Page 24

“She cursed me so completely that I forgot she’d done it.”

Carolina’s eyes opened. Anger flashed through them, hot enough that the coffee in her cup trembled. “The memory loss is part of the curse?”

“Mack thinks so. Every time he tried to tell me what happened, my mind slid away from it. I thought he was being vague because he didn’t want to admit I deserved whatever was wrong with me.”

“You didn’t deserve this.”

The answer came too quickly to be polite reassurance. She meant it.

I looked down at the scarred tabletop. Someone had carved BITE ME beside a badly drawn heart. Beneath it, a second person had added ASK NICELY.

Arrhythmia offered wisdom in strange places.

“I was an asshole,” I said.

“Being an asshole is not a capital offense.”

“You haven’t met enough assholes.”

Her mouth twitched, but the humor disappeared almost immediately. “You shouldn’t have gone to her alone.”

“I needed to know.”

“Now she knows you’re looking for me.”

“She already knew.” I leaned closer and lowered my voice. “She knew we spoke in the alley. She knew I hadn’t stopped trying to find you. She told me you saw a broken thing and mistook it for something worth fixing.”

Carolina went still. The hurt on her face lasted less than a second before she buried it beneath the careful expression of the High Priestess’s heir.

I hated that expression. I had known her for just over a day, and I already hated anything that made her disappear behind it.

“Is that what you think?” I asked. “That I’m broken and you’re supposed to fix me?”

“No.”

“You answered awfully fast.”

“Because I’ve had this argument with myself since the bar.” She released the cup and flattened her hands against the table. “I do want to help you. Anyone with functioning empathy would. But that isn’t why I can’t stay away.”

The bond tightened between us as if it had been waiting for her to say the words aloud.

“Then why?”

She glanced around the coffee shop. A gargoyle in reading glasses worked through a crossword near the window. Two tables away, a woman with antlers typed furiously on a laptop covered in stickers. Neither appeared interested in us, which meant at least one of them was probably reporting directly to Jacqueline.

Carolina whispered a privacy charm. Gold light skimmed across the table and settled around the booth like a transparent curtain. The sounds of the shop softened until we occupied a quiet pocket of our own.

“Because you’re my mate,” she said.

There it was. No hesitation. No unfinished sentence. The truth I had spent the entire walk pretending I didn’t need to hear.

My dead heart gave one painful thud.

“Mack told me,” I said. “But he isn’t always a reliable source when emotions are involved. He once claimed he wasn’t jealous while growling at a parking meter because Audrey stood beside it too long.”

“Did the parking meter survive?”

“Physically, yes. Emotionally, I can’t say.”