Page 80 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"Perhaps after we save her business that could be a good call for you to cool the fuck off," August suggests.

Their bickering keeps the walk from turning to lead, and underneath it I notice the thing I'm not ready to notice — that the five of us are already beginning to move like a shape.

Town Hall is not quiet.

The filing leaked. It was always going to, obviously. A town this small can’t possibly hold secrets for long, and they read records like scripture of new information that needs to be upheld.

Reporters, business owners, a knot of designation-rights advocates, three members of the council, and a scatter of residents who simply enjoy the scene crowd the steps and spill into the lobby. Some faces are on my side. Some only want to know whether the celebrity wedding is about to collapse.

So fucking nosey they are.

A few wear the particular expression of people who believe an unbonded Omega has no business running high-risk rooms without a man to sign for her.

Mayor Florence Hartwell meets us inside, furious in a contained, civic way. She cannot clear the lobby. The preliminary filing is public, and the public has arrived.

Dr. Amara Greene is already here with my records, calm as a tide, confirming to anyone who'll listen that Golden Hour Vows has kept excellent protocols and has no history of a single negligent scent incident.

The complaint, she says plainly, appears politically motivated. The emergency classification stands anyway, until someone with standing knocks it down.

The questions come from everywhere at once.

Is Golden Hour Vows being suspended?

Did I hide my unbonded status?

Are the celebrity clients at risk?

Are Shaw, Bellamy, and Mercer my pack again?

Is the fourth Alpha part of it?

Why would one Omega need four?

Were there incidents at previous weddings?

Did your own parents file the complaint?

The crowd tightens. Beckett moves to my left. August takes my right. Cade turns to put his back to me and his face to the loudest of the reporters, all three of them trying to hold a perimeter without breaking my no-touch rule.

Their scents go up around me — cedar and rain, sage and pear, salt and blood orange — but the lobby is small, packed with other people's Alphas and camera light. It is too much.

My throat closes at the old familiar seam.

The complaint accused me of manufacturing scent panic in public rooms. The complaint has now built me the exact room to do it in and prove their complaint is by far accurate.

Which isn’t fair when I’m being boxed in, being asked multiple questions, and stuck in a situation that makes me claustrophobic.

Someone says, loudly, that I can't claim adequate support when not one of these men is bonded to me. Someone else says the department is right to question an Omega "working alone." A reporter lifts his voice over the rest and asks whether the three runaway grooms are using a celebrity wedding to launder their reputations.

I open my mouth.

Nothing arrives fast enough to fill it.

Sawyer moves before the others do.

Not aggressively. Decisively.

He steps a half-pace in front of me, angled so his shoulder eats the camera line without hiding me behind him, and his scent opens through the lobby — magnolia and warm bourbon with that spine of black pepper, not a dominance flare, nothingthat shoves. It's the scent equivalent of a heavy door swinging shut against weather.