Chapter 14

He didn’t start at once. He sat on my pew bed with his back against the wall and looked at his hands, and then he reached for mine, and stopped halfway, and put his own down flat on the blanket between us instead. Where I could take it, if I wanted to.

After a while, I did. I was still angry. But anger, it turned out, could hold a hand and stay exactly as angry as it was.

“First,” he said. “You asked how I can be sure, when you aren’t.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“You were going to.”

That was fair. All I knew about fated mates was what Molly had told me at sixteen, and what I had copied into the birth books of Ashgrove: a name, a date, mated, sometimes a line drawn through it later in a different ink. Lightning, Molly had said. You can’t mistake it for anything else. I had wanted Caspian on a storeroom floor and in a kitchen and on a bench by a frozen pond. But I had never been struck by anything.

“I’m over a thousand years old,” he said. “I have met