Epilogue
Katherine
I’ve decided weddings aren’t my thing.
Too many people. Too many eyes. No matter how much healing I’ve done, my skin still prickles under all the attention, the accidental brush of someone’s skin against mine.
But I’m here—for Selene. For my brother. For Dario and Keir, too. Like it or not, we’re family now. Selene legally took Kaz’s last name so the Bravata could carve out a front-facing empire in Vegas. Smart. Ruthless. Exactly like her.
She looks radiant. Regal, even. The kind of beautiful that comes from surviving hell and daring it to try again. I don’t do sentiment, but I’ll give her that—she earned every second of this. And the three men who’d set the world on fire for her? She deserves them too.
I watch from the edge of the reception, tucked beneath a vine-draped canopy strung with soft fairy lights. It’s the first quiet I’ve had in hours. I sip champagne and let myself breathe.
“You’re hiding,” a smooth voice says behind me—feminine, sharp, amused.
I turn just enough to meet her eyes. Lilith.
My brother’s second-in-command wears a black leather jumpsuit like it’s her birthright. Tattoos coil down her arms, her ashy blonde hair tumbling to one side. There’s danger in her grin, and something else. Interest.
“I wouldn’t say hiding,” I reply coolly, watching as her gaze skims over me like a hand.
“Waiting for someone then?” she asks, her smirk sliding into something more deliberate.
My cheeks heat. Damn her.
“Why?” I tease. “Would that make you jealous?”
Before she can answer, there’s a crash and a muttered, “Fuck,” from the bushes.
Keir’s cousin stumbles out of the greenery, leaves in his hair and mischief all over his face. He’s tall—annoyingly so—and his green eyes are too bright for someone who looks like he could kill a man with his bare hands and then bake cookies about it.
“Ladies,” he grins, brushing dirt off his shirt like that somehow resets the moment.
“What were you doing in the trees?” I ask, more curious than annoyed.
Behind me, I feel Lilith step forward, close enough that I can feel the warmth of her. A silent show of backup. Or maybe possession.
“Setting up the fireworks,” he says proudly, as if that explains anything.
I arch a brow. “You told everyone there’d be fireworks, right?”
His expression goes blank. “Why would I do that?”
And that’s when I know—he might be part of a biker gang, but he has yet to see the kind of dark the rest of us live in.
Because the moment the first firework cracks through the air like a gunshot, half the wedding party—including Selene, her three husbands, Lily, and Max—drop for cover or whip out firearms.
The poor idiot yelps and ducks, arms flailing.
I can’t help it—I laugh. Hard.
Something sharp and reckless twists in my chest.
Part of me craves the danger of the woman behind me.
And the other?
Craves the golden retriever in the bushes who just tried to surprise us with fireworks and almost got shot for it.
Weddings might not be my thing.
But this chaos?
Yeah. I could get used to this.