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I want nothing more, but I’m not sure I even deserve to find my own pleasure. Remembering her tears last night, the way she left our bed this morning without waking me, how upset she was at learning we’re mates, all of it still feels like fresh cuts across my heart and heavy shame in my soul.

There’s a conversation we need to have, probably more than one, but damned if I know how to start it.

“You can sense my magick?”

Her words draw me back to the present. “I could always sense it.”

A little line of skepticism appears between her brows, and my lips itch to kiss it away.

“No, you couldn’t. You didn’t know me at first, when you came through the Veil.”

The soft words send another pang of guilt and regret straight down to the center of my gut. No, I hadn’t recognized her at first. Disoriented at being in a new realm, overwhelmed by the scent of so much witchmagick in the air around me, I hadn’t been able to find her. At least not right away.

“I knew you were there,” I say, hoping to assuage some of her concern. “From the moment I stepped through the Veil, I knew my mate was somewhere there, waiting for me.”

Her body tenses at the mention of the bond between us, the mating tie that has already become one with my muscle and flesh and bone. I don’t know if she can feel it, hanging so heavy and irrevocable in the air between us, and it splits my soul in two.

Half of me doesn’t care. That half would have her no matter what the cost. I would claim her and mark her and bind her to me, damn any consequences that may come.

The other half?

The other half yearns to have her claim me in just the same fashion. The other half of my brain cares nothing for these instincts if she does not possess them as well. What good’s a fated bond if it’s not reciprocated?

I’m a brute, but not an unreasonable one. I want my partner willing and hungry for me.

“Allie,” I continue, the unbearable need deepening my voice to a pitch I don’t recognize. “Did you not feel it as well?”

She goes utterly still.

I don’t know precisely what uncertainty she’s fighting, but the edges of my conscious mind catch on the facts I do know.

Her magick is not as strong as others in her coven. Her mother is a coven leader. My Allie has known loneliness and isolation as a result. She’s gone years, perhaps decades, believing her power is not as valuable as the witches around her. Why then should she have any faith that this magick between us is something she should trust?

“I…” Allie starts and then hesitates.

I’ve wanted nothing more in my eighty-seven years than I want her to share her thoughts with me. Remaining silent, I wait for her to finish.

“I felt it,” she whispers. “When you came through the portal, there was… something there, in the pit of my stomach.”

It’s all the opening I need.

Pressing a line of kisses from her collarbone to the edge of her gown where it rests over the top of her breasts, I take full advantage of the admission I’ve just pried from her.

“What did you feel? What manner of magick came over you when I stepped from the portal?”

The magick which came over me is all too easy to remember. A frenzy, an irresistible urge to find and claim her, a restless demand to act.

And… a sense of peace, of belonging. It was a certainty that had settled into my marrow, an inexorable tug toward the new center of my universe.

It had been Allie, leaving her mark on my soul.

I stay quiet and wait for her to answer. Her face is a mask, carefully blank, like she doesn’t want me to guess at what she’s thinking while she tries to come up with her reply. Maybe it’s too much to ask of her. Maybe she’s not ready to give me her thoughts, or still isn’t ready to come to terms with the truth of our bond. I’m almost ready to soothe those worries, take back my request at give her leave to come to it in her own time when she shakes her head and lets out a long breath.

“I felt half-crazed,” she whispers. “When the Veil turned red, I wanted to throw myself into it. I had to physically restrain myself from stepping toward it.”

Her confession fills me with a wild, feral sense of satisfaction. “Why did you hold yourself back?”

Another shake of her head. “I don’t… I thought it must have just been the magick of the Tithe.”