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Yes, every part of me says. Yes. Yes. Now.

It takes me too long, and she's counting. She counted eleven of these on my porch steps once and told me so afterward.

Her face changes at about seven.

"Don't," I say.

"You're going to say no."

"I'm not."

"Then why is your mouth doing that?"

"Because I want to make sure you're choosing me." It comes out flatter than I want. My hands are shaking and I put them behind me. "Not just choosing not to die. Those are two different things and you don't have time to tell them apart, and if I take a yes shaped like that, then I'm the fourth person in this room tonight who wanted you for something."

She goes very quiet.

Behind me, something the size of a house hits whatever Evelyn put up, and neither of us turns around.

Across the room, past whatever Evelyn has strung up between us, Seraphine laughs like she's at a party.

"He'll say yes," she calls. "Look at him. They always say yes, and then they spend the rest of the time explaining to themselves why it was hers."

I don't turn around. It's the cheapest thing anybody has said to me in six months but I've been asking myself the same question and I've never liked my answer.

"You've wanted to tell me since April." She steps into me, close enough that the cold coming off the floor stops mattering. "You want a yes I could've given you on an ordinary Tuesday. Over a mailbox. With nothing on fire."

"Yes."

"You're not getting one. There aren't any ordinary Tuesdays left tonight, and there aren't going to be any more of them if I stand here being careful." Her chin comes up. "So ask me the other way."

"Maren."

"Ask me if I'd want you if there was no hole in the floor."

I can't. I haven't asked her that question because I'm scared of the answer.

She answers it anyway.

"I'd have gotten here eventually," she says. "Slower. Meaner about it. I'd have made you wait until spring out of pure spite." Her eyes are wet and her voice doesn't wobble at all. "But I'd have gotten here, Gage, and you know it."

My wolf should be tearing the inside of my chest apart right now.

My wolf isn't saying anything.

"There's a piece you're missing," Mercy says.

She's come around to my side of the seam. Up close her face is the one from the pendant, and her hands are ruined, and she keeps them at her sides like she's used to that.

"A claim runs one direction," she says. "Him to her. That's what your kind has always done, and it holds about as well as a nail in wet plaster, and I watched three generations of women find that out." She looks at me, and I know exactly what she can see.

"That isn't what she needs. An anchor has two ends. She has to take hold of you, and you have to let yourself be taken, and if there is any part of you that would rather do the holding, this fails and the floor takes her."

I've been braced for a cost.

I'd been holding one ready all night, but it was the wrong one. I could have given her my life in about a second and a half and never felt the weight of it. Nobody has ever asked me to be the one who gets held.

I've got no practice. I've got a house I built alone and a pack that answers to me and not one hour in any of it where someone supported me and I let them.