Page 86 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Nobody answers.

Cedar and cold rain. Cut sage. Burnt sugar.

Three Alpha scents climbing the sealed walls with nowhere to go. Under all of it, the sound of three men understanding there is no rebuttal coming, because I have not said a single thing they haven't whispered to their own ceilings at three in the morning for five straight years.

I let it hang.

Then I roll my eyes, because I'm out of patience, and somebody in this room has to say the plain thing.

"Well, damn," I say. "You didn't even deserve her back then."

Beckett's jaw flexes.

"You have no idea what it cost us to leave."

"I have no interest in what it costyou." I hold his eyes. "That's the whole tell, Shaw. Five years later, and the first place your mind runs is the priceyoupaid. Not the woman standing behind me who paid all of it and never got a vote."

Beckett's voice drops to the register a man uses for a thing he's rehearsed alone in the dark for years.

"I thought I was protecting her. If we'd bonded her that day and he'd made good…pulled the permits, closed the farm, ended Theo's future, she'd have spent her whole life watching the people she loved fall one by one, knowing she was the price of it. I couldn't hand her that. I decided it was kinder to be the villain once than to let her be the reason."

"You decided." I don't raise my voice. "You. Not her. You looked at a woman with more spine than the four of us stacked together, and you decided which truth she was strong enough to carry. Then you drove off before she could prove you wrong. That is not protection, Shaw. It's the most arrogant thing a man can do to someone he claims to love. You didn't spare her a choice. You stole one."

Beckett has no answer.

I watch the sentence go into him like a nail into old wood — slow, all the way to the head.

"And who made you the authority?" Cade rounds on me, because attacking is easier than sitting in that quiet. "One day in this town, and suddenly you're the expert on standing by your Omega. Where's yours, Devereaux? This pack of yours you keep so carefully quiet — where are they tonight?"

The question lands exactly where he aimed it. I don't let it reach my face.

Five years of practice keeps that door shut.

"I'm the authority," I say, even and low, "because I already know precisely what it costs to get this wrong. It's the onlycredential that matters. It's the one I'd give anything not to hold."

That quiets even him.

There is no charm ever built that can answer plain honesty.

It's Beckett who recovers first, jaw setting, drawing breath to defend the indefensible one more time.

"No." August's voice cuts across him before the first word forms. Soft. Final. "He's right."

The other two round on him like he's pulled a blade in a locked room.

"Whose side are you on?" Cade snaps.

"Amber's." August doesn't lift his voice. He never does; I've clocked that about him now. "That was meant to be the entire point of us. You're only angry because he said the thing out loud that we agreed among ourselves never to say. Be honest for once, Cade. Out of the three of us, you were the one most afraid for Theo. Not for her. For your brother. I loved you enough to never once name it. I'm finished being that particular flavor of gentle."

"That is not—" Cade starts.

"We should not be turning on each other." Beckett moves, putting his body between his packmates the way he's clearly spent his whole life doing. "This is exactly what the man wants. Us, cracking down the middle. We can argue whose fear was worse until dawn, and it changes nothing, so we shouldn't?—"

"My dad threatened you."

The voice is very small.

It stops the whole room like a hand on a bell.