Page 148 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"Go. You look like hell warmed over."

"I look incredible."

"You look like hell warmed over in a very nice shirt." She studies me a beat longer, and whatever she finds there makes her drop the teasing. "You good, Mercer? You've been a thousand miles away all night."

"Peachy," I lie, with the easy grin that's slipped me out of every honest conversation of my adult life. It works on her the way it works on everyone. She sighs and shoves me toward the storeroom.

The breakroom is a supply closet with delusions of grandeur — a busted couch, some dented lockers, a fluorescent tube that flickers like it's sending code. After the roar of the floor, the quiet lands on me like a weighted blanket. I drop onto the couch and thumb my phone awake out of pure habit, expecting the usual nothing.

There's a text from a number I don't know.

I frown at it.

No name attached, no saved contact, just ten digits I've never laid eyes on. Wrong number, probably. Some drunk tourist who fat-thumbed a message to the wrong Cade.

I open it.

You really didn't learn the first time? Should I prove to you that marrying this omega would be a mistake?

The world goes very quiet and very cold.

I read it three times.

Then a fourth.

The busted couch, the flickering light, the muffled roar of the bar on the far side of the wall — all of it drops clean away. There's only those two sentences, glowing up at me out of the dark.

Only the cold sweat breaking out down the length of my spine.

Only the old, familiar taste of dread flooding the back of my throat, turning my own scent sour in my nose, that spiced rum and blood orange gone suddenly acrid with fear.

So there it is.

The thing I've been standing guard against for weeks. The hand out of the woodwork. It found me anyway, whether I went all in or held myself back — it found me exactly the way I always swore to myself it would.

Five years, and they haven't forgotten a thing.

Five years, and they're still perfectly willing to reach a manicured hand straight into my life and squeeze until I do what I'm told.

I don't recognize the number, but I don’t have to.

I know thevoiceof it — that smooth, entitled, velvet-over-a-blade menace. I heard it five years ago in a study that reeked of cigars and old money, when a man told me, smiling the whole time, exactly what would happen to my baby brother's future if I didn't walk away from his daughter by morning. So I did.

God forgive me, I walked, and I have hated the taste of my own name every single day since.

I make myself breathe.

I swallow the stone in my throat, hard, and force my spine straight against the busted couch.

You're not nineteen and terrified anymore. You're not that boy. You've got a spine now. A mother who raised you better than his example. A brother who just looked you in the eye and told you to quit paying a debt that was never real.I lock the phone. I press it face-down flat against my knee.You are stronger than this. You can do this. You will not run this time.

I tell myself I believe it.

I walk back out into the roar, because that is simply what you do — you put the coat back on, you go back to work, you do not let a single soul see the crack running straight down your middle.

I'm three steps back onto the floor when it hits me.

A scent.