Knot in the Wedding Cards (HoneyBell Harbor #1)

Prologue The Empty Aisle

~AMBER~

FIVE YEARS AGO…

Here is a thing nobody tells you about your own wedding.

If it starts going wrong, you will be the last person in the building to hear about it.

Literally.

The string quartet downstairs has played the same eight bars of Pachelbel eleven times. I know the number is eleven because counting is the only job I have left. My mother took all the others.

She took the dress, a forty-pound architectural event with crystals sewn into the bodice, after mine was deemed too simple, by which she meant too much like me. She took the flowers, the menu, the guest list, the church-versus-ballroom debate, which the ballroom won because my father owns it.

What she left me is standing still while she circles, pinching tulle a quarter inch to the left like the tulle is the problem.

"Stop fidgeting, Abercrombie."

"The skirt weighs more than I do, Mother. A bomb couldn't crease it."

"Don't be vulgar."

This woman…

"I wasn't being vulgar. I was being accurate."

I catch my own eyes in the gilded mirror, hazel gone sharp and green the way they do when something's wrong, and I look away fast, because a bride who looks scared in a mirror an hour late to her own ceremony is a bride who has started doing math.

This is all going downhill, isn’t it?

"What time is it?"

"It doesn't matter what time it is."

"It's a wedding. The time is the entire point of it."

She exhales through her nose.

Helena Whitlock does not sigh. Sighing wrinkles.

"There has been a small delay. These things happen at events of this scale. Hold still."

The ceremony was called for four. The clock on the mantel, a hideous gold thing chosen by my father's hotel designer because it photographs well, says 4:47.

That is not a small delay. That is a missing groom.

Three missing grooms, technically.

I'm marrying a set after all. The pack I love and cherish who I assumed loved me just as hard to show up to the most important moment in my life.

Don't…they're coming.

Beckett is never late. Three years, and I have never once stood anywhere waiting for Beckett Shaw. He's the man who shows up forty minutes early to make sure the doors open in the direction the fire code wants.

If something broke, something you can touch, a beam, an axle, a generator, then he's standing in the middle of it right now with his sleeves rolled up, fixing it, while August talks him down in that greenhouse-quiet voice, breathe, Beck, and Cade drives too fast up the parkway with his tie already loose, working out which joke will make an hour's wait funny to me.

That's what's happening.

Nothing else fits otherwise, because they certainely wouldn’t stand me up. Never…there's a hole at the bottom of the logic, and I keep stepping around it, the way you step around a loose board you have no intention of looking under.

"Where's my phone?"

"With the coordinator."

"Then get the coordinator."

"Abercrombie."

"Mother." I turn, and the crinoline turns a half second behind me like a ship coming about. "Beckett would have sent word. August would have called. Cade would have sent a photo of whatever ditch he's in, grinning. Somebody would have reached out to me by now. Give me my phone."

It’s rare for me to have some damn backbone when it comes to my life, but enough is enough. Either something is wrong, or I’m truly being stood up by the men of my life.

For half a second, something moves behind my mother's flawless face. Then it's gone, buffed out like a thumbprint on silver, and I understand two things at once.

She knows something.

She has decided I’m undeserving of knowing exactly what that is.

The saddest part is I’m not surprised in the least.

"The last thing this family needs," she says, "is you sobbing into a phone where three hundred guests can hear you. Whatever this is, we will manage it quietly."

Whatever this is...

There's the confession, tucked inside the crackdown, and my body catches it before my brain agrees to.

My scent goes first. All day it's been behaving, sun-warm apricot and garden roses, sweet, bridal, appropriate, and now the rose note snaps green and sharp, stems broken in a fist, and it floods the suite so fast my mother actually steps back.

Panic has a smell.

Mine, apparently, could clear a room.

"Marisol." She snaps her fingers at the maid by the door. "The neutralizer. Quickly, before it reaches the hallway."

Before it reaches the hallway.

Not before my daughter falls apart. The hallway.

I stand with my arms out while a maid I've apologized to twice today mists my throat, my wrists, my shoulders, erasing me one polite spritz at a time, and her eyes say sorry, while her hands keep working, because her hands answer to Helena, same as everything else in this hotel.

The apricot dims. The broken-green sharpness goes quiet.

What's left is a bride with no smell at all, which in a room full of Alphas and Omegas is the same as a bride with no feelings, which I suspect was the goal.

"Better," my mother says.

"For whom?"

She's already turned to the mirror to fix her lipstick.

By quarter past five, the quartet has moved on to Vivaldi, which means even the musicians have stopped pretending, and I've given up on the phone and moved on to bargaining.

It's quite a production, the bargaining.

I'd be embarrassed if anybody could see in.

Beckett's truck broke down, except his truck has never broken down.

He rebuilds the engine for fun, the way other men do crosswords.

August lost the rings, except August has carried the rings in his breast pocket for two weeks and pats them when he thinks nobody's watching, right over the tattoo of three flowers growing from one root, the one that's supposed to get its fourth bloom inked after tonight.

Cade got pulled over. Fine. That one I'll allow.

That one has happened twice since I've known him.

They would never leave me.

I press that one flat against the panic like a hand over a cut and hold it there.

Then somebody knocks.

That's the detail I'll keep out of the whole day. The knock.

People have been sweeping in and out of this suite since dawn without knocking, because a bride, it turns out, is a public installation, so a knock means someone who isn't sure she's allowed in.

It's Nina, the young attendant with the crooked name tag.

Last month, I sat with her for an hour going over linen counts because she was new and drowning.

Everyone else kept snapping at her, and it costs nothing to be decent to a person who's drowning.

She's white as the tablecloths. Her hands are shaking around a cream envelope.

"Miss Whitlock. This was left with the concierge. It's addressed to you, and nobody was going to— I thought you should have it."

My mother crosses the room fast.

"Give that to me."

"It's addressed to her," Nina says, and then goes pale at her own daring, because she has just contradicted Helena Whitlock in a private suite, and jobs in this building have ended for less.

I get there first.

My name is on the front in Beckett's blunt carpenter print, square, certain letters, built like everything he builds.

Amber.

Not Abercrombie.

Amber, the name I chose for myself at nineteen, the one he always wrote like it was the truest fact he knew about me.

"Thank you, Nina," someone says in my voice, very calm, from somewhere up near the crown molding. "You did the right thing."

Hotel stationery. Three lines. Three signatures.

We cannot do this today. You deserve a life that is freely chosen. We are sorry.

Beckett. August. Cade.

I read it four times, and it gets worse every pass, and here's why.

It doesn't say we don't love you.

I could have built a life on we don't love you.

Clean wounds close eventually.

What it says is you deserve, which means the three of them sat somewhere, my pack, my whole planned future, and held a vote about what my life should be, and the meeting adjourned without anyone thinking to invite the life in question.

They didn't leave me. Leaving would at least be honest.

They gave me away, to myself, like a gift I never asked for, and signed it like a card.

The neutralizer doesn't stand a chance.

My scent comes up through it like water through a paper towel, apricot gone bruised, roses off at the root, and under everything, the vanilla curdling into a thing even I can smell is grief.

"Abercrombie." My mother's hand closes around my wrist. "Breathe. Not one sound. Do you hear me? Not one."

The door opens. No knock this time.

My father fills the frame in his charcoal tux, and I watch him take in the room, the letter, his only daughter shaking in forty pounds of crinoline, and the first words out of Alistair Whitlock's mouth, the very first, are:

"Who else has seen it?"

"Just the girl," my mother says.

"Which girl?"

"The attendant. Nina, something."

"Name to Davis. NDA before she leaves the property tonight." He shuts the door behind him, and only then does his gaze get around to me, running the numbers the way he runs them on a distressed asset. "How bad is she?"

"She is standing right here."

"Then she can hear me say this is containable." He straightens a cufflink. "We announce a medical emergency. One of the grooms collapsed. The carpenter. He's the least connected. Ceremony postponed, guests enjoy the dinner with our compliments, and by Monday we control the story."

"The story."

"Yes, Abercrombie, the story. Three hundred witnesses downstairs, half of them press or married to it. The Hastings came. The designation board chair came. Two senators. Every minute we spend in this room, somebody down there is inventing a version of tonight, and I promise you theirs is worse."

"Worse than the truth?" My voice cracks straight down the middle, and I let it. "Beckett, August, and Cade left me at the altar, Dad. That's not a story. That's my life, and you've been in this room ninety seconds, and you haven't asked me one question. Are you all right? Not what do you need?"