Page 85 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

The three of them barely wait for the hum to settle.

"Why are you here?" Beckett asks. Not loud. Just immovable, like a door with the bolt thrown. "In this room. This is a pack matter."

"Is it?" I lean back against the table. "Because from where I stood in that lobby, it looked like a compliance matter. I'm the fourth signature on a five-person unit. That makes it very much my room."

"You met her yesterday." Cade's arms are crossed. "You don't get to sit in on the family business."

"There's a family business? I'd love the org chart, because from the outside it reads as three vendors and a great deal of unresolved eye contact."

Cade's mouth twitches before he can stop it — the reflex of a man who reaches for a joke the way other people reach for a handrail. "Okay. That one was decent."

"Don't." Beckett doesn't look at him. "He isn't being funny. He's maneuvering."

"He can be both," Cade mutters. "That's the irritating part."

"Enough." Beckett takes a step in, done with all of it. "You think this is a game you get to referee."

"I think," I say, "that you'd rather interview me than answer for yourselves, and I think it's because the interview is more comfortable. So let's not." I push off the table. "I'll ask the real question instead. Why are the three of you standing in a sealed room acting like frightened boys, when it's obvious to anyone with eyes what this actually is?"

August tilts his head, quiet.

"And what is it you think it is?"

"It's a test. Her father built the whole thing. The complaint. The deadline. The impossible number. Alistair, or whatever he has printed on the letterhead. He didn't file a safety report. He designed a trap, and he built the only clean exit through a door he's holding. That's not oversight, gentlemen. That's a man auditioning you." I spread my hands. "So why does that scare you?"

Cade's scent snaps first. Salted caramel gone bitter, blood orange sharpening toward smoke.

"Because we've sat this exam before, city boy. Five years back, that man cornered us and laid out exactly what he'd take from each of us if we bonded her. My brother's scholarship. Beckett's permits. August's contracts. Half thistown's livelihood, since he held the paper to do it. Those were not stupid threats."

The thing moves in my chest before I decide to let it out. It's old. It's mine. It does not care in the slightest that these men are strangers.

"And that scared you?"

All three flinch, because I've raised my voice and I did not plan to.

The room is small enough that the sealed walls throw it straight back.

"Do you understand what a threat like thatis?" I say. "It's a test. Every single time. Her father is richer than God. Her family is richer than that. Men like Alistair do not hand their only daughter to whoever happens to ask. They threaten the ground under your feet on purpose. Then they wait, because they want to see which men have the spine to keep standing on it." I shake my head. "He wasn't trying to run you off. He was measuring whether you'd run. You took the exam and handed it back blank."

"They were threatening mybrother." Cade's voice splits up the center. "Theo was nineteen. That scholarship was his entire future. What were we supposed to do, gamble the kid's life on a hunch?"

"You were supposed to do anything but what you did."

"We had no other move." He says it like a prayer he's worn down to nothing. "We got in the car. We drove. We left her at that altar because there was no play on the board that didn't burn somebody we loved. We didn'twantto?—"

"But you did!"

I don't realize I'm shouting until the words hit the sealed walls, bounce, and leave the room dead silent behind them.

I make myself slow down.

I've run crisis management on four continents. I can hold a tone in a burning building. I find it again.

"There is a legal system," I say, quiet now, which is worse. "There are courts. There are designation-rights advocates who eat men like Alistair for sport. There are at least three packs in this county sitting on more money than the Whitlocks, and I would bet my license that not one of you ever bothered to learn their names, because you never once lifted your head out of your own fear long enough to count the room."

I look from one to the next.

"You genuinely believed one rich man was going to walk into a town like this…a town built by people who ranfrommen like him, and that everyone here would fold their whole lives shut and let him win, because he asked politely? You don't know who's actually wealthy in this harbor. You don't know what half these people walked away from to build what they've got. You don't know why they chose this exact patch of coast to build it on. You didn't ask. You heardI'll ruin you, and you decided the only sane response was to abandon your Omega on the worst morning of her life, in front of the entire eastern seaboard, without one word of explanation."