Mate (Bride, #2)

by Ali Hazelwood

It’s because Lowe feels domesticated, a wise, instinctual voice explains from the recesses of my skull. Lowe can, and will, control and pace himself. Koen is a wild card. Koen is raw. Koen will do whatever the hell he— “You are my mate,” he says. With little inflection.

“Is this a, um…terminal diagnosis?” His lips twitch. “No cure, I’m afraid.” “I see.” I clear my throat. “Well, this relationship sure escalated quickly.”

And then I met Ana. Who’s an orphan and a hybrid. She’s everything that I used to be. And the compassion I’ve never been able to extend to myself overflows whenever I think about her.

“Does it not bother your back, Koen?” “You mean, the supermassive weight of my ego? No, it does not.” “Oh, come on. How did you know—” “You’re gonna have to come up with more creative insults than that, Serena.”

Omg the banter

It’s Misery’s fault if I have a thing for tall blondes who use fuck off humor to shield their true selves. I’ll write my sister a strongly worded email of condemnation.

“Don’t criticize my looks. It hurts my feelings.” “Your what?” I ask. Koen gives me a deadpan look.

Because every single thing I glanced at, grazed, examined, eyed, or even considered when we were at the grocery store, every single thing I decided to walk past, every single thing I told myself I didn’t need—every single thing has somehow made it here, inside Koen’s house.

We love a man obsessed

I will paint this entire territory green before I let anyone in the pack spill a single drop of red. Okay?”

🫠

And his eyes are always searching mine, shaping me, trying to make sure I’m okay, and never asking anything of me.

“Could reports of his passing have been greatly exaggerated?” “I ripped his heart out of his chest, chewed it for half a minute, and then spit it into the ocean.” I nod slowly. “A simple ‘no’ would have sufficed.”

😂

bends down to scoop me up, and my forehead fits so perfectly into the valley of his already-prickly throat, this cannot be anything but fated.

He bends further, and there isn’t a single trace of doubt on his face. He’s an immovable object and an unstoppable force. And he says, slowly, “If you think I’m going to let you die, Serena, you know fuck all.”

I think he might want to know everything that’s in my head. I think he could shake every thought I’ve ever had out of my skull, rummage through them for years, and still not be bored.

He easily resigned himself to a lifetime without her, but… Simply put, he is unwilling to contemplate a universe in which she no longer exists.

Koen presses his lips together, clearly worried, and my entire body hurts with how much I care for him. I would give a year of my life, a year I don’t even have, to press a kiss against the corner of his lips. Lower, where the stubble is quickly regrowing. I would do illegal, maybe even unethical things, in exchange for the right to bury my nose in the crook of his throat, where the scent of him is densest.

There has never been anyone like him. I could live a thousand more years, and there will never be.

“Where would I bite you, to show that you’re mine?” Koen goes still at the question. And then, after processing it for entirely too long, he lets out a soft, explosive curse against my collarbone. “I hate it,” he breathes out. “What?” “How perfect you are. I spent the last twenty years hoping that if there was a mate for me out there, I’d never come across them. And then I found you, and, Serena…there isn’t one thing I would change about you. Or one single thing I regret about knowing you.”

I think about having this, but times twenty. Times one hundred. Times tens of thousands. When two people fall in love, how many nights do they spend together, doing absolutely nothing, before they’ve had their fill? How many silences and crosswords and mugs of tea do they share?

“My entire life is made of fucking lines. And you’re blowing past all of them.”

“Serena,” he breathes out against my cheekbone. “I think this might be it, for me.”

It’s like a boulder in my stomach, the transience of this. Of us. We’re momentary. Impermanent. Doomed.

“If someone had given me a piece of paper and asked me to list everything I liked, everything I dreamed of, everything that I was sure would make me happy, you would have been the final product of it.”

Oh my god 😭

“There could never be disappointment, because there were never any comparisons, or expectations, or hopes, or standards to meet. There’s only…” He casts a glance around the room, searching. Then his eyes settle on me. “There is only you, Serena.”

I could spend the next hundred years cataloging new things about him, and never be done. He could be the project of my lifetime. Just like I’m his.

“You make my world better, for sure. And mate or not, I wouldn’t love you half as much if you weren’t the kind of person who deserves it.”

The fact that every mundane little action feels new and shimmery and magic when she’s around.