Page 91 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Reasonable love folds the second it's asked to bleed.

My feet hurt already, and I'm not a quarter of the way.

I keep going.

My father is a villain.

I decided that a long time ago, and I am not interested in revising the ruling tonight.

But I'm honest enough, furious, with the salt stinging the back of my throat, to know he didn't build this new trap to punish me.

He built it to protect me.

Me, and the empire he assumes I'll inherit whether I want the thing or not. He watched three men prove, in front of the whole eastern seaboard, that they'd choose their own ground over his daughter.

He filed it away, the way he files everything.

Now he's testing whether they'll do it a second time.

That's what turns my stomach on this dark road.

Not the cruelty. The accuracy.

He is proving his entire point without saying a word, because the men keep proving it for him.

He threatened them once, and they folded.

He's threatened them again, and I only learned the truth of the first time because the second arrived in a cream envelope with a filing code stamped in the corner.

What, exactly, were they planning to do about it?

Sign the forms. Stand in a row. Be careful, honest, and sorry, and let it happen again in slow motion, because careful is the only setting they own.

I stop in the middle of the empty road and press the heels of my hands to my eyes. I breathe. My own scent comes up around me sharp enough to taste — apricot gone bruised, roses snapped off at the stem, the spiced-citrus burn I could never train out of my own anger.

There's no neutralizer left in me strong enough to hold it, and I don't want to hold it. Let the whole dark road smell it.

There's no one out here to hide from.

I would rather crawl home on my hands than let one of them drive me.

I lower my hands.

I keep walking.

I make it maybe a mile before I hear the engine.

It comes up fast behind me, too fast, tires biting the dry road, then a hard screech as it brakes.

My whole stupid traitor heart does the thing I'd have sworn under oath it wouldn't. It leaps. For one bright, humiliating second, I let myself hope it's them. That one of them couldn't stand it.

That somebody finally chose the unreasonable thing and came tearing down a dark road to fight for the woman who walked out on him.

I turn my head.

It isn't them.

The truck idling half a length behind me is not Beckett's, and the eyes locked onto mine through the windshield aren't cedar-and-storm hazel. They're darker. Warmer. Right now they're wide with something that looks a great deal like fear.