Bride

I spend several minutes sweeping the place for bugs and cameras, and checking for strong Wi-Fi networks under Lowe’s increasingly amused gaze. When I find none, I catch his pitiful must-be-hard-to-live-subsumed-by-this-level-of-paranoia look, and I’m tempted to scrape a lint ball from my pocket and tell him that it’s state-of-the-art spyware, just to be right for once.

He probably wouldn’t know better.

“Can I speak? Or would you like to espionage more?”

I glare. “Your golden boy Alex told me to do this.”

He shakes his head with a small smile. “Emery knows better.”

“So we’re not going to entertain the possibility that she’s going to slit our throats in our sleep?”

“For the time being.”

“Hmm.” I go through his phone to make sure it’s not being tracked. It’s an interesting, vaguely wistful window into Lowe’s life. Not that I expected to find it chock-full of MILF porn, but his most visited websites are European sports news and fancy architectural magazines that look as entertaining as a traffic jam.

“Sorry your baseball team is doing so poorly,” I offer.

“It’s doing fine,” he mutters, offended.

“Uh-huh, sure.”

“And it’s rugby.” He stands to retrieve my blood cooler.

“Anyway. Emery doesn’t seem that bad.”

“No, she doesn’t.” Lowe opens the cooler, and then the secret compartment where we stowed the tools Alex gave me. “Mick has been collecting intel on the attacks and sabotages in Were territory, and it overwhelmingly suggests that she’s behind them. But she also knows that if she were to openly challenge me, she wouldn’t stand a chance. And it’s possible that several of the Loyals aren’t even aware of the kidnapping attempt. They might not know they’re on the bad side of this war.”

I stand by him, checking that all the equipment is accounted for. “Father used to say that there are no good or bad sides in a war.”

Lowe chews on his lower lip, pensively staring at the bags of blood. “Maybe. But there are sides I want to be part of, and others that I do not.” He looks up, pale eyes just inches from mine. “Do you need to feed?”

“I can do it in the bathroom, since we’re sharing this”—I glance around at the flowery wallpaper, canopy bed, landscape-based art—“marriage chamber.”

“Why would you use the bathroom?”

“I’m assuming you’ll find it gross?” Serena always said that there’s something repulsive about hearing blood being swallowed, though she eventually got used to it. I get it: I might be a (shamefully enthusiastic) peanut butter consumer, but I find most human foods gag-worthy. Anything that requires chewing should be launched into space via a self-destroying capsule.

“I doubt I’ll care,” Lowe says, and I shrug. I won’t babyproof his environment. He’s a big boy who knows what he can take.

“Okay.”

I grab the bag and make quick work of it. Blood is too expensive—and too hard to clean up—to risk spillage, which is why I use straws. The process takes less than two minutes, and by the time I’m done, I’m smiling to myself, thinking of the three-hour di

Weres and Humans are weird.

“Misery.”

Lowe’s voice is gravelly. I dispose of the bag, and when I glance at him, he’s sitting on the bed again. I have the impression that his eyes have been on me for the entire time. “Yes?”

“You look different.”

“Oh, yeah.” I turn to the mirror, but I know what he’s seeing. Rosy cheeks. Blown-up pupils with a thin lilac rim. Lips stained with red. “It’s a thing.”

“A thing.”

“Heat and blood, you know?”

“I don’t.”

I shrug. “We get blood-hungry when we’re hot, and we get hot after we feed. It won’t last long.”

He clears his throat. “What else does it entail?”

I’m not sure what to make of this line of questioning on Vampyre physiology, but he was forthcoming when I asked the same about the Weres. “Mostly just that. Some senses are heightened, too.” The scent of Lowe’s blood, but also everything else that makes him him, is sharper in my nostrils. It has me wondering if I still smell like him.

Which has me thinking of what happened earlier.

Not that it was ever far from my mind. “In the plane. When you were marking me.” I expect him to act embarrassed, or dismissive. He just holds my gaze. “Not to make a weird situation even weirder, but it seemed like it was . . .”

“It was.” He briefly closes his eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to take advantage.”

“I— Me neither.” I was as much into it as he was. More, probably.

“It’s the act of it. It’s something that usually happens between mates, or in serious romantic relationships. It’s intrinsically sexually charged.”

Oh. “Right.” I’m a bit mortified to have assumed he was attracted to me. Not because I don’t think I’m attractive—I’m hot, and fuck you, Mr. Lumiere, for saying that I looked like a spider—but because Lowe has Gabi. Someone he’s biologically hardwired to focus the entirety of his attraction on.

“I’d never done it before,” he says. “I didn’t know it would be like that.”

Hold up. “You’d never done it? You’d never marked anyone before?”

He shakes his head and starts taking off his boots.

“But you have a mate. You said so.”

He moves to the other shoe. Without looking up. “I also said it’s not always reciprocated.”

“But yours—yours is, right? You said so.” Gabrielle. She’s the Collateral now, but before, they were together. They probably met in Zurich. Ate that cheese with the holes together, all the time.

“Did I?”

I cover my mouth with my palm. “Shit. No.” I stalk across the room to the bed, but once I’m sitting next to Lowe, I have no idea what to do.

What did the governor say at the wedding? That the Were Collateral was his mate. But he never said that they were together. As a matter of fact, no one in the pack ever acted as though Lowe was in a relationship with her. Ana never mentioned Gabi, not even in passing. There were no signs of her in Lowe’s bedroom.

His mate, the governor said, and it makes sense that Lowe would share that, to guarantee that he was handing off a valuable Collateral. But no one ever said that Lowe was her mate.

“Does she know? That she’s your mate, I mean.”

A micropause, and then he shakes his head. As though reaffirming a decision. “She doesn’t. And she won’t.”

“Why won’t you tell her?”

“I won’t burden her with the knowledge.”

“Burden? She’d be into that! You’re basically swearing eternal love to her—and you’re kind of a catch. I used to vet all of Serena’s dating app matches; I’ve seen what’s out there. The pool is shallow. As far as I know, you have zero criminal convictions, a house, a car, a pack, and . . . okay, a wife, but I’m happy to help you clear that out.” I wonder why I’m being so proactive about this. I’m not the kind to want to meddle with other people’s love lives, but . . . maybe it has to do with this heavy feeling deep in my stomach. Maybe I’m just overcompensating my irrational disappointment with enthusiasm. “Honestly, she’ll be stoked.” She’s the current Collateral, she’s probably as perfectly self-immolating as he is, and—something occurs to me. “Is it about your sister? You think she won’t accept Ana?”

He exhales a laugh and goes to put his shoes away. “The opposite. Ana would be delighted, too.” He checks that the door is locked and comes back to bed. “Scooch over,” he orders, pointing at the side of the bed that’s farthest from the entrance.

I obey without hesitating. “What if she feels the same about you?”

“She can’t.”

The mattress dips with his weight. He lies back, still wearing his jeans and shirt. The back of his head sinks into the pillow as he crosses his arms on his chest. The bed is king-size and still a little too short for him, but he doesn’t complain.