Page 88 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"Because done is the new part." Cade's voice is hollow. "Done is what's left after the anger finally burns out."

"For five years," I say, "you've stayed the exact same brand of coward."

That lands.

All three heads come up.

"You don't know us." Cade's voice is low and shaking now, the charm burned all the way off it. "You've been in this town one day. You don't know the first thing about any of us."

I should let it go.

She's already down the corridor, and my priorities walked out the door with her. I don't let it go, because I have stood on the other side of this exact failure, and it deserves, one time, to be said to somebody's face.

"I know Alphas." I lift my jacket off the chair. "You're all the same animal in different tailoring. When the sun's out, and she's laughing and the bed's warm — oh, you're right there. Devoted. Attentive. Hers. Then the weather turns. One cloud. One threat on the horizon. You scatter like you were never a pack to begin with." I shrug into the jacket. "She waited for you. You understand that? She built her entire life on the one foundation no man could threaten out from under her — herself — because the three of you taught her that's the only thing that ever stays. Now you'll stand in the smoke and wait for even that to burn, because reaching into the fire might cost you a permit. A contract. A little comfort."

Beckett's scent goes thunderous.

I could not care less.

"That makes you selfish bastards," I say. "It also makes you no different from her father. He's just the honest one. He's willing to play the villain to prove a point, and the point is this. You three love the heat of her. You love the pretty life she builds around you. You love the version of yourselves you get to be while she's smiling. You simply don't loveherenough to bleed for her. He's wagering his own daughter's misery that you'll fold the second it costs you something…same as you folded before."

I open the door. The hall air hits me.

Under it, already, is her.

"Prove him wrong or don't. I'm past caring which."

I walk out.

I don't have to guess which way she went.

The whole corridor is written in apricot. Bright and broken and impossible to mistake, sharpened by the one emotion no neutralizer ever manufactured has managed to hide.

Betrayal.

I follow it.

CHAPTER 15

The Long Road Home

~AMBER~

The first thing you learn in this business is to confirm your own ride home before you confirm anyone else's.

I have arranged transportation for four hundred guests in a single evening. Shuttles, town cars, a horse-drawn carriage once, a boat that leaked.

I have never, in five years, remembered to arrange my own.

There is always someone to ride back with. Marlowe with the salvage van. Juniper with the bakery boxes. Priya with the good rental. I climb in wherever there's a seat, because the seat is never the thing I'm thinking about.

Tonight there is no seat waiting for me to fill for a ride.

I walk out of the meeting hall into the blue end of the evening. The lot behind the library is empty. I understand in one clean beat exactly what happened.

The team took the truck. They dropped everyone at their designated doors the way we always do. They left the way we always leave, and they assumed —reasonably, because it has been true every single day for five years— that I was alreadyhandled. That someone had me. That I'd fold into whatever vehicle had room and ride home thinking about tomorrow.

I should have gone with them.