Page 193 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

My ears are ringing. I look from Juniper's tear-streaked face to Marlowe's unbothered one to the three little sticks lined up on my sink like a jury that has already reached its verdict. My whole body has gone strange and light, the way it does right before you faint or right before you laugh so hard you can't breathe. I honestly can't tell yet which one is coming.

Seabriar has never held this much noise. My cottage is a small, snug thing — worn quilts and a kettle always warm and the smell of the eucalyptus and old paper I keep everywhere — and the three of us have turned it into a war room over the course of one wine-soaked, no-boys-allowed night. There are snack bowls on every surface. There's a blanket fort collapse in the living room. Then there's me, backed against my own bathroom sink, holding the evidence of a thing I have spent weeks swearing up and down could not happen.

"It's impossible." I set the stick down with the other two, a neat little firing squad of pink lines. "I am on blockers. Thegood ones. The birth-control-infused ones the clinic swears by. Dr. Greene sat me down herself and walked me through it. Two forms of prevention doing one job." My voice climbs. "Ican'thave a baby. That's — that's the whole architecture of my life. I built it on that."

They both blink at me.

"Why not?" Marlowe asks.

The question stops me. I open my mouth, and what falls out is the first excuse my scrambling brain can reach. "Well. I don't — I don't have enough money."

Two identical arched eyebrows aim my way. Juniper actually stops crying to level me a flat look, which is how I know it's a bad excuse.

"Okay." I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. "Fine. I have enough money for myself. And my parents would absolutely lose their minds over the idea of a grandchild — a little Whitlock heir to parade at the country club, my father would rent abillboard— and they'd throw a truly obscene amount of money at it." I drop my hands. "But that money has strings on it thicker than the umbilical cord. I don't want it. I've spent my whole adult life making sure I never have to want it. So it isn'tforevermoney. It's leash money."

Juniper reaches up and squeezes my ankle. "You don't need his leash money, babe," she says, quiet and fierce. "You never did. You clawed your way to your own name in this town brick by brick. Nobody handed you Golden Hour Vows. You built the whole thing with your bare hands."

"She did," Marlowe agrees. "Which is exactly my next point."

"Girl." Marlowe leans forward, elbows on her knees. "You have four men who could bankroll a small nation of babies. We are going to graciously pretend to ignore what most of those men did to you in the past, for tonight only, because I have a feeling in my gut that they are dead serious about you now. And menlike that getferalabout their own kids. That baby will want for nothing."

I feel the smirk pull at my mouth before I can stop it. "Well," I say. "It's actually three."

They frown in perfect unison. Juniper tilts her head like a confused spaniel. Marlowe's eyes narrow.

"Three what," Marlowe says slowly.

"Three men." I hop up to sit on the edge of the sink counter, tucking my cold feet under me, and I tell them. All of it. The contract that got quietly redrawn. The registration office and the kind Omega with the green highlighter. The clause nobody knew Cade had signed, the one that legally walls him out of the pack until he untangles it himself. The four names the state will certify, and the fifth name that isn't on the list.

It's more than the paper, though. Paper I could explain away. It's that Cade hasn't set foot in the house — not once, not for a meal, not to sleep, not to fight for a single corner of it. August left a plate in the fridge for him two weeks ago with his name on a sticky note. It sat there until it went bad. That plate told me everything the contract didn't.

"So it's Beckett, August, and Sawyer," I finish. "On paper. And me. Four."

The bathroom goes quiet except for the drip of the tap I keep meaning to fix.

"Does heknow?" Juniper asks. "Cade. That he's been left off?"

I shrug, and I hate how honest the shrug is. "No idea. Genuinely. The guys said they'd handle the communication, and Cade hasn't so much as texted me a single word about it. So I've decided to assume he's fine with it, because the alternative is losing sleep I don't have to spare.

"Hold on." Marlowe holds up a hand. "This clause of his. He signs some mystery contract years back, never breathes a wordof it, and it just so happens to be the one thing legally walling him out of the pack the exact moment everything else is falling apart? That doesn't smell like coincidence to me. That smells like somebody's hand on a lever."

A chill walks down my spine, because I have had that precise thought at three in the morning more than once. I file it back where I keep it. "After the wedding," I say. "I will pull every thread apart after the wedding, or I will not survive the wedding.""

"Why," Juniper says, sitting up straight, her weepiness hardening into something sharper, "would a grown man befinewith his pack quietly cutting him out? That makes zero sense, Amber. Nobody's fine with that. Either he doesn't know, or there's more going on."

I sigh. I glance toward the little bathroom window like the marsh might be eavesdropping, and I lower my voice even though the nearest house is a quarter mile of reeds away.

"So," I say. "I think the guys have been getting threats. Like the first time."

Marlowe's eyebrow climbs. "Threats. Okay. And did you geniuses, I don't know—" she spreads her hands, "—call the police?"

A snicker escapes me before I can catch it. "I know. I know it's not funny." I press my lips together. "I had a real talk with Sawyer about it a few days back, and the two of us brought it to August and Beckett, who'd started getting these ugly anonymous texts. So, yeah. It's ugly."

"So. Like the first time." Juniper says it quietly, and her eyes have gone very round. "The first time. Which you didn't even know about."

I go still. Because that's the part that's been sitting under my ribs like a swallowed stone for two weeks now. "They told me about it fourteen days ago," I say. "Some of it. Enough to makeme understand that the last time the world blew up in my face, there were things moving in the dark that I never got to see. Threats I didn't know were being made. Choices being made about my life in rooms I wasn't allowed into." I swallow. "I don't have the whole picture even now. I can feel the shape of it, the way you can feel a piece of furniture in a dark room. I'm not going to like the lights when they finally come on."

"Amber." Juniper's hand finds my knee.