. . . 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.