24. The Power Seat #2
"Men," Marlowe says, with the weary authority of a woman who has rebuilt a great many stubborn old engines, "need healthy competition.
Otherwise they get comfortable. They start to believe they can coast on anything, skip any step, and you'll just — be there.
Waiting on them. Grateful for the scraps.
" She levels a paint-flecked finger at me.
"Sawyer walking in reminded all three of them, in one clean stroke, that you are not a sure thing.
Best possible thing that could've happened to this whole situation. "
I pick at the hem of my sleeve.
The laughter's drained out of the room now, and I feel the question rising up in me before I can talk myself back out of it, small and unsteady in a way I've always hated in myself.
"Do you think I should?" I ask. It comes out quiet. "...Give them the chance. Actually give it to them."
They both go still.
I feel their eyes land on me, feel them catch the wobble I couldn't keep out of it, the thing sitting underneath the words.
"Amber." Juniper sits forward, all the play gone. "Are you okay with all of this? Actually, genuinely okay?"
I sigh.
I set the sweater down. I let myself sit in the question for a second instead of outrunning it.
"Sawyer's the opposite of that," I go on, softer.
"He reads the writing on the wall like it's painted six feet tall.
He's going over and above, every single second, just to get it.
And August…August gets it too, I think. He always felt the most of the three of them.
Beckett's starting to pick up on it, slow, the way Beckett does everything, like weather rolling in.
" I stop. "But Cade. Cade, I can't read at all right now.
Something's turning over in that man, and I don't have the first idea what it is. "
Juniper slides off the couch and comes to kneel in front of me, both of her warm hands landing on my shoulders.
Marlowe frowns — the specific frown she wears when she's worried and refuses to show it — and settles in close on my other side.
"Amber," Juniper says, soft and direct, searching my whole face. "Do you not want to do this? The pack thing. Any of it. You can say it out loud to us. Right here."
I think about it.
I think about it long and hard, longer than I've let myself think about anything since Sawyer Devereaux ran a full mile in ruined shoes to reach me.
When I finally speak, it comes out barely above a whisper.
"The night I spent with Sawyer," I say, "was the most loving, most liberating thing I've felt in five years.
It cracked something wide open in me." I swallow hard.
"And it made me realize I've spent all this time…
all these years…grieving three men who left me at an altar to save everyone's skin but mine.
I've been loyal to a wound. Faithful to the people who made it.
" My voice frays down the middle. "And I don't know if I can move past that.
I don't know if I—" The word catches in my throat like a hook. "I'm not even certain I want to."
They both go still.
A single tear slips loose and rolls down my cheek before I can stop it — hot, startling, unwelcome — because I don't do this.
I don't cry.
I wipe it away fast with the back of my wrist. Another follows it. Then another.
I keep wiping them because I'm half-afraid of what happens if I stop.
"I want to give them a chance," I whisper.
"I do. I want these ten weeks to maybe reignite whatever it was we had, once, before everything.
But let's be honest with each other." I look between them, my two oldest friends in the world, through the blur.
"I'm not the same lover I was five-plus years ago.
Back then my heart was…it was pure. I knew, without a single solitary doubt in my body, that those three men would never, ever hurt me.
" I let out a wet, cracked laugh. "And then they did it anyway.
So now? Now it's different. I'm different.
And I honestly don't know what I want anymore. "
Juniper and Marlowe share one of their looks over the top of my head, and this once I don't mind being shut out of it, because whatever passes between them comes straight back to me as each of them folding one of my hands into both of theirs.
"Then," Juniper says, squeezing tight, "let these ten weeks be exactly that. The arc that decides who you keep…and who you don't."
I frown, looking between them.
"...What?"
"Nobody said you have to walk out the far end of this still tied to all three of them," Marlowe says, blunt and steady as a keel.
"Or to any of them, for that matter. You're proving you're a functioning pack so the wedding goes off clean and the government crawls back out of your business.
That is the entire assignment." She arches a brow.
"What you choose to do with your actual heart, inside that assignment, is nobody's business on this earth but yours. "
"So here's how you play it." Juniper's got the gleam now, the one she gets when she's decided to go fierce on my behalf.
"Ten weeks. This is their window. Their one and only shot to give you everything they've got — to communicate, to show up, to love you the very best way they each know how.
And if they can't manage it?" She shrugs, cool as sea glass.
"Then they get left behind. Fair and square, no apologies owed. "
"But—" I hesitate. "Don't I have to tell them? That they're being — that this is a —"
"Why?" Marlowe cuts in, almost laughing at the very idea.
"Amber. Listen to me right now. You are in the power seat.
Do you understand that? You are the Omega.
You are, by design, the entire center of their world.
You do not owe four grown Alphas an advance warning that you'll be deciding, at the end of all this, who has proven himself worthy of your devotion and who has not. "
"Men," Juniper adds, "behave beautifully when they believe they've got something to earn.
This contract, right now, lets all four of them believe that if they just claw their way to the finish line, they get you.
The grand prize. Guaranteed, no take-backs.
" Her smile goes sly and slow. "They don't need to know it stays temporary right up until the very end, until you all sit down and sign the final papers that tell the government who is actually, permanently part of your pack.
So maybe one of them makes the cut. Maybe three of them do.
Maybe, hell, all four." She squeezes my hand.
"But you decide that. Not them. You. Start to finish. "
"And if it comes down to it," Marlowe says, quieter now, her thumb running over my knuckles, "if those three can't manage to prove to you, really, truly prove it, that you're the treasure they let slip through their own fingers, the one they'd sell their souls to never lose again?
Then you take Sawyer by the hand, and the two of you go build the best damn life a duo pack has ever lived, for as long as it takes the right people to come along.
" She bumps my shoulder with hers, gentle.
"There's no version of this where you lose, Amber.
Not anymore. We simply will not allow it. "
I turn it over the way I turn over everything — hunting for the trap, the hidden cost, the fine print buried three clauses deep.
For once in my life, I don't find one. Just my two best friends, holding my hands on the floor of the home I built entirely alone, handing me back a version of my own life in which I'm the one holding the pen.
"Okay," I whisper. A slow, watery smile fights its way up despite the tears still tracking down my face. "Okay. I can do that."
I sniff, wipe my cheeks with both palms. "Thanks, guys."
That is the exact moment both of their faces crumple.
"Oh, no. No, no, no, don't—" Juniper's voice cracks straight down the middle, her own eyes flooding. "You never cry. You never cry, Amber. Now you're going to make me cry, and I did a whole entire eyeliner wing this morning for no reason—"
"Fuck," Marlowe says thickly, scrubbing at her eyes with her paint-stained wrist. "We really, truly never see you sad. I hate it. I hate this. I'm going to need you to be mean to me immediately, so I have something to work with."
I laugh — a real one, wet and hiccupping and helpless — even as more tears spill over the edge.
They both pile into me at the same instant, arms wrapping around from either side, and for once I let them hold me all the way up.
"They're not sad tears," I manage into somebody's shoulder.
"I promise. Not really." I pull back just far enough to swipe at my face, laughing at my own wreckage.
"I think my heart just…knows. That we're stepping into a new act.
And maybe this is the one that finally decides where my whole future lands in the—" a wet, helpless smile "—in the wedding cards. "
"It's terrifying," I admit, quieter. "It's genuinely terrifying. But at the very end of it? Something deep in me is certain I'm going to walk out the other side feeling freer than I have in my entire life."
They squeeze me tighter, the three of us in a heap on my living room floor amid the half-packed boxes, and I let myself cry it all the way out for the first time in five years — the grief and the fear and the enormous, terrifying, brand-new hope of it all, until it's wrung clean out of me and something lighter settles in its place.
Whatever act I've been living inside all this time — the grieving one, the shrinking one, the one where I made myself small and invisible and dared to call it strength — I feel it drawing quietly to a close around me now, soft as a curtain lowering.
And the final act starts tomorrow, when four Alphas will live and breathe the same space, determining whether they're truly worthy to one day be her forever...again.