40. Not In The Cards #2
The worst of it is how easy they made it look.
One line. One tap. Years of somebody's dream and months of my own careful work, all of it undone by a man too scared to say no, in less time than it takes to order a coffee.
I keep waiting to feel like a villain. Villains at least get to feel powerful.
I just feel small and sweaty and about nineteen years old, standing in a crowd of happy people holding a bomb that nobody else can see.
I take a breath. I hold it. I let it out slow.
This isn't how a man's supposed to do things. I know that. I've always known that. But it's for the best, some rotted little voice in me keeps insisting. For the best. Get it over with. Rip the bandage. Then you can finally, finally stop.
Stop what, though. That's the question I keep not letting myself finish. Stop hurting? Or stop being anywhere near the only people who ever made the hurt worth surviving? I can't tell them apart anymore. I lost the ability around the same time I started taking my orders from a phone.
I'm not ready yet. My thumb won't quite move. I need a minute, one more minute, so I start walking again just to give my legs something honest to do — and that's when I see her.
She's tucked between the caramel-corn stand and a ring-toss booth, in a little violet tent strung with more of those fairy lights, a folding table before her and a clouded crystal ball catching the last of the sun.
FREE READINGS, says the hand-lettered sign.
ONDINE. She's older, draped in shawls the color of a bruise healing, silver rings on every finger, and there's a stillness to her that the whole shrieking fair seems to bend around.
This is the one. The reader everyone's been whispering about all week.
Amber's team wanted to book her for the after-party, actually — I remember Priya mentioning it — but she was already spoken for, or she doesn't do private events, or something.
I don't believe in any of it. I don't. I just want to keep moving past her.
The whole town's got a story about her by now.
Marlowe swears the woman told her something about a salvage haul that came true inside a week.
Juniper won't come within thirty feet of the tent — says the reader looked at her once across the green and she cried for an hour with no reason she could put a name to.
I filed all of it under harmless small-town noise, the way I file most things I'm too tired to feel these days.
A woman with a clouded ball and a sharp instinct for a mark. That's all it is. That's all it can be.
I don't get the chance.
"Is a wedding," the woman says, without looking up from her ball, "not in the cards for you?"
I stop. I don't mean to. My feet just quit on me.
"Excuse me?" I drift a step closer, frowning down at the cloudy glass like it might have a caption. "What's that supposed to mean?"
She tsks, soft, almost fond, the way you'd cluck at a slow child. Her eyes lift to mine. They are the palest gray I have ever seen, nearly silver, and they do not blink.
"So the Omega in the wedding dress," she says. "She's Knot in your Wedding Cards, then?"
I frown harder, because the words don't line up right in my head. "Not?" I ask. "Not in my—"
"Knot," she corrects, and I hear the difference the second time, the weight she sets on it.
"K-N-O-T. The agreement. The one that woman struck with the men who still love her — putting layer upon careful layer between their bodies to keep from rushing what mattered.
No true knot until the wedding night." She smiles, and it isn't unkind, which somehow makes it worse.
"A knot, held back, waiting in the cards. Knot in the Wedding Cards."
The back of my neck goes cold. There's no way she knows that.
That's pack business, private business, the kind of thing whispered in a dark bedroom — Beckett's stubborn line in the sand, no full knot until there's a ring.
I never told a living soul. I'm not sure I was ever even meant to know it myself.
My scent must be doing something loud, because a couple drifting past the tent wrinkle their noses and steer wide.
Spiced rum gone sharp, blood orange curdling toward something closer to rot — that's what fear smells like on me, what it's smelled like for months now.
She breathes it in slow, like it's information.
Maybe it is. Maybe that's the entire trick of her, no crystal ball required — just a woman who can read a man's terror straight off his skin, the way I used to read a whole room before I forgot how.
"How do you—"
"Does it matter how?" She turns the ball a quarter-turn with two ringed fingers.
"The better question, I think, is the one you keep flinching away from.
" Those silver eyes pin me. "Will you truly let fear go on dictating your whole future?
When there's a happiness sitting right there, dealt and waiting, destined for you if you'd only reach out and take the card? "
"I don't—" My mouth's gone dry. "I don't get what you're—"
"A little girl."
The three words drop into me like stones into a well.
"A baby girl," Ondine goes on, low and certain, her gaze gone distant now, fixed on something past my shoulder that isn't there.
"She'll look just like her mother. The same hair, dark and wild and warm as poured honey.
But the eyes — ah. The eyes will belong to the man with the spine to stand up in a cold room and fight for exactly what she yearns for.
Confident eyes. Steady ones." Her voice drifts, dreamy.
"Raised by a cowboy who'll teach her the ropes of a hard world and hold the reins so she never has to fear the horse.
Cherished by a gentler soul who'll cradle her delicacy in a field of the finest flowers — flowers grown from a bouquet that was once thrown down and abandoned on a cold stone step, and yet.
" She smiles at the ball. "And yet now it blooms. Acres of it, out past the edge of town, a whole masterwork of blossoms raised up out of what was discarded, and tended with nothing but love. "
She pauses, her rings clicking once against the glass.
"Four will stand around that child like the four posts of a good strong bed.
Though the cards did deal a fifth, once — a fifth who folded his hand before the game was even fairly played and walked off from the table swearing the fault lay with the table.
" Her silver eyes lift and find mine again. "Sound like anyone you happen to know?"
I stare at her. The fair roars on around us, the band and the shrieks and the tinny carousel music, and I can't hear a note of it. All I can hear is the blood in my own ears.
She's guessing. That's what I tell myself, hard.
A carnival trick. A cold read, kept vague enough to fit any heartbroken man inside a hundred-mile radius.
Half the omegas in this town have honey-dark hair.
Every wedding on earth comes with a bouquet.
It's smoke and shawls and pretty words, and I am a grown man who does not believe in fortunes.
I say all of it to myself, firmly, in my father's flat gray voice.
It doesn't take. Because she said outskirts.
She said flowers grown up out of a bouquet thrown down on a cold stone step.
She is describing a lawn that doesn't exist yet, on the far edge of a town where I know for a hard fact those four just signed for a house, and there is no cold read on this green earth that lands that close to the bone.
A baby. Amber. A baby girl with Amber's hair.
I don't want to picture it. I fight it. But the image comes anyway, unbidden, cruel in its brightness — the pack I peeled myself away from, on purpose, brick by brick, because what kind of fool walks back into a room he was never invited back into.
I see Amber in the middle of it, beaming, lit up the way she used to be before we broke her, her whole face open.
I see August and Beckett flanking her, and — God help me — even Sawyer, all three of them turned toward her like sunflowers tracking the sun.
Then a little girl, tearing across green grass on chubby legs, dark curls flying, laughing at nothing the way only the truly safe ever laugh.
Running straight at them. Straight into arms that lift her without hesitation.
Beckett swings her up onto his shoulders like she weighs nothing, the way he used to swing me when we were young and stupid and whole.
August tucks a bloom behind her tiny ear.
Sawyer says something low that makes Amber throw her head back and laugh — really laugh, the full-throated one I spent years trying to earn off her and never once managed.
It's a good picture. It's the finest picture I've ever stood in front of. It's a family.
There's no version of that picture with me in it.
I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek, trying to drown the pit yawning open in my stomach — the sick, sinking understanding that I don't fit that frame. I was cut out of it. No.
No. Be honest, for once in your worthless life.
I cut myself out of it. The worse truth, the one underneath even that one, the one I can barely make myself look at, is this: maybe I don't even want in. Maybe wanting it would cost more than I've got left to spend.
"I guess," Ondine says gently, and her voice pulls me up out of the vision like a hand closing around my collar, "that this is the path you've chosen for yourself, then."
"I didn't—" But I don't have the end of the sentence. I never do, lately.