Page 135 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"But—" I hesitate. "Don't I have totellthem? That they're being — that this is a —"

"Why?" Marlowe cuts in, almost laughing at the very idea. "Amber. Listen to me right now. You are in thepower seat.Do you understand that? You are the Omega. You are, by design, the entire center of their world. You do not owe four grown Alphas an advance warning that you'll be deciding, at the end of all this, who has proven himself worthy of your devotion and who has not."

"Men," Juniper adds, "behavebeautifullywhen they believe they've got something to earn. This contract, right now, lets all four of them believe that if they just claw their way to the finish line, theygetyou. The grand prize. Guaranteed, no take-backs." Her smile goes sly and slow. "They don't need to know it stays temporary right up until the very end, until you all sit down and sign the final papers that tell the government who is actually, permanently part of your pack. So maybe one of them makes the cut. Maybe three of them do. Maybe, hell, all four." She squeezes my hand. "Butyoudecide that. Not them. You. Start to finish."

"And if it comes down to it," Marlowe says, quieter now, her thumb running over my knuckles, "if those three can't manage to prove to you, really, truly prove it, that you're the treasure they let slip through their own fingers, the one they'd sell their souls to never lose again? Then you take Sawyer by the hand, and the two of you go build the best damn life a duo pack has ever lived, for as long as it takes the right people to come along." She bumps my shoulder with hers, gentle. "There's no version of this where you lose, Amber. Not anymore. We simply will not allow it."

I turn it over the way I turn over everything — hunting for the trap, the hidden cost, the fine print buried three clauses deep.

For once in my life, I don't find one. Just my two best friends, holding my hands on the floor of the home I built entirely alone, handing me back a version of my own life in which I'm the one holding the pen.

"Okay," I whisper. A slow, watery smile fights its way up despite the tears still tracking down my face. "Okay. I can do that."

I sniff, wipe my cheeks with both palms. "Thanks, guys."

That is the exact moment both of their faces crumple.

"Oh, no. No, no, no, don't—" Juniper's voice cracks straight down the middle, her own eyes flooding. "Younevercry. You never cry, Amber. Now you're going to makemecry, and I did a whole entire eyeliner wing this morning for no reason?—"

"Fuck," Marlowe says thickly, scrubbing at her eyes with her paint-stained wrist. "We really, truly never see you sad. I hate it. I hate this. I'm going to need you to be mean to me immediately, so I have something to work with."

I laugh —a real one, wet and hiccupping and helpless— even as more tears spill over the edge.

They both pile into me at the same instant, arms wrapping around from either side, and for once I let them hold me all the way up.

"They're not sad tears," I manage into somebody's shoulder. "I promise. Not really." I pull back just far enough to swipe at my face, laughing at my own wreckage. "I think my heart just…knows. That we're stepping into a new act. And maybe this is the one that finally decides where my whole future lands in the—" a wet, helpless smile "—in the wedding cards."

"It's terrifying," I admit, quieter. "It's genuinely terrifying. But at the very end of it? Something deep in me is certain I'm going to walk out the other side feeling freer than I have in my entire life."

They squeeze me tighter, the three of us in a heap on my living room floor amid the half-packed boxes, and I let myself cry it all the way out for the first time in five years —the grief and the fear and the enormous, terrifying, brand-new hope ofit all, until it's wrung clean out of me and something lighter settles in its place.

Whatever act I've been living inside all this time — the grieving one, the shrinking one, the one where I made myself small and invisible and dared to call it strength — I feel it drawing quietly to a close around me now, soft as a curtain lowering.

And the final act starts tomorrow, when four Alphas will live and breathe the same space, determining whether they're truly worthy to one day be her forever...again.

CHAPTER 25

Second Bloom

~AMBER~

Bellamy Blooms at golden hour is the closest thing this town has to a cathedral.

I've stepped into August's greenhouse a hundred times over the years, and it has never once stopped doing this to me — the hush of it, the green weight of the air, the way the low sun comes slanting through the fogged glass and turns every bead of condensation into a little drop of fire.

It's warm in here. Humid in the good way, the kind that settles down into your lungs and loosens some knot you'd forgotten you were carrying.

Row on row of blooms in every stage of becoming, and the scent of all of them layered into one impossible perfume —wet earth, green stems, pollen, a hundred sweetnesses I couldn't name if my life depended on it.

August stands in the middle of it, and he hasn't noticed me yet.

That's the best way to watch him, if I'm honest with myself. Unobserved. He's bent over a long zinc worktable that runs thelength of the center aisle, sleeves shoved up to the elbows, a pencil tucked behind one ear that he's clearly forgotten is there.

He's arranged the flowers into little clusters down the length of the table — the whole palette for the wedding, laid out like paint on a board — and he's frowning at them the way other men frown at engines or ledgers.

Completely, beautifully absorbed.

The setting sun catches the pale gold of his hair and the sharp, thoughtful line of his profile, and his scent drifts back to me on the humid air: blue iris, pear blossom, white musk, a cool green thread of sage running under all of it.