Page 76 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"It is," she says, "when someone taught you to disinfect it."

I don't have a fast answer for that, so I put my hands flat on the desk instead and let the citrus stay in the air where I earned it.

Priya keeps going because she's kind enough to give me facts to hold.

The review wasn't an automated audit. It was triggered by a named confidential complaint. She reads the allegations, and each one is a small, precise cut. That I concealed the seriousness of my unbonded status. That I spike, uncontrolled, at client events. That I have no reliable Alpha or pack support. That I use personal neutralizers in place of an approved safety structure. That I was once attached to a formal pack arrangement that collapsed before bonding. That I keep runningdesignation-sensitive work anyway, despite what the complaint calls emotional instability.

It's the last cluster that stops my breath.

Some of these details are not public.

The complainant knows about the bond ceremony that never happened. They know how I used to react to crowd pressure at eighteen. They know about the neutralizer routine —the exact one, the schedule, the childhood of it— that my mother taught me before I was old enough to spell "designation," so that I would never once embarrass her by smelling like a feeling.

Only three people on earth ever knew that routine.

I was one of them.

"It's my parents." I hear myself say it from a small distance. "Alistair signs nothing himself. They'll have used a lawyer, a board seat, a subsidiary, whoever. But the information is theirs. This is Whitlock House."

Helena had turned up not long ago, cool and cream and full of concern about how small my life looked. I understand now that the visit wasn't the attack. It was the survey.

They came to measure the building before they set the fire, and they timed the fire for the one week my name is finally attached to something big enough to force me home.

Doesn’t my family love to induce drama but wants to avoid the rest of the world from witnessing it if that ruins their perfect image?

Hypocrites.

"Alistair wants me back in the city," I say, "with Golden Hour Vows tucked under Whitlock legal protection where he can steer it. And Helena wants a photograph — me standing in public beside the three men I was supposed to bond, so the family gets to reclaim the story it lost."

Sawyer speaks, and the ease has gone out of his voice.

“Your own parents want to use your trauma against you, after you build your own thriving business by yourself without their aid I’m assuming.” When I nod, he seems even more disgusted by the whole revelation. "They didn't report a safety concern. They engineered a deadline to lock you into something you can’t refuse nor ignore."

I look at him.

He is not smiling. His warmth is intact, but the bourbon in his scent has gone dark at the bottom, and a thin line of black pepper cuts under it. His anger is quiet enough to be useful, which makes it more dangerous than anyone in this room shouting would be.

It’s odd.

Why does he care? In fact, why is he angry? He barely knows me. We haven’t gotten the privilege to get to know one another…but he’s reacting as if I’m his to protect.

Far better than the men who probably wouldn’t have a backbone to face someone like my Father.

It makes me secretly wonder, if he’s suddenly involved in this, was he involved with the falling of my life at the altar?

I don't call the three men yet.

I make Priya walk every legal alternative to its dead end first, because I refuse to summon them until wanting to is the only option left.

There's no designation-response officer available inside the deadline — the real ones are booked for months. An emergency contractor could file a letter of intent, and the department is under no obligation to honor it. Dropping the services guts the company and sinks the wedding.

Oversight opens my clients' lives, up to and including Sloane's confidential medical planning, to a government that has already decided I'm a hazard.

"They do not," I say, "get to punish me by opening my clients like filing cabinets."

"No," Sawyer agrees. "They don't."

Which leaves the empty fourth line on the support-unit form, and the three names I've spent five years keeping off every document I own.