Page 98 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"Wait." Cade. "What?"

"What?" Beckett, half a beat behind, the two of them landing it in the same stunned breath.

I can't help myself.

I never can.

"You're going to leave your pack and become what, exactly?" I ask, mild as milk. "Some feral little concoction like me?"

August turns his head and looks at me.

It's different.

I don't have a cleaner word for it. He looks at me the way you catch the eye of the one other person in a loud room who got the joke. Something old and long-buried in me turns over, stretches, and has the sheer nerve to flutter — right under my sternum, unmistakable, deeply unwelcome.

Absolutely not. You left that road behind you, Sawyer. Both directions of it.I bend whichever way a good thing bends. I stopped apologizing for that a long time ago. But this is not the moment. That man is not a safe bet. There's a woman under my steering wheel who I very much doubt signed on for whatever just arced across six inches of night air between me and her ex-Alpha.

I put my face back in order before anyone, but August can read it. He saw. I know he saw. He surely files it away, then answers the question I actually asked instead of the one I didn't.

"If it means getting our Sweet Apricot back," August says, "then yes. Fucking yes."

He turns it on the other two now, and five years of it pours out at once.

"We keep handling her heart like a snow globe we're astonished hasn't shattered. As if the fact that it's still whole means we haven't been dropping it this whole time. We abandoned her. Out of fear. Then she went and built this… this entire, gorgeous machine that hands total strangers the exact happiness we ran away from giving her." His breath tears. "Do you understand what that costs her? She stands in the back of a hundred weddings a year and watches people who fought for each other get the thing she planned down to the fork. Every season. Couple after couple choosing each other out loud, and her orchestrating all of it from the shadows. The woman who got left, smiling, flawless, wondering every single time whether she'll ever once stand on the other side of that aisle."

Nobody breathes.

"And even if we win her back," August goes on, quieter, "she'll spend the rest of her life auditing it. Wondering if we only came because the trouble came knocking again. Because that is what we taught her love does. That is not a thing she should have to check for forever. It is not what she deserves." His jaw works. "And yet the idea of losing her…watching her get swept off by him—" a small jerk of his chin at me, not cruel, just true "—or by some whole new pack that learned in one week what we couldn't manage in five years…I cannot do it. I haven't touched another Omega since the morning we drove away. Not one. There is no version of my life with someone else's face in it."

He exhales, and what comes next is almost too low to catch.

"Amber is the Omega for me. She's the stem. I'm only the petals. I'll wilt and rot and grind through every dead season it takes to bloom back the right way….the way that lets her thrive, if she'll just give me the chance to try. So if learning to stand and fight means saying to hell with my own pack rather than running from one more threat built to scare us off, then to hell with it. So be it."

Neither Beckett nor Cade has a single word.

Then Beckett moves; not to argue, for the first time all night, but to press the heel of one hand hard against his own sternum, like something behind it has finally given way.

"You're right," he says, and the words leave him like nails pulled from old wood. "All of it. The manual with nothing written in it. I've known for five years. I built a hundred other things rather than sit down and learn the one that counted." He stares at his own hands on his knees. "I don't know how to lead us back to her. But I'll follow whoever does. Even if it isn't me. Even if it's him."

For a second, I don't have a word either, which almost never happens to me.

Damn.

I rolled into this town certain these three were a lost cause with excellent shoulders.

I was wrong about at least one of them.

The quiet one.

The one who just made my chest do the thing I've spent five years making sure it doesn't.

He's got it. Buried deep, learned far too late, but real iron all the way through.

They still can't have her back on the strength of one good speech in a truck.

That's not how a price works. But I file it, the way he files things, because a man about to run a campaign should always know where the true iron sits in the other line.

"One of the townsfolk said they spotted a woman near the west parking lot," I offer, smooth as pouring, laying the false trail down flat. "Waiting on a ride. Her team took her truck. She likely assumed one of you had her." A lift of one shoulder. "If I were three men trying very hard not to lose her twice, I'd start there. Fast."