Page 183 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

The quiet stretches long enough that I can hear the batter bubbling on the griddle, the tick of that old wall clock, the distant fuss of the hens out back.

My grin —the one that's talked me out of a hundred speeding tickets and into a fair few beds— climbs onto my face out of pure reflex and finds nothing at all to hold onto.

"We didn't do anything," I add, quicker now, because the silence is starting to itch. "I'm not into her like that. Iris knows I'm not into her like that. It was a couch and a couple hours of sleep. Then I came straight home, and they were all sitting around the table already, forks down, plates clean, like a done deal. Like a real pack. And I'm standing there in the doorway like some stranger who wandered in off the road."

"And whose fault is that?"

Theo isn't laughing anymore.

That's the thing that snags me.

The teasing's gone clean out of his voice, and underneath it is something I don't have a name for on my little brother — heat, real heat, his jaw tight and his scent gone sharp and peppery with it.

I frown at him.

"Why are you angry? You're actually angry."

"Because are you stupid?" He says it flat, no cushion. "Cade. That's cheating. What you just described is cheating."

"That is not cheating!" The chair scrapes as I shove back from the table. "Nothing happened!"

"You slept the night at another woman's place when you have a home full of people waiting on you." He ticks it off on his fingers, relentless. "You have a pack you put your name to three days ago. You are obligated…legally, by a document, obligated…to act like a unit. And you just…forgot all of that existed for one whole night? Then you have the nerve to come home sulking because they ate breakfast without the guy who didn't come home?" He throws his hands up. "Be so for real right now."

Heat crawls up the back of my neck because some small, buried, stubborn part of me knows he's right. I felt it this morning in that doorway; the wrongness of it, the way Amber wouldn't quite meet my eyes, the way Sawyer set a plate down a shade too hard.

I felt all of it and buried it and reached for defensive instead, because defensive is a stance I know how to hold.

"There was no other option," I snap.

"Bullshit." The word cracks out of him. "You could've slept in your truck. You've slept in that truck a hundred times. Hell, you could've slept on the actual ground. You chose the couch. You always choose the version that keeps one boot out the door."

"Why are you taking their side?" My voice climbs, and I hate that it climbs, hate that I sound like the kid he used to be able to make cry. "You're my brother. You're supposed to be defending me here."

"Defending idiocy?" Theo laughs, short and disbelieving. "You've known me my whole life. When have I ever oncedefended something stupid just because it came out of your mouth?"

"So you're on their side."

"Yes." He doesn't even blink. "Yes, Cade, I'm on their side, because it's the right side. It's principle. How would you feel, genuinely, picture it, if your Omega spent the whole night at some man's house? Just to sleep. Nothing happened. Just a couch and a couple hours. You'd be fine with that, would you?"

"She slept with Sawyer," I fire back. "She's slept with all of them. Nobody's calling that cheating."

"You signed the agreement days ago!" Theo says it slow, the way you'd walk a stubborn kid through something he's decided not to understand. "She was with Sawyer before there was any contract to break. And whether it happened before or after doesn't matter, because Sawyer's inside the contract. He's part of the unit. Iris isn't. That's not a hard line to see, unless you're working real hard not to see it."

"Stop calling me stupid."

"Then stop doing stupid things."

I shove up out of the chair and pace to the window, because holding still under all of this is more than I can do. Out in the yard the hens scratch at the dirt, oblivious to the whole business.

"You weren't there five years ago," I tell the glass. "You were a kid. You don't know what it cost us. You don't know what I've been carrying since."

"So tell me." Theo's voice doesn't give an inch. "Right now. Lay it out. Because from where I'm standing, the only thing I have ever watched you carry is an excuse to bolt before anyone can make you stay."

"I'm protecting us!" It bursts out of me before I can stop it, too loud in the little kitchen. "I'm protecting this whole town, and none of you can see it."

Theo blinks.

"From what, exactly? The boogeyman?"