Page 96 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

A collapsed cake. A groom being sick in the parking lot. A father-in-law two drinks from a scene.

My entire career is standing dead center in a small controlled disaster with my hands in my pockets, wearing the untroubled face of a man who just wandered over for the shrimp.

I'm very good at it.

I have never needed the skill more than I need it right now — on a dark shoulder of the harbor road, with a crying Omega folded under my steering wheel and a truck full of her furious ex-pack skidding to a stop six inches off my door.

"Where did she go?"

Cade's got the wheel of the other truck. That alone tells me plenty. They put the panicker behind the wheel. Beckett rides shotgun with his jaw set like a man braced to lift somethingheavy. August is a pale shape in the back seat, quiet in the specific way that always comes right before weather.

I take my time.

I reach back one-handed, haul my work bag off the seat behind me, and drop it into the passenger footwell like a man clearing space for a conversation he didn't ask for. The plaid shirt I'd knotted at my waist during the run comes loose in the same motion. It pools across my lap, over the wheel, into the dark pocket where Amber is tucked so tight against my shins I feel her stop breathing.

From their headlights, I'm one man alone in a cab, mildly inconvenienced. Nothing under the wheel but a dropped shirt and shadow.

Not a muscle, Blooming Apricot. Let me work.

Her scent is the real problem, and I solve it the only way there is. I keep my window cracked two inches, no wider. I let my own roll up thick through the cab — magnolia and cracked black pepper and bourbon, turned up on purpose, until it's the loudest thing in the sealed space.

It helps that the three of them are throwing off enough of their own to fog a greenhouse. Cedar and cold rain. Cut sage. Scorched caramel. Three agitated Alphas cannot parse a thread of bruised apricot under a stranger's dominant musk in a closed truck.

They're drowning too loudly in themselves to try.

"Where did she go?" I repeat, unhurried, tasting the words. "You're asking me. As if I didn't leave that room a solid five minutes ahead of the three of you." One brow climbs. "Unless you held a little debrief after she walked out. Sat in a circle. Workshopped your feelings, while your Omega vanished into the dark. Because, say it with me now, you're cowards who can't move fast enough to fight for the woman you claim to love."

"We can fight." Cade's voice cracks off the word. "We can absolutely fight you, city boy."

"How thrilling for us both." I don't move an inch. "But I'm the wrong address for it. You want to burn something down, aim it at the men who just proved, twice in five years, that the woman they love isn't the priority."

"She is the priority." Beckett. Low, flat, immovable as a foundation stone.

"Is she?" I let it hang. "Then why did you let me leave first? Why did it take you this long to come tearing down your own back roads after her?"

"We were—" Beckett starts.

"I don't care what you were." I lean an elbow on my door, easy, and watch it land. "She's on foot, Shaw. Alone. In the dark. The three of you were still sealed in a room deciding how to feel about it. What if she's being watched right now? Her name is one leaked memo from an undisclosed celebrity wedding. What if somebody lifted her off this road ten minutes ago while you three were finding your shoes? What would you have done about it? Filed a report? Held a vote?"

The fear flickers across all three faces at once. Real, instant, useless.

Ten minutes too late to be worth a thing.

I roll my eyes where they can watch me do it.

"You honestly believe the whole world is fine and dandy with an Omega who built her own empire. Alone, unbonded, wildly successful, and is now the single loudest name in the county?" I shake my head slowly. "You think there's nobody out there itching to take a woman like that down a peg? Either the three of you are the worst Alphas I've had the displeasure of scenting, or nobody ever taught you the first thing about protecting a woman you love. My money's split evenly."

"As if you'd know," Cade snaps.

"I know." My voice drops. The drop is the truth, and I feel Amber go stone-still against my shin. "I know it well enough that I don't have a pack anymore. I chose getting it right over keeping what was comfortable. It cost me everything I owned. So run that sentence at me one more time, and this time aim it at a man who paid full price for the lesson you three keep skipping."

Beckett's frown deepens. His nostrils flare —once, twice— and his head tips a degree toward my cracked window, and every muscle down my right side goes to iron, because if any of them is going to catch her, it's this one.

He knows her scent the way he knows load-bearing walls.

"Something wrong, Shaw?" I ask, pleasant, and I let a fresh roll of magnolia and pepper crest off me and fill the gap. "You look like a man who smelled a decision he doesn't like."

He blinks.