Page 1 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Prologue: The Empty Aisle

~AMBER~

FIVE YEARS AGO…

Here is a thing nobody tells you about your own wedding.

If it starts going wrong, you will be the last person in the building to hear about it.

Literally.

The string quartet downstairs has played the same eight bars of Pachelbel eleven times. I know the number is eleven because counting is the only job I have left. My mother took all the others.

She took the dress, a forty-pound architectural event with crystals sewn into the bodice, after mine was deemed too simple, by which she meant too much like me. She took the flowers, the menu, the guest list, the church-versus-ballroom debate, which the ballroom won because my father owns it.

What she left me is standing still while she circles, pinching tulle a quarter inch to the left like the tulle is the problem.

"Stop fidgeting, Abercrombie."

"The skirt weighs more than I do, Mother. A bomb couldn't crease it."

"Don't be vulgar."

This woman…

"I wasn't being vulgar. I was being accurate."

I catch my own eyes in the gilded mirror, hazel gone sharp and green the way they do when something's wrong, and I look away fast, because a bride who looks scared in a mirror an hour late to her own ceremony is a bride who has started doing math.

This is all going downhill, isn’t it?

"What time is it?"

"It doesn't matter what time it is."

"It's a wedding. The time is the entire point of it."

She exhales through her nose.

Helena Whitlock does not sigh. Sighing wrinkles.

"There has been a small delay. These things happen at events of this scale. Hold still."

The ceremony was called for four. The clock on the mantel, a hideous gold thing chosen by my father's hotel designer because it photographs well, says 4:47.

That is not a small delay. That is a missing groom.

Three missing grooms, technically.

I'm marrying a set after all. The pack I love and cherish who I assumed loved me just as hard to show up to the most important moment in my life.

Don't…they're coming.

Beckett is never late. Three years, and I have never once stood anywhere waiting for Beckett Shaw. He's the man who shows up forty minutes early to make sure the doors open in the direction the fire code wants.

If something broke, something you can touch, a beam, an axle, a generator, then he's standing in the middle of it right now with his sleeves rolled up, fixing it, while August talks him downin that greenhouse-quiet voice, breathe, Beck, and Cade drives too fast up the parkway with his tie already loose, working out which joke will make an hour's wait funny to me.

That's what's happening.