27. Two Roads #2
"Thanks, man." He takes the glass like it's spun from gold.
Then they're gone, sweeping her up and away from the crush toward a booth in the back, four broad bodies folding into a wall around her so that not one drunk tourist so much as brushes her in the chaos. Guarding her.
Not because a contract says they have to.
Because they get to.
That's the thing that catches under my ribs and won't let go. Not the pregnancy. The joy. The uncomplicated, full-bodied, nothing-held-in-reserve joy of it.
It's foreign to me.
I don't have a better word than that. I stand here and watch five people be that happy about a future, and it's like watching someone speak a language I was never taught a syllable of. When exactly did I decide the future was a threat instead of a gift?
It shoves a thought at me I've never once let myself hold.
Do I want that? A kid. A family that isn't a millstone.
Would I be that man — spinning her off her feet in a crowded bar, out of my skull with happiness?
I turn it over in my hands and it's strange and enormous and it doesn't quite fit anywhere I try to set it down.
For one reckless second, I let myself try to picture it.
Her.
Amber, glowing, mine, ours —
I can't.
That's the whole rotten heart of it.
I try to see Amber happy — Amber laughing in the middle of us, Amber choosing this, choosing me — and the only image my traitor of a brain will render is the other one.
The one burned permanently onto the backs of my eyes.
Amber in a white dress at the Lantern House, standing alone at the end of a long aisle, mascara cutting tracks down a face that has just understood, in real time, that nobody is coming. The picture I put there myself. The one I will never in this life un-see.
I frown down at nothing, scrubbing at a glass that's been clean for a full minute.
Why can't I see the good version? Why is it only ever the altar? I adore that woman.
I know it the way I know my own name — it lives in me like a second pulse, has for years. So why can't I conjure a single future where I'm the reason she's smiling instead of the reason she's on her knees in the wreckage?
It's a phase, I tell myself, the way I tell myself everything I can't afford to feel. Cold feet. You're tired. It's a weird, loud night.
I don't believe a word of it.
I never do.
But it's easier to swallow than the alternative, so down it goes.
"Iris." I flag my coworker down the length of the bar, already loosening my apron strings. "Cover me five minutes? I need air."
Iris takes one look at my face — she reads a room nearly as well as I do, and she reads me better than most — and just tips her chin toward the back.
"Go. You look like hell warmed over."
"I look incredible."
"You look like hell warmed over in a very nice shirt." She studies me a beat longer, and whatever she finds there makes her drop the teasing. "You good, Mercer? You've been a thousand miles away all night."
"Peachy," I lie, with the easy grin that's slipped me out of every honest conversation of my adult life. It works on her the way it works on everyone. She sighs and shoves me toward the storeroom.
The breakroom is a supply closet with delusions of grandeur — a busted couch, some dented lockers, a fluorescent tube that flickers like it's sending code.
After the roar of the floor, the quiet lands on me like a weighted blanket.
I drop onto the couch and thumb my phone awake out of pure habit, expecting the usual nothing.
There's a text from a number I don't know.
I frown at it.
No name attached, no saved contact, just ten digits I've never laid eyes on. Wrong number, probably. Some drunk tourist who fat-thumbed a message to the wrong Cade.
I open it.
You really didn't learn the first time? Should I prove to you that marrying this omega would be a mistake?
The world goes very quiet and very cold.
I read it three times.
Then a fourth.
The busted couch, the flickering light, the muffled roar of the bar on the far side of the wall — all of it drops clean away. There's only those two sentences, glowing up at me out of the dark.
Only the cold sweat breaking out down the length of my spine.
Only the old, familiar taste of dread flooding the back of my throat, turning my own scent sour in my nose, that spiced rum and blood orange gone suddenly acrid with fear.
So there it is.
The thing I've been standing guard against for weeks. The hand out of the woodwork. It found me anyway, whether I went all in or held myself back — it found me exactly the way I always swore to myself it would.
Five years, and they haven't forgotten a thing.
Five years, and they're still perfectly willing to reach a manicured hand straight into my life and squeeze until I do what I'm told.
I don't recognize the number, but I don’t have to.
I know the voice of it — that smooth, entitled, velvet-over-a-blade menace.
I heard it five years ago in a study that reeked of cigars and old money, when a man told me, smiling the whole time, exactly what would happen to my baby brother's future if I didn't walk away from his daughter by morning. So I did.
God forgive me, I walked, and I have hated the taste of my own name every single day since.
I make myself breathe.
I swallow the stone in my throat, hard, and force my spine straight against the busted couch.
You're not nineteen and terrified anymore.
You're not that boy. You've got a spine now.
A mother who raised you better than his example.
A brother who just looked you in the eye and told you to quit paying a debt that was never real.
I lock the phone. I press it face-down flat against my knee.
You are stronger than this. You can do this. You will not run this time.
I tell myself I believe it.
I walk back out into the roar, because that is simply what you do — you put the coat back on, you go back to work, you do not let a single soul see the crack running straight down your middle.
I'm three steps back onto the floor when it hits me.
A scent.
Her scent, cutting clean through the fog of spilled beer and packed bodies and forty warring perfumes like a blade drawn through still water — apricot and garden roses and warm spun vanilla, that low golden amber running underneath it that I'd know blind, that I have known blind, through five years of dreams I had no right to be having.
My head comes up.
My heart forgets its one job for a beat.
Then two…three.
There she is.
Coming through the crowd like the crowd was set there for the sole purpose of parting to let her through.
Amber.
But no Amber I have ever laid eyes on.
Her hair is down. Down and loose and falling in these heavy, perfect curls I have never once seen her wear — not in five years, not in the entire time I've known her, when it was always pinned up tight and severe and all business.
Tonight it spills over her bare shoulders like something out of a dream I got told, in no uncertain terms, I wasn't allowed to have anymore.
She's poured into a corset top — strapless, black lace laid over cream, cinched in a way that does profoundly unfair things to a man's composure, that makes the soft curve of her look delicate and devastating in the same breath.
Leather pants that appear to have been painted onto her legs. Boots with a heel that hand her a height she's never needed and an attitude she has always, always had. Her makeup is barely there — she's never needed the help — save for her mouth.
Her lips are painted a bold, dark, blood-deep red, and heaven help me, the instant I see them my mind is gone, straight into the gutter, straight to the thought of exactly what that red mouth would look like—
I bite down on the inside of my cheek, hard enough to taste copper. I drag my eyes up before I disgrace myself behind my own bar.
Get it together, Mercer.
But my pulse is slamming, my mouth's gone bone dry, and there's a heat crawling up the back of my neck that has no business being anywhere near me tonight.
What is she even doing here?
The question knifes clean through the fog of wanting her. She doesn't come to the Driftglass. She has never once walked into this bar dressed like a wish a lonely man makes at midnight.
Why tonight, of all nights? Why now? Why—
Then, cold on the heels of all that heat, it comes back to me. The phone in my apron pocket, face-down and heavy as a river stone. Those two sentences glowing in the dark.
Should I prove to you that marrying this omega would be a mistake?
I stand there behind my bar, in the dead center of a hundred people celebrating a hundred kinds of love, and I feel my entire life narrow down to a single fork in the road.
Two paths, laid out plain right in front of me. One of them is safety — keep my head down, do whatever the voice on that phone wants, protect everyone the way I've always protected everyone, and run for the exit like my father's own son.
The other is redemption — walk out from behind this bar, cross that whole crowded room to her, fight like hell for the woman I destroyed, threat be damned, and gamble every last thing I have all over again.
Two roads, right there at my feet.
I know exactly which one a brave man takes. I've always known which one.
But with her scent in my lungs, a threat sitting heavy in my pocket, and the whole joyful room roaring on around me, I can't make my feet move toward either.
Truth be told…I’m scared to pick the road that will give me safety or redemption…