Bride

He tries to avoid thinking about what he’d do to her father if only it wouldn’t cause the worst diplomatic incident of the current century.

Ana was right: it isn’t that difficult, climbing up to the roof, even for someone with the hand-eye coordination of a platypus.

I.e., me.

It takes me less than fifteen seconds to get there, and it’s vaguely empowering, the way I never even feel like my brains will end up splattered in the plumbago flower bed. Once I’m sitting on the tiles, vaguely uncomfortable but not willing to admit it, I close my eyes and breathe in, then out, then in, letting the breeze play with my hair, welcoming the tickle of the night sky. The waves wash gently over the shore. Every once in a while, something splashes on the lake. I don’t even mind the bugs, I tell myself. If I persevere, I’ll believe it. That’s what I’m failing at when Lowe arrives.

He doesn’t notice me right away, and I get to observe him as he gracefully lifts himself up the eave. He stands on an edge that should be terrifying, lifting a hand to his eyes and pressing thumb and index fingers into them, so hard he must see stars. Then he lets his arm drop to his side and he exhales once, slowly.

This, I think, is Lowe. Not Lowe the Alpha, Lowe the brother, Lowe the friend, or the son, or the unfortunate husband of the equally unfortunate wife. Just: Lowe. Tired, I think. Lonely, I assume. Angry, I bet. And I don’t want to disturb his rare moment alone, but the breeze lifts, blowing in his direction and carrying my scent.

He instantly spins around. To me. And when his eyes become all pupils, I lift my hand and awkwardly wave.

“Ana told me about the roof,” I say, apologetic. I’m intruding on a cherished private moment. “I can leave . . .”

He shakes his head stoically. I swallow a laugh.

“If you sit here”—I point to my right—“you’ll be between me and the wind. No bouillabaisse smell.”

His lips twitch, but he makes his way to the spot I was pointing at, his large body folding next to mine, far enough to avoid accidental touches. “What do you even know about bouillabaisse?”

“As it’s not hemoglobin or peanut based, nothing. So.” I clap my hands. The cicadas quiet, then resume their singing after a disoriented pause. “Tell me if I got it right: You’ll use your meeting with Emery as an excuse to plant some spyware or interceptor that will allow you to monitor her communications and gain proof that she’s leading the Loyals. But you are going into enemy territory alone, and have the computer skills of an octogenarian Luddite, which puts you at great risk. Actually, no need to tell me if I’m right, I already know. When are you plunging to your imminent death? Tomorrow or Friday?”

He studies me like he’s not sure whether I’m a bench or a postmodern sculpture. A muscle twitches in his jaw. “I truly don’t get it,” he muses.

“Get what?”

“How you managed to stay alive despite your reckless outbursts.”

“I must be very smart.”

“Or incredibly stupid.”

Our eyes clash for a few seconds, full of something that feels more confusing than antagonism. I glance away first.

And just say it, without thinking it through. “Take me with you. Let me help with the tech part.”

He huffs out a tired, noiseless snort. “Just go to bed, Misery, before you get yourself killed.”

“I’m nocturnal,” I mutter. “Little offensive, that my husband doesn’t think I can take care of myself.”

“A lot offensive, that my wife thinks that I’d take her with me into a highly volatile situation where I might not be able to protect her.”

“Okay. Fine.” I glance back at him—his earnest, stubborn, uncompromising face. In the fading moonlight, the lines of his cheekbones are ready to slice me. “You can’t do it on your own, though.”

He gives me an incredulous look. “Are you telling me what I can and cannot do?”

“Oh, I would never, Alpha,” I say with a mocking tone that I only half regret when he glares back. “But you can’t even start a computer.”

“I can start a fucking computer.”

“Lowe. My friend. My spouse. You’re clearly a competent Were with many talents, but I’ve seen your phone. I’ve seen you use your phone. Half of your gallery is blurry pictures of Ana with your finger blocking the camera. You type ‘Google’ in the Google bar to start a new search.”

He opens this mouth. Then snaps it closed.

“You were about to ask me why that’s the wrong way.”

“You’re not coming.” His tone is definitive. And when he makes to stand, driven away by my insistence, I feel a stab of guilt and reach out for the leg of his jeans, pulling him back down. His eyes fix on the place where I’m gripping him, but he relents.

“Sorry, I’ll let the matter go.” For now. “Please, don’t leave. I’m sure you came here to . . . What do you do here, anyway? Scratch your claws? Howl at the moon?”

“Deflea myself.”

“See? I wouldn’t want to be in your way. Do go on.” I wait for him to pick critters out of his hair. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping, anyway? You are not nocturnal.” It’s past midnight. Prime awake time for me, the cicadas, and no one else for miles.

“I don’t sleep much.”

Right. Ana said that. When she mentioned that he had . . . “Insomnia!”

His eyebrow quirks. “You seem overjoyed by my inability to get decent rest.”

“Yes. No. But Ana mentioned you had pneumonia, and . . .”

He smiles. “She mixes up words often.”

“Yup.”

“According to Google, which I apparently don’t know how to use”—his side look is blistering—“it’s normal for her age.” He looks pensive for a long moment as his smile sobers.

“I can’t imagine how difficult it must be.”

“Learning to talk?”

“That, too. But also, raising a young child. Out of the blue.”

“Not as difficult as being raised by some asshole who doesn’t know to buy a car seat for you, or gives you Skittles before bed because you’re hungry, or lets you watch The Exorcist because he’s never seen it, but the protagonist is a young girl, and he figures that you’ll identify with her.”

“Wow. Serena and I watched that at fifteen and slept with the lights on for months.”

“Ana watched it at six and will need expensive therapy well into her forties.”

I wince. “I’m sorry. For Ana, mostly, but also for you. People usually ease into parenthood. We’re not born knowing how to change diapers.”

“Ana’s potty-trained. Not by me, obviously—I’d have somehow managed to teach her to piss out of her nose.” He runs a hand over his short hair and then rubs his neck. “I was unprepared for her. Still am. And she’s so fucking forgiving.”

I rest my temple on my knees, studying the way he stares into the distance, wondering how many nights he’s comes up here in the witching hour. To make decisions for thousands. To beat himself up for not being perfect. Despite how competent, self-denying, and assured he appears to be, Lowe might not like himself very much.

“You used to live in Europe? Where?”

He seems surprised by my question. “Zurich.”

“Studying?”

His shoulders heave with a sigh. “At first. Then working.”

“Architecture, right? I don’t fully get it. Buildings are kind of boring. I’m grateful they don’t fall on top of my head, though.”

“I don’t get how one can type stuff into a machine all day and not be terrified of a robot uprising. I’m grateful for Mario Kart, though.”

“Fair enough.” I smile at his tone, because it’s the poutiest I’ve ever heard. I must have found his touchy spot. “I do like the style of this home,” I volunteer magnanimously.

“It’s called biomorphic.”

“How do you know? You learned it in school?”

“That, and I designed it as a present for my mother.”

“Oh.” Wow. I guess he’s not just an architect—he’s a good architect. “When you studied, did you do the Human thing?” Their school system is often the only option, simply because there’s more of them, and they invest in education infrastructure. In Vampyre society, and I assume among Weres, too, formal degrees are not worth the paper they’re printed on. The skills that come with them, however, are priceless. If we want to acquire them, we create fake IDs and use them to enroll at Human universities. Vampyres tend to take online classes (because of the fangs, and the whole third-degree burns in the sunlight thing). Weres are undetectable to Humans’ naked eye, and could come and go from their society more easily, but Humans have installed technology that singles out faster-than-normal heartbeats and higher body temperatures in plenty of places. Honestly, I’m just lucky they never expected Vampyres would go to the trouble of filing their own fangs and never developed the same degree of paranoia about us.

“Zurich was different, actually.”

“Different?”

“Weres and Humans were attending openly. A few Vampyres, too. All living in the city.”

“Wow.” I know there are places like that around the world, where the local history between the species is not so fraught, and living side by side, if not together, is considered normal. It’s still hard to imagine, though. “Did you have a Vampyre girlfriend?” I point at my ring finger. “Once you go Vamp, you can never go back, huh?”

He gives me a long-suffering look. “You’ll be astonished to hear the Vampyres didn’t hang out with us.”

“How snobby.” I fold my hand back in my lap, but start playing with my wedding band. “Why all the way to Zurich? Were you on the run from Roscoe?”

“On the run?” His cheeks stretch into an amused grin. “Roscoe was never a threat. Not to me.”

“That’s brave of you. Or narcissistic.”

“Both, maybe,” he acknowledges. Then quickly turns serious. “It’s hard to explain dominance to someone who doesn’t have the hardware to understand it.”

“Lowe, was that a computer metaphor?” I get another of those don’t-sass-me looks, and laugh. “Come on. At least try to explain it.”

He shakes his head. “If you met someone without a nose and had to explain to them what a smell feels like, what would you tell them?” He looks at me expectantly. And I open my mouth half a dozen times—only to close it just as many, frustrated. “Yup.” He doesn’t even sound too told-you-so–y. “It was like that with Roscoe. He was a grown adult, I was barely past puberty, but I always knew that he was never going to win a fight against me, and he always knew it, and everyone in the pack knew it, too. As much as I despise him now, I’m thankful that he gave me long enough without a reason to challenge him.”

Without becoming a despotic leader, he means. “What changed him?”

“Hard to say. His views escalated very suddenly.” He licks his full lips, looking faraway, in the grip of a memory. “I got the phone call and didn’t even have the time to stop by my apartment on the way to the airport. My mother had vocally opposed a raid. She was wounded, and Ana was defenseless.”

“Shit.”

“It was eleven hours and forty minutes from the moment I got the phone call until I pulled up Cal’s driveway and found Ana sobbing in Misha’s room.” His tone is emotionless, almost disturbingly so. “I was terrified.”

I can’t imagine. Or can I? Those first few days after Serena was gone, and I was so frantically preoccupied with looking for her that it didn’t occur to me to bathe or feed until my head pounded and my body was feverish.

“Did you ever get to go back to Zurich? To pick up your stuff? To . . .” Get closure. Say goodbye to the life you’d built. Maybe you had friends, a girlfriend, a favorite takeout place. Maybe you used to sleep in in the morning, or take long weekend trips to travel around Europe and check out . . . buildings, or something. Maybe you had dreams. Did you go back to retrieve those?

He shakes his head. “My landlord mailed a couple of things. Threw out the rest.” He scratches his jaw. “Feel kinda bad for leaving my dirty breakfast dishes in the sink.”

I chuckle. “It’s kind of your thing, isn’t it?”

“What?” He turns to me.

“Blaming yourself for being anything less than perfect.”

“If you want to wash my dishes, by all means.”

“Shush.” I lightly bump my shoulder into his, like I do with Serena when she’s being obtuse. He stiffens, stills in a breathless sort of tension for a moment, then slowly relaxes as I pull away. “So, this dominance thing. Is Cal the second most dominant Were in the pack?” This sounds foreign, like picking words at random. Magnetic fridge poetry.

“We’re not a military organization. There’s no strict hierarchy within the pack. Cal just happens to be someone I trust.”

Can’t be more dysfunctional than arbitrary councils whose membership is established through primogeniture. And Humans elect leaders like Governor Davenport. Clearly, there’s no perfect solution here. “Did he also have to challenge someone to become a second? Maybe Ken Doll?”

“It’s fucked up that I know who you’re referring to.”

I chuckle. “Hey, he has never introduced himself.”

“Ludwig. His name is Ludwig. And our pack has over a dozen seconds, who are chosen within their huddle through a caucus system.”

“Huddle?”

“It’s a web of interconnected families. Usually geographically close. Each second reports to the Alpha. After Roscoe, new seconds were elected, which means that most of them are as new to this as I am. Mick is the only one who kept his position.”

“You mean, the only one who didn’t try to kill you?”

“Yup.” His laugh could be bitter, but it isn’t. “He and his mate were close friends of my mother’s. Shannon used to be a second, too.”

“Did you kill her?” I ask, conversationally, and he’s so gonna push me off the roof.

“Misery.”

“It’s a fair question, given your precedents.”

“No, I did not kill the mate of the man who used to change my diapers.” He massages his temple. “Hell, they both did. They taught me how to ride bikes and track prey.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died two years ago, during a confrontation at the eastern border. With Humans, we think.” He swallows. “So did Mick’s son. He was sixteen.”

Not something my people would be above, but I still flinch. “That explains why he always seems so melancholic.”

“He smells like grief. All the time.”

“Well, he’s my favorite Were.” I hug my knees. “He’s always so nice to me.”

“That’s because he has a weakness for beautiful women.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“You know what you look like.”

I laugh softly, surprised by the backhanded compliment.

“Why do you always do that?” he asks.

“Do what?”

“When you laugh, you cover your lips with your hand. Or you do it with your mouth closed.”

I shrug. I wasn’t aware, but I’m not surprised. “Isn’t it obvious?” It’s not, judging by his puzzled look. “Okay. I’m going to be super vulnerable with you.” I take a deep, theatrical breath. Steeple my hands. “You may not know this about me, but I’m not like you. I’m actually another species, called—”

“Misery.” His hand comes up to snatch my wrist. My breath catches in my throat. “Why do you hide your fangs?”

“You’re the one who told me to.”

“I asked you not to respond to an act of aggression with another act of aggression, to avoid coming home and finding my wife torn to pieces—and someone torn in even smaller pieces next to her.” His hand is still around my wrist. Warm. A bit tighter. His touch flusters me. “This is different.”

Is it? Would you not tear me into pieces?

“Come on, Lowe.” I free my arm and cradle it to my chest. “You know what my teeth are like.”

“Come on, Misery,” he mocks. “I do know, and that’s why I don’t get why you hide them.”

We stare at each other like we’re playing a game and trying to make the other lose. “Want me to show you?” I’m trying to provoke him, but he just nods solemnly.

“I’d like to know what we’re dealing with, yeah.”

“Now?”

“Unless you need specific tools, or have a previous engagement. Is it bath time?”

“You want to see my fangs. Now.”

His look is vaguely pitying.

“It’s just . . .” I’m not sure what’s so concerning about the idea of him seeing them. Maybe I’m just remembering being nine, and the way my Human caregivers always stopped smiling the second I began. A driver, making the sign of the cross. A million other incidents through the years. Only Serena never minded. “Is this a trap? Are you looking for an excuse to watch my entrails fertilize the plumbago?”

“Would be highly inefficient, since I could just push you and no one in my pack would question me.”

“What a beautiful flex.”

He makes a show of hiding his hands behind his back. “I’m harmless.”

He’s as harmless as a land mine. He could destroy entire galaxies with a stern look and a growl. “Fine, but if your wolfy sensibilities are repulsed by my vampyric tusks, remember you asked for it.”

I’m unsure how to initiate it. Snarling, pulling my upper lip back with my fingers like Human dentists do in toothbrush commercials, biting into his hand for an applied demonstration—all seem impractical. So I simply smile. When the cold air hits my canines, my lizard brain screams at me that I’m caught. I’m found out. I’m . . .

Fine, actually.

Lowe’s pupils splay out. He studies my canines with his usual unalloyed attention, without recoiling or trying to eat me. Little by little, my smile shifts into something sincere. Meanwhile, he looks.

And looks.

And: looks.

“Are you okay?” My voice snaps him back into his body. His grunt is vague, not quite affirmative.

“And you don’t . . .” He clears his throat. “Use them?”

“What? Oh, my fangs.” I run my tongue over my right one, and Lowe closes his eyes and then turns away. Either too gross, or he’s scared. Poor little Alpha. “We all feed from blood bags, with very few exceptions.”

“What exceptions?”

I shrug. “Feeding from a living source is kind of outdated, mostly because it’s a huge hassle. I do think that mutual blood drinking is sometimes incorporated into sex, but remember how I was cast out as a child and am universally known for being a terrible Vampyre?” I should force Owen to explain the nuances of it to me, but . . . ugh. It’s not like I plan to get that close to another Vampyre, ever. “I’m not going to bite you, Lowe. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried.” He sounds hoarse.

“Good. So now that I’ve shown you my fearsome weapons, you’ll take me to Emery’s with you? It is, after all, the honeymoon you owe your bride. Pleasure doing business with you. I’ll go pack, and—” I make to stand, but his hand snatches me back down.

“Nice try.”

I sigh and lean backward, wincing when the tiles press into my spine. The stars crowd the sky, drift us into a moment of silence. “Want to know a secret?” I ask, weary. “Something I thought I’d never admit to anyone.”

One arm brushes against my thigh as he twists to look at me. “I’m surprised you’d want to tell me.”

I am, too. But I’ve carried it so tirelessly, and the night feels so soft. “Serena and I had a huge fight a few days before she disappeared. The biggest ever.” Lowe remains quiet. Which is exactly what I need from him. “We fought plenty, mostly about trivial shit, sometimes over stuff that took us a bit to cool down. We grew up together and were at our most annoying with each other—you know, sisters? She spat into the pockets of the caretakers who were mean to me, and I read smutty books to her while she was so sick she needed IV drips. But also I hated that sometimes she just wouldn’t pick up her phone for days, and she hated that I could be a stone-hearted bitch, I guess. That last fight we had, we were both fuming, after. And then she never showed up to help me put on the duvet cover, despite knowing that it’s the single hardest thing in the universe. And now the things she said keep circling in my head. Like sharks that haven’t been fed in months.”

I can’t see Lowe’s expression from down here. Which is ideal. “And what do the sharks say?”

“She got a recruiter from this really cool company interested in me. It was a good job—something challenging. Something only a dozen people in the country could do. And she kept telling me how perfect I’d be for it, what an opportunity it was, and I just couldn’t see the point, you know? Yes, it was a more interesting job, with more money, but I kept wondering, why? Why would I bother? What’s the end goal? And I asked her, and she . . .” I take a deep breath. “Said that I was aimless. That I didn’t care about anything or anyone, including myself. That I was static, headed nowhere, wasting my life. And I told her that it wasn’t true, that I did care about stuff. But I just . . . I couldn’t name anything. Except for her.”

 . . . this apathetic spiral of yours, Misery. I mean, I get it, you spent the first two decades of your life expecting to die, but you didn’t. You’re here now. You can start living!

Dude, you’re not my mother or my therapist, so I’m not sure what gives you the right to—

I am out there, trying. I had a fucked-up life, too, but I’m dating, trying to get a better job, having interests—you’re just waiting for time to pass. You are a husk. And I need you to care about one single fucking thing, Misery, one thing that’s not me.

The sharks gnaw at the inner walls of my skull, and I won’t be able to make them stop until I find Serena, but in the meantime, I can distract them. “Anyway.” I sit up with a smile. “Since I so selflessly opened my heart to you, will you tell me something?”

“That’s not how—”

“What the hell is a mate, precisely?”

Lowe’s face doesn’t move a millimeter, but I know that I could fill a Babel tower of notebooks with how little he wants to have this conversation. “No way.”

“Why?”

“No.”

“Come on.”

His jaw works. “It’s a Were thing.”

“Hence, me asking you to explain.” Because I suspect that it’s not just the Were equivalent of marriage, or a civil union, or the steady commitment that comes with sharing monthly payments to multiple overpriced streaming services one forgot to discontinue.

“No.”

“Lowe. Come on. You’ve trusted me with far bigger secrets.”

“Ah, fuck.” He grimaces and rubs his eyes, and I think I won.

“Is it another thing I don’t have the hardware for?”

He nods, and almost seems sad about it.

“I understood the whole dominance thing.” We really made some strides in the past fifteen minutes. “Give me a chance.”

He turns to me. Suddenly he feels a little too close. “Give you a chance,” he repeats, unreadable.

“Yeah. The whole rival-species-bound-by-centuries-of-hostility-until-the-bloody-demise-of-the-weakest-will-put-an-end-to-the-senseless-suffering thing might seem discouraging, but.”

“But?”

“No buts. Just tell me.”

His lips quirk into a smile. “A mate is . . .” The cicadas quiet. We can only hear the waves, gently lapping into the night. “Who you are meant for. Who is meant for you.”

“And this is a uniquely Were experience that differs from Human high schoolers writing lyrics on each other’s yearbooks before heading to separate colleges . . . how?”

I might be culturally offensive, but his shrug is good-natured. “I’ve never been a Human high schooler, and the experience of it might be similar. The biology, of course, is another matter.”

“The biology?”

“There are . . . physiological changes involved with meeting one’s mate.” He’s choosing his words with circumspection. Hiding something, maybe.

“Love at first sight?”

He shakes his head, even as he says, “In a way, maybe. But it’s a multisensory experience. I’ve never heard of someone recognizing their mate just by sight.” He wets his lips. “Scent is a big part of it, and touch, but there’s more. It triggers changes inside the brain. Chemical ones. Science articles have been written about it, but I doubt I’d understand them.”

I’d love to get my hands on Were academic journals. “Every Were has one?”

“A mate? No. It’s fairly rare. Most Weres don’t expect to find one, and it’s by no means the only way to have a fulfilling romantic relationship. Cal, for example, is very happy. He met his wife on a dating app, and they went through years of push and pull before getting married.”

“So he settled?”

“He wouldn’t consider it that. Being mates is not a superior kind of love. It’s not intrinsically more valuable than spending your life with your best friend and getting to love their quirks. It’s just different.”

“If they are so happy, could his wife be his mate? Could he have overlooked the signals when he met her?”

“No.” He stares at the moonlit water. “When we were young, I was there when Koen’s sister met her mate. We were on a run. She smelled her, suddenly went real still in the middle of the field. I thought she was having a stroke.” He smiles. “She said that it felt like discovering new colors. Like the rainbow had gained a few stripes.”

I scratch my temple. “It sounds like a good thing.”

“It’s . . . really good. Not always the same, though,” he murmurs, as if he’s talking to himself. Processing things through his explanations. “Sometimes it’s just a gut feeling. Something that grabs you by the stomach and doesn’t let go, not ever. World-shaking, yes, but also just . . . there. New, but timeless.”

“That’s how you felt? With your mate?”

This time he turns to look at me. I don’t know why it takes him so long to produce that simple:

“Yeah.”

God. This is just total, utter shit.

Lowe has a mate, which is apparently amazing. But his mate is stuck among my people while he’s married to me.

“I’m so sorry,” I blurt out.

His gaze is calm. Too calm. “You shouldn’t be sorry.”

“I can be sorry if I want to. I can apologize. I can prostrate myself and—”

“Why are you apologizing?”

“Because. In a year at the most I’m going to peace out.” His well-being is not my responsibility, but already so much has been taken from him—and swiftly exchanged with bricks of duty. “You’ll be able to be with your mate, and you’ll live bitingly ever after. There’s biting involved, right?”

“Yeah. The bite is . .” His gaze flickers down to my neck. Lingers. “Important.”

“It looks painful. Mick’s, I mean.”

“No,” he husks, eyes on me. My pulse flickers. “Not if it’s done right.”

He must have one on his body. A secret buried into his skin, under the soft cotton of his T-shirt. And he must have left one on his mate, a raised scar to guide him home, to be traced in the middle of the night.

And then something occurs to me. A petrifying possibility.

“It’s always reciprocal, right?”

“The bite?”

“The mate thing. If you meet someone, and you feel that they are your mate, and your biology changes . . . theirs will change, too, right?” I don’t need a verbal answer, because I see in his stoic, forbearing expression that no. Nope. “Oh, shit.”

I’m no romantic, but the prospect is appalling. The idea that one might be destined to someone who just . . . won’t. Can’t. Doesn’t. All the feelings in the world, but one-sided. Uncomprehended and unbound. A bridge built of chemistry and physics that stops halfway, never to pick up again.

The fall would break every last bone.

“It sounds fucking horrible.”

He nods thoughtfully. “Does it?”

“It’s a life sentence.” No parole. Just you and a cellmate who’ll never know you exist.

“Maybe.” Lowe’s shoulders tense and relax. “Maybe there is something devastating about the incompleteness of it. But maybe, just knowing that the other person is there . . .” His throat bobs. “There might be pleasure in that, too. The satisfaction of knowing that something beautiful exists.” His lips open and close a few times, as though he can only find the right words by shaping them first to himself. “Maybe some things transcend reciprocity. Maybe not everything is about having.”

I let out a disbelieving laugh. “Such wisdom, from someone whose mating is clearly reciprocated.”

“Yeah?” He’s amused—and something else.

“No one who has ever dealt with unrequited love would say that.”

His smile is secretive. “Is that how your love has been? Unrequited?”

“There has been no love at all.” I rest my chin over my knees. It’s my turn now to stare at the shimmery lake. “I am a Vampyre.”

“Vampyres don’t love?”

“Not like that. We definitely don’t talk about this stuff.”

“Relationships?”

“Feelings. We’re not raised to put a whole lot of value in that. We’re taught that what matters is the good of the many. The continuation of the species. The rest comes after. At least, that’s how I understood it—I grasp my people’s customs very little. Serena would ask me what’s normal in Vampyre society, and I couldn’t tell her. When I tried to go back after being the Collateral, it was . . .” I flinch. “I didn’t know how to behave. The way I spoke the Tongue was choppy. I didn’t get what was going on, you know?” Yes, he does. I can tell.

“Is that why you went back to the Humans?”

“It hurt less,” I say instead of yes. “Feeling alone among people who were never supposed to be my own.”

He sighs and draws up his knees, hands clasped between them. A thought vibrates through me: right here, right now, I don’t feel particularly alone.

“You’re right, Lowe. I don’t have the hardware to understand what a mate is, and I can’t imagine meeting someone and feeling the sense of kinship you’re talking about. But . . .” I close my eyes and think back fifteen years. A caregiver knocked on my door and introduced me to a dark-haired girl with dimples and black eyes. The breath I draw is stymied. “I was able to install the software. Because Serena gave it to me. And maybe I disappointed her at times, maybe she was angry at me, but that means nothing in the big picture. I understand that you’re willing to face Emery on your own, or to sacrifice everything for your pack. I understand because I feel the same about Serena. And for reasons I cannot fully articulate, because feelings are fucking hard for me, I’d like to come with you. To help you find whoever is trying to hurt Ana. And I think that Serena would be proud of me, because I’ve finally managed to care about something. Even just a little bit.”

He studies me in the moonlit air for far too long. “That was a badass speech, Misery.”

“Badass is my middle name.”

“Your middle name is Lyn.”

Shit. “Stop reading my file.”

“Never.” He inhales. Tips back his head. Stares at the same stars I’ve been mapping all night. “If we do it—if I take you with me, it will have to be my way. To make sure that you’re safe.”

My heart flutters with hope. “What’s your way? Architecturally? With a Corinthian pilaster?”

I’m not funny. But neither is he.

“If you come with me, Misery, you’ll have to be marked.”