Page 203 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"What?" It comes out cracked. "What — what are you talking about?"

"You're Cade Mercer." She says my full name into the camera like an indictment, and the way she says it, she's already got the whole story written. "You've worked events for Nolan Reeve for years. Seen at his shows, his sets, his private parties. You're the man everyone in this business hires precisely because you keep things airtight — privacy, security, discretion, top to bottom. So it's a little shocking, isn't it, thatyou'rethe source of the leak. What happened? You and Nolan have a falling out?"

"Leak?" I can hear my own voice climbing, thin and baffled and stupid. "I didn't — I didn't leak anything."

She tilts her head. Almost pitying. Then she pulls out her phone, turns it to face the camera first so the whole broadcast can see, and then, slowly, she turns it to face me.

Every drop of blood in my body goes cold at once.

It's my message. The one I drafted. The GPS pin, the line built to detonate,SLOANE CARROWAY WEDDING, HAPPENING NOW, come see the dress before it's gone.It's there on her screen exactly as I wrote it, spreading across the town like a grease fire, screenshotted and forwarded a thousand times over.

Except.

Except the sender isn't the anonymous account.

The anonymous handle is gone. Stripped clean off. In its place, at the top of that message, right where the whole broadcasting world can read it, plain as a headstone, sits my own name.

Cade Mercer.

My jaw comes unhinged. I can't feel my face. Far off, at the very back of my skull, I understand that I have just, on live regional television, in front of a hundred neighbors and a rolling camera, handed the entire world proof that I am the rat. I outed myself. I built the noose. Then I stepped into it. Then I kicked the chair.

The anonymous account was never anonymous. That's the piece my stunned brain keeps snagging on. Whoever pulled this whole thing apart — and I already know it was Sawyer, it had to be Sawyer, that slow-smiling snake with his badge-wearing friends and his quiet federal favors — didn't merely see the leak coming. He reached into the machine, peeled my name off the mask, and pinned it to my own chest for the entire county to photograph. He didn't stop me. He let me do it. Hewantedme todo it. A man doesn't get caught in a trap like this one. A man gets invited into it, and thanks the host on his way down.

"Can you comment?" The reporter presses in, relentless, delighted. "Were you paid? Blackmailed? Coerced into betraying a longtime client? Give our viewers something, Cade."

There's no way out. That's the thing that lands, cold and total, as the camera drinks me in. This isn't a rumor I can smooth over with a phone call and a favor. This is live. This is broadcast. This is my name and my face and my crime, out in the open air of my own hometown, permanent as a brand. I open my mouth. Nothing comes. I've spent my whole career finding the right word for the worst moment, and now, in the worst moment of my life, I've got nothing but a dry tongue and a ringing skull.

Then the crowd roars.

"NOLAN! NOLAN! NOLAN!"

The chant goes up all at once, a stadium sound, and hands lift and point past me toward the platform. I turn on instinct, fear clawing straight up my spine, because if Nolan Reeve walks out onto that stage right now, into this catastrophe I built, I don't know what I'll do — throw myself in front of him, maybe, some final useless gesture —

A man steps up onto the platform in a pure white suit with an apricot floral piece pinned at his lapel.

For half a heartbeat the fear whites out everything. Then something snags. The stance is wrong. Nolan carries himself tight and coiled, a performer braced for a crowd. This man moves loose. Easy. Charleston-slow, taking the whole stage like he built it, and the scent that rolls off him toward me isn't Nolan's at all — it's magnolia and black pepper and warm aged bourbon.

Sawyer lifts a hand and waves at the mob like a homecoming king.

"Now why," he drawls, grinning wide, his voice carrying easy over the confusion, "are y'all out here hollering a stranger's name atme?" He looks around at the flood of people, the fallen barricades, the cameras, and he lets out a low whistle that somehow lands as pure delight. "Well, I'll be. Didn't think one little model prop shoot would pull half the county out of their houses."

The chant dies in a hundred throats at once. Confusion ripples backward through the crowd like wind over a wheat field.

Then the bride turns her head.

She turns, unhurried. The light shifts off her face. It's Amber. It was always Amber. Her hazel eyes travel across the mob, cool and unbothered. Then they land on me at the bottom of her staircase, and they lock.

I feel guilt hit me first, a physical blow, gut-deep. But underneath the guilt, rising up behind it, is a second thing I can't name at first, a feeling so strange and slippery it takes me a full second to catch its shape.

Played.I feel played. I don't understand it yet. I just feel, all at once, like a fish who's only now noticing the hook was in his mouth the whole time.

Because it's all too clean. The crowd, the cameras, the timing, the bride who turned out to be the wrong bride — not one piece of it is an accident. It has the fingerprints of a plan all over it, a good one, a patient one, the kind a man builds quietly over weeks while letting his mark go on believing he's the clever one in the room. I've been so busy congratulating myself on never getting caught that it never once crossed my mind I might be the one being played. I taught myself that trick. I used to be the man holding the strings. Now I'm just the puppet finding out, live, on camera, that his own two hands were never really his.

Amber doesn't smile at me. She doesn't do anything at me. Her face stays perfectly, professionally blank, a calm I know isn'treal because I have seen the storms behind it. She lets her gaze drift off me and out over the crowd like I'm a stagehand who wandered into frame, and she raises her voice, light and puzzled and pitched to carry.

"Um..." She glances at Sawyer, brow prettily furrowed. "Did we miss something?"

The reporter jumps on it. "Ma'am! Isn't this where Sloane Carroway and Nolan Reeve are getting married this afternoon?"