Page 179 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

I hunt the terms of everything, even the terms of my own heartbreak.

I sink down until I'm sitting on the top step, out of sight, knees drawn up, the old floorboards cool through the thin robe. My pulse knocks in my ears.

Below me the kitchen has gone silent in that held-breath way a room takes on right before it breaks.

For a moment there's only the low rumble of Beckett saying something I can't make out, the words too quiet to carry.

Then a sound I feel in my own teeth — a sharp, flat crack of impact, skin on skin, and a stumble.

The silence after it is enormous.

"Did you—" Cade's voice, gone high and stunned. "Did you just punch me?"

"And I'll do it the fuck again." Beckett. Low, level, absolutely certain. "You want to test me on that, keep talking."

"Beckett—"

"Are you stupid?" It's not a shout.That's the terrible part. Beckett doesn't shout. His voice just gets heavier, each word set down like a stone laid in a wall. "We signed a contract. The four of us put our names on a temporary pact, and you think it's fine to spend the night at a woman's place…a woman who works ten feet from you…and stroll in the next morning like you picked up milk? Think about how that sounds. Say it out loud and listen to how it sounds."

"It's Iris." Cade, defensive now, scrambling. "She's not…come on. She's not even an Omega. It's not like that. I don't have feelings for her or anything."

"Oh, that's the bar?" Beckett again. "So if Amber spent the whole night at some coworker's place…Josh, let's say Josh, and came home smelling like his couch, you'd be fine. Just fine and dandy with that?"

A pause.

When Cade answers, he's actually reaching for it, and it makes my stomach turn.

"She…okay, she wouldn't stay over at Josh's. That's different."

"It's the principle." Sawyer's drawl, stripped of every ounce of its usual warmth. "That's the whole thing, Cade. It's the fucking principle of it."

"But she fucked you!" Cade's voice cracks up the middle. "All of you! How is that?—"

"Yeah, she did." Sawyer doesn't miss a beat. "Back when not one of us had signed a single piece of paper, when we were four unattached adults who owed each other exactly nothing. That was then. This is now. We're a pack now…a real one, on paper, with terms. That means you don't get sleepovers with women. Same as she doesn't get sleepovers with any man who isn't one of us. That's not complicated to understand."

"This is so stupid." I can hear him pacing, the frustrated scuff of his boots. "This is insane. Maybe you should've written that down too, huh? Put it in the little terms and conditions with everything else, since apparently I need it in writing."

"It's common courtesy." August. Quiet, cold, final. "It isn't rocket science, Cade."

"Whatever." Cade's voice climbs, fraying, and I know that sound.

I know it in my bones.

It's the sound of a man backing toward a door he's already decided to walk through.

Isn’t this the perfect test as to whether he’d leave me at the altar again?

The sad part is…I’m confident if push came to shove…he would.

And that right there is a big fucking problem.

"You know what? Forget it. I'm out of here. All of you, all of a sudden so damn smitten over an Omega who's just gonna blow the whole thing up again. Trigger the same catastrophe all over,and you'll be right back where we started. But sure. Sure. I'm the problem."

The door slams.

The whole house shudders with it.

A picture frame rattles on the wall beside me.