Page 201 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"A baby girl," Ondine goes on, low and certain, her gaze gone distant now, fixed on something past my shoulder that isn't there. "She'll look just like her mother. The same hair, dark and wild and warm as poured honey. But the eyes — ah. The eyes will belong to the man with the spine to stand up in a cold room and fight for exactly what she yearns for. Confident eyes. Steady ones." Her voice drifts, dreamy. "Raised by a cowboy who'll teach her the ropes of a hard world and hold the reins so she never has to fear the horse. Cherished by a gentler soul who'll cradle her delicacy in a field of the finest flowers — flowers grown from a bouquet that was once thrown down and abandoned on a cold stone step, and yet." She smiles at the ball. "And yet now it blooms. Acres of it, out past the edge of town, a whole masterwork of blossoms raised up out of what was discarded, and tended with nothing but love."

She pauses, her rings clicking once against the glass. "Four will stand around that child like the four posts of a good strong bed. Though the cards did deal a fifth, once — a fifth who folded his hand before the game was even fairly played and walked off from the table swearing the fault lay with the table." Her silver eyes lift and find mine again. "Sound like anyone you happen to know?"

I stare at her. The fair roars on around us, the band and the shrieks and the tinny carousel music, and I can't hear a note of it. All I can hear is the blood in my own ears.

She's guessing.That's what I tell myself, hard. A carnival trick. A cold read, kept vague enough to fit any heartbroken man inside a hundred-mile radius. Half the omegas in this town have honey-dark hair. Every wedding on earth comes with a bouquet. It's smoke and shawls and pretty words, and I am a grown man who does not believe in fortunes. I say all of it to myself, firmly,in my father's flat gray voice. It doesn't take. Because she saidoutskirts.She said flowers grown up out of a bouquet thrown down on a cold stone step. She is describing a lawn that doesn't exist yet, on the far edge of a town where I know for a hard fact those four just signed for a house, and there is no cold read on this green earth that lands that close to the bone.

A baby.Amber. A baby girl with Amber's hair.

I don't want to picture it. I fight it. But the image comes anyway, unbidden, cruel in its brightness — the pack I peeled myself away from, on purpose, brick by brick, because what kind of fool walks back into a room he was never invited back into. I see Amber in the middle of it, beaming, lit up the way she used to be before we broke her, her whole face open. I see August and Beckett flanking her, and — God help me — even Sawyer, all three of them turned toward her like sunflowers tracking the sun. Then a little girl, tearing across green grass on chubby legs, dark curls flying, laughing at nothing the way only the truly safe ever laugh. Running straight at them. Straight into arms that lift her without hesitation. Beckett swings her up onto his shoulders like she weighs nothing, the way he used to swing me when we were young and stupid and whole. August tucks a bloom behind her tiny ear. Sawyer says something low that makes Amber throw her head back and laugh — really laugh, the full-throated one I spent years trying to earn off her and never once managed. It's a good picture. It's the finest picture I've ever stood in front of. It's a family.

There's no version of that picture with me in it.

I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek, trying to drown the pit yawning open in my stomach — the sick, sinking understanding that I don't fit that frame. I was cut out of it. No.

No. Be honest, for once in your worthless life.

I cut myself out of it. The worse truth, the one underneath even that one, the one I can barely make myself look at, is this:maybe I don't even want in. Maybe wanting it would cost more than I've got left to spend.

"I guess," Ondine says gently, and her voice pulls me up out of the vision like a hand closing around my collar, "that this is the path you've chosen for yourself, then."

"I didn't—" But I don't have the end of the sentence. I never do, lately.

"It's all right." She's already looking back down into her clouded glass, already half gone from me. "Go on, now. Walk on into the destiny you've picked. Best you go and witness that wedding dress." A pause. Her rings click against the crystal. "One last time."

The words snag on something and tear. "What do you mean, one last?—"

But she's humming now, some old tune with no beginning or end, her attention folded entirely back into the ball. I've been dismissed. The great and terrible seer of the Harborlight Fair has taken my measure, said her piece, and moved on. She's paying me no more mind than she'd pay a moth against the tent flap.

One last time.The phrase trails after me like a cold draft. She couldn't have meant it the way it landed. She meant go look at the pretty dress before the night is over, the way you'd tell anybody at a fair to catch the fireworks before they're gone. That's all. That has to be all. But my skin has gone to gooseflesh under my good jacket. The fair's gold light has taken on the queasy shimmer of a thing about to tip over, and I can't shake the sense that the old woman saw the whole shape of tonight long before I ever did.

I stand there stupid for a second longer. Then I make myself turn. I make myself walk.

My phone's back in my hand before I've cleared her tent, the screen a bright cold rectangle in the gathering dusk, and I staredown at it knowing — feeling it in my chest like a stone — that I've run out of road. The wedding's in a few hours. The message is drafted. The number's waiting for its confirmation. Whatever I'm going to be, after today, I'm about to become it. There's a choice sitting right here in my palm and no more room left to not make it.

I think about Amber.

I think about that morning, the one I keep circling back to at three a.m. — the kitchen, the pancakes I wasn't there for, and her. On the stairs. I know she heard me. I know it the way you know a bruise before it colors. She was up there and I was down here getting loud and stupid and cruel about Iris and a couch, saying she was going to be the cause of every ounce of misery this second chance dragged in, saying it like it was her fault, like any of it was ever her fault. She heard all of it. I felt her hear it.

That's the thing I can't set down. Not the contract, not the threats, not even the burning wreck of my career. Her. On those stairs, going still the way she does when a thing lands too hard to even flinch from. I have spent five and a half years being a man who hurts Amber Whitlock and calls it self-preservation. First at an altar. Then on a staircase. Now, in a few hours, if I go through with this — a third time. Not aimed at her directly, this round, but at the one fragile thing she has poured her whole battered heart into building back up out of the wreckage I helped make. Three strikes. A man doesn't get a fourth. A man shouldn't.

After tonight, it won't matter. That's the thing I keep telling myself. After this wedding, we scatter. The pack gets its house on the outskirts and I get my truck and my empty apartment and the long, clean, merciful distance between us. Maybe distance is the thing that finally fixes it. Or maybe there's no fixing. A man just learns to move on, and that's its own kind of mercy too.

Ondine's voice keeps circling back through me.Will you truly let fear go on dictating your whole future?Under it runsan older, colder one — Theo's.You let fear run your whole life.Under even that, the oldest voice of all, my father's, the one I've spent thirty years running from and turning into by the inch. Three ghosts, all singing the same note in three different keys. I've gotten very good at not listening. I've built a whole life out of not listening. The trouble with a fair full of fortune-tellers and family is that the not-listening eventually runs out of road, same as everything else does.

I take a breath that shakes on the way in. My thumb hovers over the screen, over the little arrow that ends things, and my own reflection stares back at me faint and gray in the glass between the words.

Two roads. That's what the fair-witch would likely call it, if she deigned to glance up again. Two roads and a coward standing at the fork, same as always. One of them I know cold. It's the one I've walked my whole life, the one my father blazed clear ahead of me, the safe wide road that keeps you moving and keeps you good and alone. The other scares me so badly I can hardly make my eyes rest on it. That's the joke of being your father's son. You get so practiced at the running that standing still starts to feel like the only truly dangerous thing left.

"I have to own up to my shit," I whisper, to nobody, to the roar of a fair that isn't listening. My voice cracks down the middle. "So let's own up to my decisions."

I press the send button.

CHAPTER 41

And Then There Was None

~CADE~