Chapter 9
CLAIRE
The chapel room is packed, and we’re late.
An usher in a waistcoat gives us a look that could curdle milk as we slip through the doors.
The ceremony hasn’t started yet, but the room is full, rows of white chairs lining a long stone aisle scattered with petals, and every seat up front is taken.
Candles flicker in iron brackets along the walls, casting the vaulted ceiling in shifting gold.
Garlands of white roses and trailing ivy frame the altar, and the late sunlight cuts through three arched windows at the back, throwing long amber shafts across the congregation. It’s absolutely beautiful.
“Back row,” Brody murmurs, his hand finding the small of my back, guiding me into the last row of seats. Brody on my right. Corey on my left. Jakob at the end.
The stares come immediately in our direction. A woman two rows ahead turns, eyes widening, mouth forming a small O before she whispers to the man beside her. A couple across the aisle do a double take so synchronized it’s almost choreographed.
I sink lower in my seat, push my glasses up my nose, and pray for invisibility.
The thing about Mistberry Cove is that gossip is less of a hobby and more of a town-wide sport.
People here know when Mrs. Delly changes hairdressers, when the butcher over-orders lamb, and when someone’s husband spends too long talking to the woman who runs the florist shop.
“Breathe,” Brody whispers, barely moving his lips.
So I drag in a slow breath and glance at him, only for my lungs to pump furiously. He’s stunning beside me, and for the first time since this disaster began, the reality of it truly settles over me.
There are three gorgeous Alphas sitting with me. Every time I glance over at them, they’re already watching me with a smile. My heart is definitely too large for my chest at this moment.
The music shifts and the congregation stands.
We rise with them, my clutch bag pressed to my stomach, and that’s when I spot Louis escorting the maid of honor, down the aisle.
Deep brown hair. Porcelain skin. The soft green dress of the bridesmaids, and she might have stepped out of a spring garden. She’s beautiful, delicate.
My stomach turns hard, rejection rushing through me all over again.
Louis glances across the room, and his gaze finds mine almost instantly.
The glare he gives me hardens his expression, almost accusing, as though I’m the one who has no right to be here.
He’s in a fitted suit with his brown hair swept off his forehead in that way I now find nauseating.
He’s smiling at others he passes, performing the role of supportive best man, and from here he looks exactly the same as he did the morning he stood in our living room and took back my engagement ring.
I expected the sight of him to crack open the old wound. To bring back the tightness, the shame, the hollow certainty that he’d been right about me.
It doesn’t.
Or rather, all that’s left is the ghost of everything I used to feel, a faint echo behind glass. Now, he’s just a stupid man in a suit, and I’m standing with three Alphas who dropped everything to be beside me, and the contrast is so sharp it steals my breath away.
Louis and his match reach the platform where the groom waits, then he glances toward the back of the chapel, back toward me, his smile faltering.
I flinch, just enough that my shoulder bumps Brody’s arm, and he stares down at me instantly.
“Sorry,” I murmur.
His gaze follows mine to the front of the chapel. Then his hand lifts, warm fingers brushing along my jaw with such quiet tenderness that my breath catches. He turns my face back to his, thumb resting beneath my chin, and leans close enough that the rest of the room seems to fall away.
“That’s him?” he whispers.
I nod.
“Then let him choke,” he says.
Before I can answer, his mouth touches mine.
It isn’t the kind of kiss that belongs in the back row of a chapel five seconds before a wedding begins.
It isn’t deep but it’s firm, slow, and devastatingly sure, his lips pressing to mine with enough heat that my body forgets where we are.
My pulse crashes loudly in my ears as he holds my face and kisses me as if he wants everyone who matters to understand exactly where he stands.
By the time he pulls back, I’m breathless.
Brody’s thumb strokes once beneath my jaw before he lets me go, and when I glance toward the front, Louis is staring at us with his mouth tight and his eyes dark with fury.
Something sharp and shamefully satisfied unfurls inside me.
Then the music swells, everyone turns, and Betty appears in the doorway in a cascade of white, ready to walk down the aisle. I’m gushing over how stunning she appears. She heads down the aisle on her dad’s arm, and the ceremony begins.
The vows are beautiful. I try to listen to Betty’s voice trembling with joy and her groom’s steady responses, then there’s the quiet crying of someone’s mother in the front row.
But I’m hyperaware of everything around me.
Brody’s thigh pressed against mine in the narrow seating, his body heat bleeding through the fabric of his trousers.
Corey’s shoulder brushing mine. Jakob on my other side, motionless, but glancing my way regularly.
It’s impossible to ignore the three scents weaving around me.
Hickory wood and salted caramel from my right.
Brown sugar and spearmint from my left. Toasted coconut and pine are a bit distant, but clear it’s from where Jakob sits, and together they blend into a thing my body recognizes.
My skin prickles, pulse calming, and the anxiety quiets.
I settle into the easy energy around them, refusing to read too much into things right now.
The ceremony ends soon enough, Betty and her husband, Trent, stroll back down the aisle, glowing, and the room erupts.
Guests stand, clapping, and once the couple have left the room, everyone else starts moving from the chapel room and toward the reception hall through wide double doors.
The energy shifts from reverent to celebratory in seconds.
For a second, it’s hard not to get caught in the romance of it all. The flowers, the music, the vows still lingering in the air. The idea that someone could stand in front of everyone who matters and choose you so completely, promising forever like it’s simple.
I thought I had that once, and I couldn’t wait for it to be my turn.
I’d even started planning my own wedding, collecting pictures of dresses and cakes and table settings in a book I kept tucked beside my bed.
I burned it after Louis left, page by page in the backyard, because every ribbon sample and handwritten note had him all over it, and I couldn’t take one more reminder of the future he’d let me build before tearing it out from under me.
Even my heats—the one time my body makes it brutally clear how much easier everything would be with an Alpha beside me—weren’t enough to make him stay. He knew how badly I struggled through them, how much they hollowed me out afterward and why I needed him, and yet, he still left me to suffer.
I swallow past the tightness in my throat and force my eyes away from the exit doors the bridal party has just disappeared through, Betty and her new husband leading the way while Louis and the brown-haired maid of honor follow them for photos, I assume.
This isn’t my wedding or my future. It’s just one night I have to survive without letting Louis see how much damage he left behind.
The crowd keeps moving into the reception hall. Brody’s hand settles on the small of my back, while Corey falls into step on my other side and Jakob moves just behind us, close enough that I feel surrounded without feeling cornered.
I search the moving crowd for my family, figuring it’s better if I find them first before they decide to turn this into a public inquiry. I’m still scanning faces when—
“Is that Brody from ManBaker?” a young woman’s whisper comes from a group just beside us.
Her friend grabs her arm. “Where? Oh my God, it is.” They’re staring in our direction.
Another voice, another cluster, phones already appearing.
I hear my own name in fragments. Claire… The cookbook… Isn’t she the one who…
My stomach clenches, bracing for judgment, smirks, the sly references to the interview that always find a way to strike like a knife.
Brody’s hand guides me past them quickly, and the reception hall snatches my breath away.
Vaulted stone ceilings draped in strings of fairy lights, a long bar along one wall glowing with amber glass, standing tables scattered across the polished wood floor with white roses and candles at their centers.
No assigned seating. Just space, light, music, and the low hum of a hundred conversations starting at once.
A photographer appears from behind a column, lens raised, and I instinctively duck behind Brody’s shoulder.
His arm slides around my waist, pulling me against his side, angling us both toward the camera. “Smile,” he murmurs into my hair.
The flash fires. I blink.
“Excellent camouflage,” Corey says from behind us. “Very natural. Like a nature documentary. The Omega hides behind the largest Alpha while the photographer stalks his prey.”
I can’t help but laugh at his commentary.
Jakob positions himself between me and the photographer’s next approach without saying a word. He just steps into the sight line, and the man takes one look at the six-foot-something wall of suit and muscle and quietly redirects.
“Thanks,” I breathe.
“Of course. He needs to read the room, and if you’ve had enough, then he should move on,” he says with a slight New Zealand accent coming through.
“I like the way you think,” I say, admiring this man who’s too handsome to even believe, with his golden hair, tanned skin, and huge smile. When his gaze drops to my mouth for one brief second, heat slips low through my stomach.