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I know that too.

The fog is down on my road at nine in the morning like it has no plans to leave.

She's on the third stair when I come in, in the same clothes as last night, with the quilt around her and her hair a disaster and a coffee.

"Twenty-six to fourteen," I say. "We stand."

Maren lets out something that isn't a laugh. "Fourteen."

"Fourteen."

"Do you know which ones?"

"Every one of them."

"Are you going to tell me?"

"No."

She takes that. She's quiet a second, working through it, and then she says, "That's the right answer," in a voice that's gone thin at the edges, and I understand that we're not going to get any further into the morning than this.

So I sit down on the bottom stair, because I'm not going to do this standing over her, and I put my hands where she can see them.

"Ask me the question from last night," I say.

It takes me a long time and I don't stop.

I tell her that my wolf chose her the second week of April. In the afternoon she backed a rental truck into my mailbox and then argued with me about whose mailbox it technically was.

Not liked. Not wanted. Chose. Finished. Nothing to be done about it afterward by me or by anybody.

I tell her the word for it, and I make myself say the whole thing out loud in my own kitchen.

Mate. Fated.

A bond, which isn’t a feeling, it's a fact with a hook in it, and mine went into her six months before Evelyn Sorrell ever assigned me a single thing.

I tell her the mirror in her shop knew. NINE DAYS. YOU ARE HIS.

That the blank space that cleared before the last word formed had a word in it, and the word was Mate.

I’ve known that since the night she told me about it, and I let her walk around with a space in a sentence for five days rather than let the Veiled Hand tell her first.

I tell her what a claim is and what fated mates are. That it's something chosen between people. That it can be undone but it’s very difficult and painful.

I tell her that I’ve never once come close to doing it, because a claim is only worth anything if the other person says yes with no one forcing them.

She doesn't move the entire time. Not once. She stands at the bottom of my stairs with the quilt around her and lets me put all of it on the floor between us. Her face does nothing I can read, and those are the worst minutes of my adult life.

When I finish, my hands are shaking on my knees, which is new, and I put them under my arms.

Say the rest.

Not yet.

Maren stands up. The quilt goes off her shoulders onto the stair.

"Six months," she says.