Do you want something to eat? Since you haven't yet."

He raises a brow. "Is that a dig at me?"

"Maybe."

Zakai pulled his weight, but he wasn't the best hunter of the pack. I teased him over it, teased him that our peers were better than he and made it out as though he were worse than he really was. In reality, there was nothing at all wrong with his abilities. There was something wrong with mine—they were absent—and so I took my frustration out on him. It was wrong of me, but he'd said himself that he didn't mind. He encouraged me even, welcomed any form of coping for me that would come.

I didn't like who I was then, how I was, even if Zakai thought nothing was amiss. I hate that at the very first mention of hunting in three years, I've already reverted back to the offensive as if it were instinctual.

But I need to remain in the present, not travel back to the past. The past is gone—despite it sitting in front of me—because I left it overseas. I have new things to worry about, new people to worry about, and Zakai's reemergence complicates that.

He'd said he'd been traveling with a group of others, though he's the only one in Heisenbühl. I cock my head to the side a bit, a flash of the last few days rushing through my head at this recollection.

Werewolf. Sophie. Zakai. My Zakai, here in this hidden away place I've made my new home, this place where Sophie was murdered, where Zakai was hunting.

No. There's no connection. Sophie and Zakai are not linked. He wouldn't. Couldn't.

"I was actually successful on my hunt, thank you very much," Zakai says, raising his chin in a false show of arrogance.

I raise my brows in question.

"A deer," he answers, but one edge of his mouth curls in the slightest amount and no matter how much he may change his appearance, he's kept his tell. Zakai is lying. Besides that, he doesn't smell of blood, old nor fresh.

He was certainly engaged in a chase—the smears and smells of dirt on him, missing my first call, and being breathless on the second are all evidence of that—but he didn't catch what he was chasing and a distinct feeling in the pit of my stomach denies that it was a deer.

Just then, Lattie calls my name from the kitchen. The orders are ready.

I look to Zakai. "I'll be right back. Sure you don't want anything? It's on me."

"Nah, I'm good." He then puts on that signature smile that I always remembered when remembering him, that smile with a roguish charm that no one else could ever wear because no one else's lips are curved quite like his, the edges perfectly pointed, the musculature around his mouth so refined as to form shaded dimples and sharp lines that disappear when his joyous expression does. He looks a heartbreaker when he smiles like this, even more so when the mischief is alight in his jade green eyes and his smile is skewed, half smirking. He looks like a rogue, a heathen, a rulebreaker who leaves people in ruins because in the end he was too good to be true after all, his damage never to be repaired. But never has he been any of these things, except for the times I made him.

And so his smile hurts—looking at him, his entire appearance, his entire being—hurts. I'm glad to be walking away from him. I'm glad to have to serve a table of drunks, to have to monitor all of the windows and all of the entrances and exits, to have to keep in mind that Nanni is home alone at night and there's a murderer in town who may or may not be the same person who was peeking in my new family's windows, who may or may not be what I was supposed to. I'm glad to have this mystery, this convoluted clusterfuck of threats to solve because I cannot look at the past and I certainly cannot solve it.

"Are you okay?" Lattie asks me in a small voice as I collect the tray of food she'd prepared.

"Yep, I'm fine. Has Nanni called?"

She frowns. "No. Why would she?"

To tell us her house was broken into. To tell us she barely escaped a maniac alive. But of course she wouldn't call if everything is okay... or if it really, really isn't.

I shrug noncommittally. This is a casual conversation and I'm making small talk, saying trivial things to fill the void of silence, to satiate my boredom. That's what I'd like her to believe. "To give us orders maybe? You know Nanni, she never rests, even when resting."

Lattie relaxes and she chuckles, knowing how her grandmother is.

With that I try to leave her on her lonesome in the kitchen but she tails me to the front where she perches herself on the stool near the register. I try to ignore her, try to ignore the fact that she's there on a pedestal for any threat to see, either inside the café nursing their hangovers or looming at the edge of the forest outside, peering through the glass front window.

I serve the tray of pastries to the drunken table and ask if they'd like any beverages to be refilled. They seem delighted to see the sweets and all decline any refills. I tell them to call me if they need anything else. I hope they don't. Then I make my way across the café—avoiding to look at Lattie for the ingrained sense that doing so will call attention to her—and reclaim my seat in the booth across from Zakai.

He smiles when I sit back down, and I don't look at that either.

"I can't believe I found you," he breathes out, and the disbelief is evident in his clear green eyes. His pupils are dilated, fuller than the last full moon I bothered to look at, and are locked on me as if glancing away for even a heartbeat would cause my disappearance.

I laugh and find that it's painful, a shard of glass stabbing into my chest. "I didn't know I was lost," I say, knowing damn well that I was. That he was.

He places his hand palm side up on the center of the table between us, splitting the distance. Gone is the gangly boy I once knew, the timid, bony hand he used to own. Time has put meat on his bones, has roped his forearm with muscle, and pushed into subtle prominence the veins beneath his tanned skin which his rolled-up flannel sleeve has left exposed up to his elbow.

His fingers twitch once in their relaxed position: an invitation.

I lay my palm in his. His fingers engage, clamping over my knuckles to envelop me fully. The feel of him is so different it's disorienting, foreign. And yet so familiar that were I not already seated I would collapse. His hand is thick with resting strength and larger than it ever was before, but the undying sincerity with which he holds mine is the same as it always was.

"I struggle to trust that any of this is real." He squeezes my hand, ensuring that I'm really here, that he's really found me. That this isn't a dream he'll wake up from in the morning to find his hand empty, never having been held at all.

All of those same fears rush through me at once. I squeeze back, the skin of my hand turning white where the pressure forces the blood away.

"It's real," I say, to soothe myself as well as him, "We're real. It's all okay now. We're okay."

His eyes are watery, and I pray that water remains contained within his lids. Because if it doesn't, if one drop slips out, the water in mine will be sure to follow.

Zakai, my Zakai, is really here. After all of this shit, after the five years it's been since we were ripped apart... he's here.

"Waiter! Excuse me!" A slurring, drunken voice demands. "Have you gone off shift? We're ready for the bill."