Chapter 17 Callum
The ridge fell away in front of me, a magnificent slash of Aegean blue that looked too still, too perfect to be real.
I stood there with my hands clasped in front of me, trying to hold myself together when I could feel every nerve vibrating.
My palms were slick. My pulse was wilder than the vines my soon-to-be wife was in awe of.
Lucy’s voice drifted up from behind me, slow and sure, each lyric cutting straight through my chest. The world had gone quiet for her, for this moment. Even the wind seemed to listen.
If fate is a myth / I’ll still thank the stars
For every scar / and every crash
That line—Christ. It hit me harder than the 48 G-force crash in Montreal.
Auri was every scar I carried. And every crash I survived. She was the reason I got back up.
Because she had given me everything. Her trust, even when I didn’t deserve it. Her fury when the world tried to break her. Her grace when mine faltered. Her wild defiance, the fire in her blood that matched mine. Her stubborn hope. Her impossible, endless heart.
She handed me every part of herself like it wasn’t something I had to earn, but something she’d always meant to give.
She gave me her faith when mine was gone.
She gave me her fight when I didn’t think I had any left.
Hell—she gave me breath again, steady and sure and mine, after I’d spent years choking on expectations, on silence, on ghosts I couldn’t outrun.
And somehow, without ever meaning to, she became the pulse under my ribs. The oxygen in my lungs. The thing that tethered me back to myself.
She was the reason I was standing here. The reason I wanted forever.
I blinked hard, staring out at the horizon until it blurred.
The light bent and shimmered, and for a second it looked like it was moving, like the world itself was holding its breath with me.
My chest felt too small for everything inside it.
My brain couldn’t keep up with the fact that we’d actually made it here, to this place, to this inevitable, perfect day.
I’d imagined it a hundred times. What she’d look like.
What she’d feel like walking toward me. Every version of that dream ended with my heart splitting open to make room for more love for her, and still, standing here now, it wasn’t enough.
None of it prepared me for the ache of it—the quiet, brutal kind that felt like reverence and ruin all at once.
Marco sniffed beside me, failing spectacularly at subtle. I didn’t even have to glance over to know his eyes were wet. “Don’t start,” I muttered, voice rough.
“I’m fine,” he whispered back, and sniffed again.
Kimi was on Marco’s other side, hands folded, jaw set tight, pretending to be carved from stone.
“Mate,” Kimi said dryly from his other side, “at this rate, you’ll need a saline drip before she even gets here.”
“You cry at The Parent Trap,” Marco hissed, wiping his cheek.
“Not in public.”
“And yet you brought matching tissues.”
“They’re neutral toned,” Kimi replied, deadpan. “It’s called coordination.”
I didn’t even try to fight the quiet laugh that shook in my chest. That was what Auri had done too—taught me how to hold more than one thing at once. Joy and grief. Love and fear. Hope and holy terror.
Ivy was to my left, where she’d stand beside Auri, muttering curses at herself for being such a sap while subtly dabbing the corner of her eye with a knuckle.
And then there was Colette, serene as ever, her voice carrying on a soft breeze. “It’s time.”
My lungs locked, just as Lucy’s song swelled. The olive branches whispered above me. And suddenly everything I’d ever known, everything I’d ever been, felt like it was converging into this one single point in time.
I could feel her. It was a shift in the air—a warmth that slid across my shoulders, a prickle at the base of my spine, a pull I couldn’t fight if I tried.
My fingers flexed. My pulse stuttered to a stop before restarting an accelerated rhythm.
Then I turned, and the whole fucking world tilted.
The world didn’t stop, but I did.
Auri was there, maybe thirty feet from me, walking toward me in white like she promised. My girl. My wife.
Every cell in my body seized. She was sunlight and silk and sin and surrender and salvation, and I couldn’t fucking breathe.
Not because she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, though fuck, she was.
But because I knew her. I knew her. And she was still coming toward me, choosing this, committing to her line for the rest of her life. She chose me.
Her hair was down, curled the way she liked it when she wanted me to stare.
And I did. God, I stared. I couldn’t stop.
The veil floated behind her like a specter, as though the air itself refused to let her go.
She looked like a holy matrimonial vision, and something in me misfired, short-circuited so violently I almost staggered.
It hit me that this wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a memory. It was her, in white, walking toward me, and I was the one waiting at the end of the aisle.
And that dress. Christ. That dress looked like it had been poured over her in liquid devotion and stitched by the hands of every lustful saint in heaven.
Ivory silk clung to her curves like it had memorized them the way I had with my hands, like it wanted me to drop dead right there for even thinking about peeling it off.
Thin straps bit into her tanned shoulders, framing the soft slope of her collarbone.
It was soft and flowing, with a plunging neckline that dipped low enough to make my spine go stiff.
Low enough that I could see the fading mark I’d left just below her collarbone.
Mine. A bite, a promise, a fucking prayer half-shadowed by the whisper-thin straps on her shoulders, straps I’d pictured and fantasized about pulling down all fucking morning.
It was indecent. It was ethereal. It was perfect.
It was the kind of dress that made a man want to sin his way through eternity just to peel it off with his teeth.
I’d always imagined what she’d wear, but nothing could’ve prepared me for this. For the way that dress turned her into something between an angel and a warning. A soft, glorious omen of the rest of my life.
In her hands, a bouquet of pink peonies, delicate and in full bloom, a shade softer than the color flushing up her throat and staining her cheeks. The same shade her lips turned when I kissed her too long and when I ruined her just right.
She was every wish I never dared to speak out loud. Every prayer I’d ever sent up to the man in the sky, now being answered. Like Heaven had gotten bored of angels and sent me one instead.
But the look on her face? Crìosd. That’s what wrecked me. Her eyes, those beautiful golden-green eyes that had captivated me from the very start, were full of tears and the kind of love that leveled a man.
And her fucking smile. It landed in my chest like a Russian missile, straight through the ribs. A direct hit to everything I’d tried to brace for.
I thought I’d be calm and composed because of how certain I was—of her and us and this.
But I wasn’t ready.
I wasn’t ready for the way my hands trembled harder.
I wasn’t ready for the way my knees nearly gave out.
I wasn’t ready for the fucking need—not lust, not hunger, not even love. Just that bone-deep, aching knowledge that she was it for me. That this wasn’t the finish line. It was the beginning.
She wasn’t walking toward me like an angel. She was walking toward me like she already knew what we were going to survive together.
Auri paused halfway down the aisle. One barefoot step—pink-painted toenails pressed into the ground—and then… nothing. Her shoulders bunched, her chin trembled, the bouquet in her hands wobbled just slightly.
I saw the moment the emotion caught up with her. The weight of everything she’d survived to get here. Everything we’d fought through—the secrecy, the crash, the loss, the politics, the grief, the fear. It was all there in the rise of her shoulders and the way her lashes fluttered with unshed tears.
And I didn’t ask or wait or think. I just moved, the way I had my whole life. But this time the movement wasn’t running from anything. I was running to her.
Each step was quiet but certain, my shoes—matching sandals with Maro and Kimi because “it’s two millionaires eloping, we’re all rich and hot, we can wear whatever we want, the Grecian sun is no joke, and none of us want to die of heat stroke”—brushing over the ancient earth like this was my final test. One last chance to prove I’d show up.
That I’d meet her where she was, every time. That I’d catch her if she broke.
The wind brushing my back like a confirmation that this was what I needed to do. Lucy’s voice floated around us, soft and melodic.
She looked up when I reached her.
And I swear to God, the moment she met my eyes, I broke.
Tears shimmered in her hazel depths, catching sunlight like they didn’t know whether to fall or stay suspended.
But it wasn’t just the tears. It was the way she looked at me, wide open and unguarded.
All the walls she’d ever built around her heart, torn down and handed to me.
I saw it in the way she stood still but trembling. In the way she let me see her.
“Hi,” she whispered on a breath that broke me.
The sound of it hit me right in the chest. I let out a breath and shook my head once, slow and helpless.
“Christ.” I grinned, slow and lopsided. “That’s unfair.” Her brow creased, confused through the tears. “You can’t look like that,” I explained quietly, eyes dragging over her like I was imprinting her into my bones, “and say hi like we’re bumping into each other at the market.”
A laugh broke free of her, soft and surprised, and something unspooled in her shoulders. The tension eased. The tremble steadied. And there it was: that smile. The one that always felt like a win. A smile that was earned.