Page 205 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

The clause.The clause that's kept me legally locked out of the pack this whole time, the mysterious thing nobody could explain, the wall between me and Amber's registration — it was Nolan's. A career exclusivity clause I signed at twenty-four without reading, back when I'd have signed anything to work with a name that big. Nolan's had me on a leash for years and I never even felt the collar. He just cut it. He cut it in the same breath he ended me.

There's a bitterness in it so complete it nearly loops back around to funny. For five and a half years I told myself I couldn't fully be with Amber — couldn't commit, couldn't put my whole name on that pack — because some careful part of me was always holding a little back for safety. Turns out the leash was real. Turns out there was a literal clause, a legal wall, standing between me and binding myself to her even if I had ever once found the nerve to try. Nolan had me penned this whole time and I never felt the fence. The single honest excuse I ever owned for my cowardice, and I only learn it was real on the same gray afternoon it stops meaning a thing, because I have already burned every reason she would ever have to take me back.

I look up. Amber is watching me read it, and there's nothing in her face. No sympathy. No leftover tenderness. No trace of the woman who once stood on a staircase and let me make her cry. Just that clean, focused calm, a woman looking at a closed account.

"To be clear," she says, and her voice is even, almost kind, which is the worst part, "the reason the contracted pack ended up as four and not five was never a punishment. It was that clause. You were legally bound to Nolan the whole time. I didn'tunderstand what it was tied to, and I still don't understand why a man would sign such a thing over his own future, but it doesn't matter now." She smooths a nonexistent wrinkle from her skirt. "The government pack confirmation doesn't include you, Cade. It never did. You're not bound to me. Not in any way that a piece of paper recognizes." Her eyes hold mine, steady. "Which means you're free. Free to go to Iris. Free to go to any woman, any Omega you like. There's nothing holding you to a single one of us."

"Wait." The word scrapes out of me. "Wait —what?"

I can't hold it in my hands. Any of it. The tent tilts.

She turns away from me. She turns away like I'm a thing she's already set down.

"If you want to talk it through properly," she says, over her shoulder, already moving, "you know where I am. My cottage. Seabriar — you remember it, from before we took the temporary place. That lease is up, so we'll be back there a while yet, until the new house is ready." A pause. "If you want to sit down and discuss logistics like adults, that door's open. But right now?" She lifts her chin toward the far tent, where the music is already starting to swell. "I have a campaign to shoot."

She walks. Skirt gathered in one fist, spine straight, chin high, straight down the petal-strewn aisle toward the arch, the music, the man waiting to make her beautiful on camera. Away from me.

My foot lifts. My whole body lurches after her on instinct, one desperate step,wait, Amber, wait, please—

A wall of black polos steps into my path.

The security team. The same four men who spent the last twenty minutes holding a mob off this tent, calm and enormous, closing ranks in front of me now with folded arms and flat expressions. Not to protect her from the crowd. To protect herfromme.One of them, a guy I've bought a beer for at the Driftglass, doesn't even meet my eyes.

I stop. I stand there in the wreckage of a wedding that never was, in a tent full of dying flowers and my own name burning across every phone in the county, and I watch her go. The white of her dress gets smaller. She reaches the arch. The music lifts. She doesn't look back — not once, not for a second — and why would she. She stopped looking back a long time ago. I'm the only one still standing in the doorway, five and a half years later, watching everyone I ever loved walk off toward a life I'm not allowed to follow.

The tent smells like the end of something. Bruised petals and blown-out candles and the cold ghost of Amber's scent already thinning in the air, that warm new honey note going with her toward the arch. My knees want to fold. I keep them locked out of the last scrap of pride I've got left. A little girl with her mother's hair. A cowboy to teach her the ropes. A gentle man in a field of flowers. The whole picture the fortune-teller painted for me an hour ago, every piece of it real, every piece of it coming true — for four people who aren't me.

The realization settles into me slow and cold and final, the way the water finally closes over a thing that's been sinking for a long, long time.

I just lost my career… lost my pack… and I'm just watching myself lose the omega I thought I could envision without…

CHAPTER 42

In The Cards

~AMBER~

The walk to the second tent is the longest aisle I've ever laid down, and I designed it that way myself, so I have nobody to blame but the woman in the mirror.

It runs a hundred feet at least, a river of ivory runner unspooled across the grass, hemmed on both sides by an arch that August and I argued over for three delirious weeks. Wondrous is the only word for it.

He's built the whole thing out of the fight we had — the good fight, the one where I told him I couldn't stand the flowers from my first bouquet, the ones I'd carried five and a half years ago and dropped on a cold stone step, and he told me, in that gentle immovable way of his, that a flower doesn't carry a memory unless you let it.

So we compromised.

He kept the ranunculus, the ones I loved back then and love still. He kept the deep reds and the burnt autumn orange I've always reached for. He swapped in new things too, coral dahlias and apricot roses and rosemary for remembrance, so the wholearch smells like the old grief and the new joy braided into one impossible rope.

I carry a smaller version of it in my hands right now, a bouquet that is both the flowers I was abandoned holding and the flowers I chose on purpose, and it is the single most beautiful thing anyone has ever made me.

He wouldn't take a dime for it, either.

When I tried to fold the arch into the event budget, August looked at me like I'd offered to pay him for breathing.Some things a man builds because he loves you,he said, then went right back to wiring roses onto a frame at midnight without another word. I think about that more and more lately — the way all three of them have quietly stopped letting me pay my own way through my own life. Not to control me.

Out of something I am still, at this late hour, learning how to let myself have.

The dress is another animal.

It's heavy — real weight, boned and beaded, the veil a whole separate ceremony of tulle floating off the back of my head. It clings to me with the seriousness of a thing built to last a lifetime, and by rights all that weight should be dragging at me.