CHAPTER 5

She is resilient. He tries to imagine how he’d feel if he were in her position—alone, removed, used, and discarded. He has nothing but reluctant respect for her, and that angers him.

Unlike Max’s grip, Lowe’s doesn’t hurt.

It’s tight, though. And the way he presses me against the wall, like he’s trying to put his big body between me and the rest of the world, makes it difficult to breathe in without plastering my entire front to his.

“Miss Lark,” he says. Hoarse. A growl, nearly.

I swallow against the sudden drought in my throat, which makes me realize where his hand is: wrapped around my neck. Almost entirely. His fingers are so long, they touch the valleys behind my ears.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asks, low and deep. Those offbeat eyes of his bore into mine. My heartbeat, which remained miraculously steady during my scuffle with Max, suddenly pounds louder—then whisks into slow flutters when Lowe lowers his head to murmur against my temple, “We haven’t even been married for twenty-four hours. Praying mantises have longer honeymoon periods.”

Max, I could take, fairly easily. Lowe, no way. It’s the difference between a puppy and a dire wolf.

“Just, you know.” My words sound wobbly. I’m not proud of that. “Trying to avoid getting killed.”

Lowe stiffens for a millisecond, then pushes away. But he sticks close, palms flat against the wall on each side of my head—one still bandaged from yesterday’s wound. It feels like a cage. A makeshift prison that he’s building, made of his body and his glare, to keep me pinned in place as he turns around to ask Max, “You okay?”

Max looks up and nods, lips trembling. By now there are several Weres gathered around him. Alex, who glances between Lowe and me with an expression so guilty he’d probably admit to mortgage fraud if pressed ever so slightly. But also Juno, thoroughly inspecting Max for any mortal wounds I might have inflicted, and the older man and the ginger from the ceremony, who stare at me as though I just told the orphanage kids that Santa isn’t real.

Everyone in this hallway looks very ready to shatter my kneecaps, maybe eat the marrow after. Which, nope.

“Excuse me.” I try to dip out of Lowe’s cage to leave. He lowers one arm, locking me in more tightly.

“What happened?” he asks me.

Juno beats me to the answer. “She was about to drink him dry. We all saw it.” She runs a hand over Max’s clammy forehead. He looks briefly adrift, and then stammers out,

“Sh-she was on me. Before I could do anything about it. And . . .” He bends his head, as if lost for words.

Every pair of eyes in the room turns to me. “Oh, come on,” I snort.

“Her fangs were so close,” he whispers feebly, and now I’m getting annoyed. Clearly method acting is his passion, but he did try to assault me.

“Yeah, okay.” I roll my eyes. “Please, leave me out of your erotomaniacal delusions—”

“Have a doctor check Max,” Lowe barks, and then his hand closes around my wrist, at once gentle and unyielding. It happens so fast, I nearly lose my balance. Before I know it, I’m scrambling to keep up with his longer legs as he drags me inside his office.

I immediately look around. I am worried about what he’s going to do with me, but this is a great opportunity. He didn’t use a key, which means that he must have some kind of smart lock—

“What happened?” Lowe asks. He let go of me, but still stands way too close, when there’s plenty of space in the room to not crowd me. It’s giving me flashbacks to our wedding, and this time I’m not even wearing heels, which means that he gets to loom over me in a way almost no one ever does.

The door opens suddenly. Juno enters, but Lowe’s eyes stay on me.

“Misery,” he growls, “how about you fucking answer me, for once?”

“Max came over, saw me, decided to indulge in some light afternoon murder.” I shrug. “That, I’m used to. It’s the subsequent lying that—”

“Bullshit,” Juno says.

I turn to her. “I’m not asking you to believe me. But reason it out—why would I attack a Were, on my first day in your territory, when the consequences would be my death at best, and full-on war between the Weres and the Vampyres at worst?”

“I think you can’t help yourself. I think you saw him, and you wanted to feed, and you—”

“—and I was too lazy to stop by the blood-dedicated fridge fifty feet away?” I step in front of her, forgetting all about Lowe. “That’s not how feeding works. Let’s just acknowledge that we know nothing about each other’s species. Max came in, started telling me about how a bunch of people I share some distant DNA with killed his family, that Lowe’s a traitor for marrying me, and then he . . . what?”

Juno isn’t listening to me anymore. Her eyes meet Lowe’s. A whole conversation passes between them in a split second.

Then she looks back at me. Furious. “If you are trying to imply that Max is working with the Loyals—”

“I’m not. Because I have no idea what the Loyals are.”

“Max is not a Loyal.”

“Sure. He’s not a brook trout, either. I’m not making any ontological claims on him, but he did attack me.”

“You are”—she takes an angry step closer—“a liar.”

“Leave us.” Lowe’s sharp voice reminds us that we’re not alone in the room. We turn at once. And we’re equally shocked to see that he’s addressing Juno.

“She’s lying,” Juno insists. It’s getting a little ridiculous, the way she points at me like I’m a mugger who yanked her purse away. “You should punish her.”

I snort out a laugh. “Yes, Lowe. Spank me and take away my TV privileges.”

“You blade-eared leech.”

“Juno. Out.”

However the hierarchy works among the Weres, it must be strict. Because Juno clearly wants to stay and ground me with her claws, but she dips her head once in something akin to a salute, and then murmurs a soft “Alpha,” before stalking out of the office.

It feels like respite, the door closing behind her, the blessed quiet. Until Lowe moves closer, and I suddenly mourn not having a third person in the room. The bad, as it turns out, is still better than the worse.

“Misery,” he says. There is reproach in his voice, and a bit of a rough edge, and the tone of someone who has lots of problems keeping him busy, and is used to solving most of them with a look and maybe a tiny threat of violence.

We regard each other, just me and him, and yes, I feel it loud in my blood: we’re alone. For the first time—though not of many to come. I doubt Lowe was planning to spend quality time with me ever again after yesterday.

Aside from a layer of stubble, he looks like he did at the ceremony, his harsh face all structure. Clearly, as my makeup artist was painting the Sistine Chapel redux, his found nothing to improve on. I notice his eyes dip to my collarbone, where a faint shadow of the forest-green markings still lingers behind the riot of waves left over from the braids. Once again, that muscle in his jaw jumps, pupils get fat all of a sudden.

This situation is a problem. The Collateral is supposed to be a nonplayable character in a video game. For the next year, I need to be invisible, unobtrusive as I search for Serena. Not the kind of nuisance who gets caught murdering a young Were.