Chapter 13 Cayce #2
We go.
The nave is full the way a chest is full before you exhale—pressure and promise.
The Shannon side looks like someone built a forest of black suits and asked it to behave.
The Italian side has mastered pretending they own the place.
Up front, Don Marco’s people sit like they can’t decide if they’re relieved or in trouble.
Nan is on the aisle, where she can stand first if she chooses and trip anyone who comes too fast. Her brother sits directly behind, wearing a tweed that probably knows secrets and a scowl that could bring down a government.
I take my place at the front with the priest. He nods once.
We don’t need to pretend we like each other.
We respect the rules—we both have them. Tiernan stands at my right, hands clasped, eyes on the room.
Roisin standing at his side. Both Conall and Niall there, rounding out the remainder of my immediate family.
The music shifts and the congregation stands.
The aisle is suddenly long. Too long.
I don’t see the flowers first. I don’t see the dress.
I see her chin, a fraction higher than fear would place it.
Then I see the line of white—not fussy, nothing to trip her, not a cloud to hide in.
Clean. A fitted bodice, sleeves, a skirt that moves like it remembers she likes to walk fast. Every inch lining her perfect curves.
Her hair is up in a way that made at least two women cry and one swear.
A long plain, translucent veil falls from the crown and doesn’t try to do more than soften the edges of my future queen.
The bouquet is green—herbs and leaves and white that isn’t sweet.
She looks like a decision, not a decoration.
My chest does something inconvenient. Tiernan steps half a toe closer like he’ll stop me from moving if I forget to wait.
Caterina’s eyes find mine at the halfway mark and doesn’t look away. Neither do I. Nico shifts in a pew on the left and pretends not to.
Tiernan will deal with that if he breathes wrong. Nan’s mouth curves the smallest degree. Don Marco stares at his hands like a man who has run out of prayers and found a new way to ask.
She reaches the step. We turn together, as Aoife rehearsed us.
We stand shoulder to shoulder, facing the altar like we mean it.
The priest begins. I don’t hear the first lines because I’m too busy counting her breaths.
When I lean to tell her she looks dangerous, she flicks her eyes up and says, “I am,” and the corner of my mouth moves because she is.
Dangerous to my well-being and my sanity, and my entire fucking empire at this point.
We do the call-and-response. We do the I will, and I do, and I don’t stop at I want.
The old man from Ireland says something under his breath in a dialect that should be dead.
Nan socks his knee with her purse without looking.
Somewhere behind us, Tiernan murmurs into the air and two ushers we own change positions without the church noticing.
“Rings,” the priest says.
Roisín has them before my hand is out—Pop’s box into my palm, the dark-silver band from my pocket set into the priest’s book for the photograph Aoife insisted she’d need for posterity and for press.
I take the gold—the thin band that has known heat and soap and years—and slide it onto her finger. My voice doesn’t shake. “With this ring,” I say, and the words don’t matter as much as the vow I am making with my face.
Keep. Guard. Choose every day. Make small when she needs small, make large when she wants large, never let the wrong enemy near the door. She looks at me like she hears the unspoken, and then like she understands.
She takes the other gold ring and slides it onto my hand, and the weight is nothing and the meaning is not. She touches the dark-silver band with her thumb, finding the Ogham without being told where it is. She doesn’t say the word. She doesn’t need to. I will.
When the time comes to speak the promises, I don’t add poetry. I don’t have to. The room is too crowded for the things I’ll only say where only she can hear them. I keep to the script where it serves and let my eyes do the rest.
The priest says what priests say when they can’t stop the world from being itself. He declares. He raises his hand. If God has an opinion, He keeps it.
“You may kiss the bride,” he says.
I have been thinking of this kiss since a screen with holes taught me the shape of her breath.
I touch my palm to her jaw, where names live, where fear hides. I kiss her like I’m done pretending the cameras matter and not done at all with what comes after. She opens just enough…my patience ends there.
Applause fills the air, and the organ tries to take the roof. I pull back a breath and say it against her mouth so only she hears it. “After this, Mrs. Shannon—”
Her eyes tilt, wicked. “Bossy.”
“Married,” I answer, and kiss her again, enough for the aunties to sigh and the uncles to shut up.
We turn to the aisle. People stand like they were taught to. Nan rises and gives me a nod I’ll carry until I’m old. Don Marco’s face breaks into something that makes him look like a man his daughter would still love. My brothers don’t embarrass me. Roisín smirks as if she planned every breath.
We step off the riser and start the walk.
For a half second, before the handles turn, I wish Blackvine Ridge hadn’t stolen the sun years ago—that I could stand here without measuring exit routes and lists and which roots to salt first. I wish I’d met her without the ice underfoot.
It doesn’t matter. If there isn’t a sky, I’ll build one.
We hit the light and the outside air tastes like the first stretch after a fight. Photographers shout. People cheer. I don’t hear it. I lean to her ear while we pretend to enjoy applause.
“You have ten minutes to be adored,” I say. “Then I am going to put my mouth on my wife, and after that I am going to introduce you to the part of the evening that isn’t for cameras.”
“Bossy,” she breathes again, and smiles for Nan instead of me.
“Married,” I correct, and kiss her again, longer, so no one mistakes whose night begins when the pictures end.