Page 247 of Face Off

By the time I walked out of his room, fear had already built a theory around his silence.

Ryan was pulling away before Sunday arrived because leaving gradually might hurt less than waiting for the weekend to end and cutting us apart all at once.

Hours later, the memory of waking inside Ryan’s arms followed me into the rehearsal dinner, along with the uneasy certainty that some part of him had remained upstairs preparing to leave me.

The castle’s western garden had been transformed beneath strings of warm lights and long strands of fabric suspended between the trees. Round tables covered in cream linen surrounded a polished dance floor, while the rehearsal-dinner party occupied an open pavilion decorated with pale flowers, candles, and enough crystal to ensure Bliss had personally terrorized several vendors.

The crowd was enormous by any reasonable standard. Nearly two hundred people filled the garden, and everyone kept reminding me it was nothing compared to the number arriving tomorrow.

The men wore suits without ties, though Ryan had removed his jacket before we made it through the doors. His black dress shirt fit closely across his shoulders, with the top two buttons open and the fountain-pen nib sharpened into a dagger fully visible along the side of his neck. Beneath it, overlapping handwritten pages scattered across his collarbone and disappeared beneath his shirt, carrying fragments from his paper for Professor Klein in a chaotic tangle of crossed-out and underlined words: monster, abandoned, violence, origin, consequence, survival, and belonging. The word home vanished beneath his collar, while Klein’s tiny reluctantly persuasive remained written in the margin of one page.

He had left his hat upstairs after Bliss threatened to have it confiscated, and his short hair was effortlessly styled. Every part of him was delectable and for the millionth time since losing him I remind myself he was all mine once.

I wore a fitted nude colored sundress I designed with narrow straps and a full skirt that moved around my calves when I walked. Aura wore the same dress in a champagne pink, while Bliss wore the same but in white because she had apparently decided the rehearsal dinner deserved its own bridal moment.

Ryan enters the garden with his arm around me. His hand rests against my waist instead of hovering near it. He doesn’t drop it when conversation shifts toward us or when someone raises a phone to take our picture. He guides me through the crowd as though walking openly beside me is the most natural thing in the world.

Nobody watching us would know anything had changed.

I felt it anyway.

His hand remained warm and certain against my waist, but he wasn’t using the contact to pull me into him the way he had yesterday. His body stayed beside mine while his thoughts moved somewhere else. Whenever I looked up, I found his jaw tense or his attention fixed on something beyond the garden, and then his thumb would brush my side as though he felt me noticing and needed to reassure me without explaining anything.

That almost made it worse. Ryan wasn’t punishing me or taking back what he gave me last night. He was still touching me, still claiming the space beside me, and still ensuring everyone saw exactly where he had chosen to stand. Whatever battle had begun inside him was one he hadn’t invited me into but was currently battling.

I should’ve been able to accept the moment without turning it into a future. I had promised him I would. That didn’t stop one impossible question from moving through me each time his thumb brushed my side.

How the fuck had I ever believed I could survive a world without him?

Aura intercepts us before we reach the head table. She places one hand against Ryan’s chest and physically redirects him toward Cade, Easton, Briggs, and Rider.

“We need her.”

“You’ve had her for fourteen years.”

“And you’ve had her since last night.”

My face heats.

Ryan looks at me. “Did you tell her?”

“I didn’t have to,” Aura says. “She walked in the glam room holding both shoes and smiling like somebody rearranged her internal organs.”

“Subtle,” He mutters.

“I’m an attorney. Observation is my craft.”

Ryan catches my chin and kisses me in front of her. The kiss is warm and real, but something remains tightly restrained beneath it. His thumb passes once over my jaw, but he doesn’t release me immediately. His gaze moves slowly over my face, thoughtful and searching, as though he’s weighing a question he refuses to ask. Then his hand falls away, leaving me with another moment I don’t know whether to trust or fear losing.

“Try not to confess to anything indictable,” he tells me.

“I already have a lawyer.”

“She’s the reason I’m worried.”

Aura slides her arm through mine and pulls me away. “Go stand with the men and look emotionally devastating. We have a toast to deliver.”

Ryan watches us cross the pavilion. Even after Cade says something that makes the other men laugh, his attention remains on me.