Page 130 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

It's such a stupid little thing to say.

It undoes the knot between my shoulder blades better than any breathing exercise ever could.

The whole time, his scent is doing something deliberate to the air around me.

Mine has been going haywire for the better part of an hour — I can smell it on my own skin, the spiced-citrus tang of nerves and swallowed anger threading through my apricot, gone sharp and sour with every single thing I'm not allowed to say out loud.

But Sawyer leans in close over my shoulder, and his scent rolls in over mine like a tide coming home.

Magnolia opening warm, black pepper, aged bourbon gone soft and steady, settling down over me thick and unhurried. It isn't an accident.

I understand that now, understand it all the way down. He's doing it on purpose —blanketing me in himself— and it works exactly like a shield.

The councilman's voice goes tinny and far away. My galloping pulse gentles. My hand stops its fine tremble on the pen. I breathe him in, deep, and the panic simply drains out through the soles of my feet. I sign the rest of my name across the rest of the pages while he makes one last unhurriedpass through the stack, thorough as a man defusing something, leaving the government not one loose thread left to yank.

The councilman clears his throat twice, loud, plainly trying to wrestle the room's attention back onto his own importance.

"This is all very touching," he says, to no one, to the air above our heads. "It changes precisely nothing about the standard of scrutiny this office intends to—" Nobody is listening to him. Not the clerk, not the three men, not me. His voice thins and dies partway through its own sentence, starved of the fear it runs on, and he retreats, sulking, back to his stamp.

By the time we reach the final page, the final signature, the last initialed box, the room has gone quiet.

I don't notice at first.

I'm too busy capping the pen and flexing feeling back into my cramped-up hand. Then I feel it —that particular prickling weight of being looked at— and I glance up to find the entire room watching the two of us. The councilman, his script forgotten. His silent clerk, who has spent the last hour stamping pages with the enthusiasm of a man counting ceiling tiles, now openly staring.

The three men along the wall, their fury gone strange and tangled and complicated on their faces. Marshall, cigarette halfway to his mouth, held there, forgotten.

I sit up straighter in my new chair.

"...What?"

Marshall smirks.

He pushes off the side of the desk and rises to his full height, gesturing at the pair of us,me settled in my chair, Sawyer still leaned protective over my shoulder, with the glowing end of his cigarette.

"An Alpha who can make his Omega feel safe in any room, under any circumstance," he announces to the assembly at large, "is an Alpha who can unify a whole group of people determinedto love with intention." He takes one final, contemplative drag. "Everyone makes mistakes. Most of them, if you trace the thing back far enough, get made out of fear."

He pauses.

His dark eyes travel to Sawyer, and the two of them hold a long look between them, five years of shared history folded quiet into it.

"That doesn't mean the people who made them don't deserve a second chance to try again," Marshall says, softer now. "Same as every soul in this room deserves happiness — long as it aligns with the cards they're holding."

Down the wall, something moves through the three of them at that — the first thing all morning that isn't rage or shame.

August's eyes fall shut, briefly, like the words landed in a tender place. Beckett's crossed arms loosen by a degree. Even Cade goes still in a new way, a listening way. Whatever else those five hard years made of Marshall, they made a man these three will actually hear, and I tuck that away for later, the way I tuck away everything.

He leans across the councilman's desk and grinds his cigarette out, slow and deliberate, in a small glass ashtray sitting right there beside the man's engraved nameplate.

"No smoking," Marshall observes, tapping one finger against the rim of the ashtray. "But there's an ashtray, sitting right here on the desk. Funny how that shakes out."

He straightens, flicks two fingers off his brow in a lazy salute, and turns for the door.

"It was a pleasure, Amber," he says, and the warmth is real now, the black-cat mask tipped up just far enough to let it through. "Take care of Sawyer for me. He's a cocky son of a bitch."

"Hey," Sawyer protests behind me.

Marshall laughs, that low, unbothered sound, and glances back over his shoulder as he reaches the door.