Page 129 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Beckett's eyes keep snagging on the marks and wrenching away. Cade looked exactly once, and hasn't let himself look again, his throat working around whatever he swallowed. August noticed and went still and quiet behind his own face.

They know.

They know precisely what I did last night, and precisely with whom. It is quietly taking all three of them apart at the seams.

I keep waiting to feel cruel about that.

Vindicated, even.

Mostly what I feel, sitting under the weight of every eye in this room, iswitnessed— seen, for the first time in five long years, as a woman somebody wanted enough to leave a mark.

It's a small, dizzy, faintly shameful kind of power, and I don't fully trust it yet. Five years I've spent making myself smaller in this town — neutralizing my scent down to nothing, pinning my hair up tight, keeping my chin level and my wants filed away where nobody could pick them up and use them on me.

Now here I sit in the ugliest room in the county, marked up and steeped in a man's whole night, pinned under a government official's glare, feeling more like myself than I have since the last time somebody buttoned me into a white dress. I don't know what to do with the feeling. So I do the one thing I've always known how to do under pressure. I keep signing.

A light touch lands at my waist.

I glance over my shoulder to find Sawyer inches away, hovering close, a paper cup of the terrible municipal coffee in one hand and — I realize — the other resting gently at the small of my back.

"I got you a chair," he says, low, just for me.

I blink up at him.

"You what?"

He nods toward it.

A plain office chair, wheeled over from some empty desk across the room and positioned right behind me.

"You've been bent over this desk the better part of an hour, signing your entire life away one box at a time. It's bad for your back." He says it like it's the most self-evident fact in the world — like a woman's spine is simply a thing a considerate person keeps track of. "Sit. Sign the rest of it sitting down."

It's such a small thing.

It's such an absurdly small, simple, reasonable thing, and it knocks the breath clean out of me, because in five years and one entire collapsed wedding, not one single Alpha ever once thought about my back.

I feel the heat climb up my throat and into my face.

"Thank you," I murmur, and I sink into the chair.

Relief floods up my spine the instant I do — real, physical relief, my overworked muscles going loose all at once, because after the night Sawyer and I shared, my body has a great many strong opinions about being folded over a desk for an hour.

I bite the inside of my cheek so that not one of those opinions makes it onto my face in a government building.

He doesn't step away. He stays, one hand still resting warm at my shoulder, leaning over me to track the pages.

"You need any help?"

"Just—" I flip back a sheet, squinting. "Just tell me I actually signed everything. My eyes have officially crossed."

"Let's find out." He gets to work.

We move through the whole monster of a document together, the two of us, like a tag team that's run this play a hundred times before. He reads a line; I sign it. He turns a page; I initial the bottom. His finger lands on a little box I skipped straight over — "Here" — and I fill it in. He catches threeseparate sections I missed entirely, tiny initial-boxes buried down in the legalese like landmines, and he taps each one, patient, until it's done and dated.

"Breathe," he murmurs, so low it doesn't carry past the two of us, his thumb moving once against my shoulder. "You're strangling that pen like it owes you money."

"It does," I whisper back. "It owes me an hour of my life and the feeling in three of my fingers."

His quiet huff of a laugh stirs the hair at my temple. "Sign four more. Then I'll buy the pen off you, and we'll press charges together."