Page 127 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"I thought," she whispers, "he went to go start the car."

"He's a petty son of a bitch, is what he is." I chuckle, low, and get one last grip of her — a firm handful that makes her squeak — before I steal one final kiss off her mouth and set my forehead to hers.

"Come on, Blooming Apricot," I murmur. "Let's go sign those documents. Let's show the federal government it's going to take a whole lot more than one nasty little complaint to run the two of us out of our careers."

She pulls back just far enough to look me dead in the eye, and that spark I'm already half in love with catches and goes to open flame behind her eyes.

"It's on," she says.

CHAPTER 23

Witnessed

~AMBER~

"And we're supposed to believe you're approving this?"

The councilman says it like an accusation, which —to be fair to him— it is.

I don't look up from the mountain of paperwork I'm currently signing my whole life away on. If I look up, I'll have to look at his face, and his face has been doing something sour and self-satisfied for the better part of forty minutes now, a face that clearly enjoys the taste of the wordunfortunatelyin its mouth.

We made it here with four minutes to spare before the eight-seventeen cutoff.

Four minutes.

Marshall drove us into town like a man who has never met a speed limit he respected, one wrist draped over the wheel, while I clutched the door handle and Sawyer read the federal instructions aloud off his phone.

We've been in this room the better part of an hour since, and in that hour I have signed my name so many times it'sstopped looking like a word and started resembling a small, tired drawing of a bird. This is the last of it.

The final stack.

The only thing left standing between me and the business I built with my own two hands is this pinched man and his rubber stamp — and he knows it, and he is savoring every second.

I'm bent over a long municipal desk in a back room of the town hall that smells like old paper, scorched coffee, and the particular staleness of a place where joy comes strictly to fill out forms.

My pen has started to feel like a permanent extension of my cramping hand.

To my right, lined up along the wall like boys sent to wait outside a principal's office, stand Beckett, August, and Cade — spines straight, jaws set, doing a heroic and visibly excruciating job of holding still and holding their tongues.

To my left, draped against the side of the desk with the boneless ease of a man who has never once been intimidated by a government building, lounges Marshall.

Marshall is smoking a cigarette.

Indoors. In a no-smoking building.

Beneath a laminated sign that reads, in cheerful municipal capitals, NO SMOKING, tacked to the wall not four feet from his head. He signed the last page of his portion of the paperwork ten minutes ago, and now he's taking a slow, luxurious pull off the cigarette like we're all lounging in a jazz club instead of sweating through a federal compliance hearing.

He considers the fuming councilman through a thin gray veil of smoke, unbothered down to his bones.

He exhales.

A lazy plume drifts across the desk toward the official, who looks like he might combust on principle and save the cigarette the trouble.

"And why wouldn't I approve it?" Marshall asks, mild as warm milk. "The man isn't my packmate anymore. That doesn't mean I'm meant to sit around wishing misery on him for the crime of finding happiness in a different pack." He taps ash into the empty air. "That's not how it works. Not for people who actually loved each other."

The councilman — a thin, pinched man with reading glasses shoved up onto his forehead and the general aura of somebody who files his own joy underpending review— sets his jaw. "This office cannot possibly be expected to certify genuine compatibility among the five of them."

"Can't it?" Marshall isn't even looking at him now. He's studying the burning tip of his cigarette like it holds the more interesting conversation. "Go on, then. Tell me why you think that."