Page 111 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"I left." He says it without a flinch. Then, softer, like he's still turning the stone of it over in the dark even now: "Truthfully? I stood there in that dining room and I watched all four of them figure out, in real time, how to look at her like a littlesister instead of a bride. I watched her fold herself right into the middle of them like she'd always had a seat there waiting. They were happy, Amber. God, they werehappy.Thriving, even, once the shock wore off. So I did the math the way I always do." A slow breath. "Five men on a registration, and one of them's nothing but the odd piece rattling loose in the box. I felt like collateral damage. Like something they'd be building careful little detours around for the rest of their lives. There was no need to put that on any of them. So I took my name off the paper. I gave them my blessing, and I stepped clean out of the frame."

"Did you love them, though." It's not quite a question. "Truly. Or is that just the noble story you tell so the leaving sounds like a gift instead of a wound."

The look he gives me is warm and approving, like I've passed some small quiet test by refusing to let him off the hook easy. "Loved them more than I've got the words to carry," he says. "Every single day of the near-decade they were mine. I grew all the way up inside that pack. Every decent thing about the man sitting on your quilt right now — some root of it got planted by one of those four. That part's real, and I won't prettify it and I won't take a word of it back." He pauses, and his voice hardens a degree. "But were they good Alphas? The right kind? The kind a woman actually deserves to build a life on?"

He shakes his head, slow.

"No. They were toxic as hell, if I'm being honest with you tonight. Each in his own private, particular flavor of it. Which is the whole reason I can sit here on your bed and tell you, flat out, that your three men genuinely love you."

I frown. That's a hard left turn and I do not enjoy being lost inside my own bedroom. "How doesyourtoxic pack tell you a single thing aboutmine?How do you get from your sister's DNA test all the way to my—" I gesture vaguely out toward the dark road, the sleeping town, the three men who are meant to bestanding on that road by 8:17 whether the sun cooperates or not. "—to them."

"Because I watched the whole thing happen in reverse, right in front of me." He shifts to face me fuller, warming to it, one knee drawing up on the quilt. "My four could not find and keep an Omega to save their entire lives. Years of trying. And it was never bad luck. It's that not one of the four had the first earthly idea how to love a person, or — worse — how to let himself be loved back. You cannot hold what you were never taught to carry. They'd have quietly wrecked any good woman fool enough to walk in early. Some nights I half thank God none of the early ones stuck around long enough to get hurt."

"And then you left."

"And then I left. Gone a full year. In that one year, with my sister, the exact thing I could not make happen in nine years of trying just — happened. All on its own. They learned it." His voice gentles right down. "All four of them. Learned how to love a person properly. Learned to look their own ugliest parts dead in the face and call each one by its right name."

"So she fixed them." I can't quite keep the old bitterness from fraying the edge of it.The right Omega glides in, and lo, the men become men. I've heard that fairy tale. I wore it to an altar once. It doesn't end the way the poster promises.

"No." He catches the edge instantly — he catches everything, it's maddening — and shakes his head, firm and certain. "That's the exact part the whole world gets wrong, and I need you to hear me get it right, because you specifically have been sold cheap redemption before and I won't be another man who does it. She did notfixthem. Nobody on God's earth gets fixed by being loved. That is simply not how the repair works." He leans in a degree, and the mattress dips. "What happened is there came a moment — I got it secondhand, but I believe it down into my boots — where my sister decided towalk away."

"Walk away," I repeat.

"Walk away. As in: another pack came sniffing around her. A good one, from everything I heard. Better than mine ever was, on paper and off it both. Slid right into her rearview mirror at the precise moment my four had gotten comfortable enough to start taking her for granted." He spreads his hands. "And it made every last one of them realize, all at the very same instant, that the best thing that ever wandered into their sorry lives was already halfway out the door with her coat on."

Oh.Something cold and clarifying trickles down the back of my neck, because I am not stupid, and I can see exactly where this map is leading.

"Some men," he says, low, "cannot see the worth of the thing they're holding until it starts sliding right through their fingers. My four were precisely that stupid — and precisely that lucky. They happened to wake up in time." He lifts a single finger, and there's cold steel threaded under all that warmth now. "But hear me, because this matters more than anything else I'll say tonight. Waking up in time does not mean a man isowedthe second chance. Let me be as clear as I know how to be, since you're a woman who's had cheap forgiveness sold to her by the pound. If a pack was evercruel— if there was real harm done, if they made an Omega small on purpose, put hands or fear on her, ground her down to keep her — then no. There is no guidance for that, and no second chance, and no wine-soaked story that redeems it. You run, and you do not look back once, and I will personally help you load the car."

His eyes hold mine, steady and dark.

"But my four were never cruel. They wereignorant.Nobody ever once sat them down and taught them how. There's a whole canyon of difference between a man who hurts you and a man who simply never learned any better — and sometimes, only sometimes, that second kind can be led to the water and taughthow to drink. That's not weakness in you for allowing it. That's just the difference between broken and mean." He pauses. "The first one, you can sometimes mend. The second one you flee."

He keeps looking at me while he says all of it. Like it was never once a story about his sister at all.

He's quiet for a long moment. When he speaks again his voice has dropped, and the ache laid bare in it is so plain that I have to drop my own eyes to my hands.

"I went back once," he says. "Year or so on. Didn't tell a soul I was coming — just drove by and parked halfway down the block like a ghost casing his own funeral. Watched them out in the front yard through the fence slats." His throat works. "My sister had all four of them wrapped around her little finger like ribbon on a gift. She was laughing at something Cass said. Threw a dish towel clean at Ezra's head. And Silas — Silas, who never in his life learned how to lead a pack — was just standing off to the side watching her like she'd personally hung the whole sky up that morning for his benefit."

He turns the glass on the nightstand a careful quarter-inch, only to have something to do with his hand.

"They bickered," he says. "Easy. Playful. That competitive back-and-forth where four grown men trip clean over each other for the honor of being the one who makes her laugh next. All of them fighting — gently, endlessly — over the sweet privilege of cherishing the one woman standing in the middle of their orbit."

His eyes come back up to mine, and they're wet at the rims, and he doesn't bother hiding it.

"That," he says. "That right there. That is the only thing I ever truly wanted, my whole life. To bicker with my pack. To be fought over a little. Tofitwithout having to file down my own edges to do it." A small, accepting smile that hurts far worse than tears would. "And I finally had to sit alone in my parked truck and admit out loud that I never once had it with them. Notbecause a single one of them was a villain. Because I was the odd piece in the box, and some things simply are what they are. It happens. You accept it. You let it go."

He meets my eyes.

"That was five years ago now. I've been letting it go every day since."

"So it wasn't—" I search for the shape of it. "It wasn't ugly. The leaving. It wasn't slammed doors and thrown plates and things you can't unsay. You didn't leave on bad grounds at all."

"Not one door slammed." He shakes his head. "I make it sound grim because the second anybody hears the words 'I left my pack,' they reach straight for the sad violin — the estranged man, the tragic loner, the fellow eating supper alone over his sink." One shoulder lifts. "But I don't hold it that way inside. The leaving pushed me out into the wide open. Made me quit standing around waiting on a switch that was never once going to flip inside that house, and go out looking for the one that might. Out there. When I'm not braced for it. When I least expect it to."

He looks at me then.Reallylooks, in that unhurried Charleston way that makes my whole bedroom feel two sizes smaller than it was, and his voice drops to almost nothing at all.

"Though," he murmurs. "I'll admit the process might be moving a touch fast to say for certain."