Page 200 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

The last text.They keep saying that. They never mean it. But this time — this time it might be true, because after today there's nothing left to leak. The event happens or it doesn't. I go through with this or I don't.

I never even found out who's on the other end of that number. That's the piece that keeps me up at night. For months now I've been dancing to a voice I've never once heard, taking my orders from a stranger who somehow knows my client list, my schedule, my mother's maiden name, the exact shape of the thing I'm most afraid of losing. It started small. A text that knew a little too much. A suggestion dressed up like a favor with a threat folded inside it. By the time I understood I was in the water, I was already in past my neck, and the water only ever rises. Smart money says it's a rival planner, or a soul that Sloane's people burned, or one of the hundred enemies a family like the Reeves collects on the way up. I stopped guessing weeks ago. Knowing the name wouldn't lower the water I'm standing in.

Here's the part nobody knows. Nobody's caught me. Three months of little poisoned breadcrumbs — a venue name dropped at the Tide Table, a delivery window murmured where the wrong ear could catch it — and not one of them has ever once looked at me andknown.They sat in a meeting yesterday, all four of them, brows furrowed over a map, talking in low urgent voices about whether they'd need to scramble a backup location if the leak sprang again. I sat right there with them. I nodded along. I offered a suggestion about access roads. I have gotten monstrously good at nodding along.

That's what shames me most, if I'm keeping an honest tally. Not even the leaking. Thelying.Sitting in a room with people I helped break and letting them lean on my competence, watching August chew his pen bloody over a problem I planted, watching Beckett go quiet and grim the way he does when there's nothing in reach worth punching. I could have ended their worry with four words. I know who's doing it. I never once said them. I sat there in my nice pressed shirt being useful, and I let three good men chase a ghost that has my exact face.

I hate this.I hate every part of it. I hate that I'm about to torch the happiest day of a bride's life, a woman who's never done a thing to me but pay her invoices on time. Nolan's going to look for the leak after this and he's going to find it, eventually, and when he does I'll never work a wedding in this state again. My whole career, the one thing I built with my own two hands, the one thing that was ever fullymine— gone. Over a phone.

But that's the trap, isn't it. That's the whole trap. My career is already the thing on the line. The voice on the other end of that number made sure I understood, months ago, in words I still hear when I try to sleep, that if I don't cooperate they'll bury me anyway — bad word in the right ears, contracts pulled, my name mud from here to Cutter's Bay. Damned if I do. Buried if I don't. So I do. I've been doing it for months. I even took the money,once, because refusing it felt more dangerous than taking it, and now I'm a man who waspaidto keep a dead secret and I can't scrub that off no matter how hard I scrub.

I've got the message drafted already. It's sitting in a compose window, waiting, patient as a snake in tall grass. Anonymous account. The exact GPS pin. A single line built to detonate —SLOANE CARROWAY WEDDING, HAPPENING NOW, come see the dress before it's gone— engineered to rip through the town group chats and light up every phone in Honeybell Harbor inside four minutes. A mob of gawkers descending on a private ceremony like gulls on a dropped sandwich. Chaos. Ruin. Exactly what I was told to deliver.

The worst of it is how easy they made it look. One line. One tap. Years of somebody's dream and months of my own careful work, all of it undone by a man too scared to say no, in less time than it takes to order a coffee. I keep waiting to feel like a villain. Villains at least get to feel powerful. I just feel small and sweaty and about nineteen years old, standing in a crowd of happy people holding a bomb that nobody else can see.

I take a breath. I hold it. I let it out slow.

This isn't how a man's supposed to do things.I know that. I've always known that. But it's for the best, some rotted little voice in me keeps insisting. For the best. Get it over with. Rip the bandage. Then you can finally, finally stop.

Stop what, though. That's the question I keep not letting myself finish. Stop hurting? Or stop being anywhere near the only people who ever made the hurt worth surviving? I can't tell them apart anymore. I lost the ability around the same time I started taking my orders from a phone.

I'm not ready yet. My thumb won't quite move. I need a minute, one more minute, so I start walking again just to give my legs something honest to do — and that's when I see her.

She's tucked between the caramel-corn stand and a ring-toss booth, in a little violet tent strung with more of those fairy lights, a folding table before her and a clouded crystal ball catching the last of the sun. FREE READINGS, says the hand-lettered sign. ONDINE. She's older, draped in shawls the color of a bruise healing, silver rings on every finger, and there's a stillness to her that the whole shrieking fair seems to bend around.

Thisis the one. The reader everyone's been whispering about all week. Amber's team wanted to book her for the after-party, actually — I remember Priya mentioning it — but she was already spoken for, or she doesn't do private events, or something. I don't believe in any of it. I don't. I just want to keep moving past her.

The whole town's got a story about her by now. Marlowe swears the woman told her something about a salvage haul that came true inside a week. Juniper won't come within thirty feet of the tent — says the reader looked at her once across the green and she cried for an hour with no reason she could put a name to. I filed all of it under harmless small-town noise, the way I file most things I'm too tired to feel these days. A woman with a clouded ball and a sharp instinct for a mark. That's all it is. That's all it can be.

I don't get the chance.

"Is a wedding," the woman says, without looking up from her ball, "not in the cards for you?"

I stop. I don't mean to. My feet just quit on me.

"Excuse me?" I drift a step closer, frowning down at the cloudy glass like it might have a caption. "What's that supposed to mean?"

She tsks, soft, almost fond, the way you'd cluck at a slow child. Her eyes lift to mine. They are the palest gray I have ever seen, nearly silver, and they do not blink.

"So the Omega in the wedding dress," she says. "She's Knot in your Wedding Cards, then?"

I frown harder, because the words don't line up right in my head. "Not?" I ask. "Not in my?—"

"Knot," she corrects, and I hear the difference the second time, the weight she sets on it. "K-N-O-T. The agreement. The one that woman struck with the men who still love her — putting layer upon careful layer between their bodies to keep from rushing what mattered. No true knot until the wedding night." She smiles, and it isn't unkind, which somehow makes it worse. "A knot, held back, waiting in the cards.Knot in the Wedding Cards."

The back of my neck goes cold. There's no way she knows that. That'spackbusiness, private business, the kind of thing whispered in a dark bedroom — Beckett's stubborn line in the sand, no full knot until there's a ring. I never told a living soul. I'm not sure I was ever even meant to know it myself.

My scent must be doing something loud, because a couple drifting past the tent wrinkle their noses and steer wide. Spiced rum gone sharp, blood orange curdling toward something closer to rot — that's what fear smells like on me, what it's smelled like for months now. She breathes it in slow, like it's information. Maybe it is. Maybe that's the entire trick of her, no crystal ball required — just a woman who can read a man's terror straight off his skin, the way I used to read a whole room before I forgot how.

"How do you?—"

"Does it matter how?" She turns the ball a quarter-turn with two ringed fingers. "The better question, I think, is the one you keep flinching away from." Those silver eyes pin me. "Will you truly let fear go on dictating your whole future? When there's a happiness sitting right there, dealt and waiting, destined for you if you'd only reach out and take the card?"

"I don't—" My mouth's gone dry. "I don't get what you're?—"

"A little girl."

The three words drop into me like stones into a well.