39. The Invitation
The Invitation
~SAWYER~
"And you two didn't cower out, huh?"
I say it to the mirror first, watching the two of them come down the marble corridor behind me in the reflection while I straighten my tie for the third time.
It's a good tie. Deep burgundy, the exact shade of the foliage Amber picked for the Carroway–Reeve palette, because I am nothing if not thematically committed. I turn to face them.
They clean up unfairly well. Beckett fills out a charcoal three-piece like the suit was cut off his own ribs, his cowboy hat traded for once for bare, brushed-back hair, and he looks like a man who could buy the building or bring it down with equal patience.
But it's August my eyes snag on, the way they've been snagging for weeks now.
Flower boy in a slate-blue suit with the jacket open, a sprig of something small and white tucked into his lapel because he cannot help himself, and God help me, he looks good.
Iris and pear blossom and green sage drift off him, calm as a garden at dawn.
Beckett catches me looking and doesn't comment, because Beckett has decided, in his quiet ranch-raised way, that whatever's kindling between the florist and me is good for the pack and none of his concern.
August catches me looking and goes faintly pink at the collar, which is a small victory I fully intend to collect on later.
For now I file it away. There's a wedding to save tomorrow and a monster to disarm tonight, in that order, and neither one leaves much room for admiring the cut of a man's lapels.
Focus, Devereaux. You can undress the florist later. There's a snake to charm first.
"We were fools once." August says it evenly, buttoning his jacket as he stops beside me. "We're not going to be fools twice."
It's the flattest I've ever heard him say anything, and from August, flat is a war cry.
He spent five years apologizing to a woman with nothing but his silence.
He's done apologizing. So am I, though I've got nothing to be sorry for — I'm only here to make certain the other two never have to grovel on a church lawn again.
"Contacted everyone who matters for tomorrow.
" Beckett's voice is that low bedrock rumble.
"Vendors confirmed, timeline locked, security briefed.
All plans go." He rolls one broad shoulder inside the fine wool like it doesn't quite fit his temperament.
"Tell me again why we're spending the night before the biggest wedding of Amber's career in this man's office instead of at home with her. "
"Because," I say, "some knots you cut before the ceremony, not after.
A man who lets a wolf circle his wedding is a man who spends the whole reception watching the doors instead of the bride.
I'd rather deal with the wolf tonight, on my terms, in his own den, than let him choose the moment himself tomorrow, while Amber's walking toward us in white.
" I glance between them. "You both got the newest texts?
The ones promising to burn the contract to the ground? "
Beckett's jaw ticks. August's scent goes a half-shade sharper. That's a yes.
They've been coming since the ink dried on our little temporary pack — ugly anonymous things, all threat and no follow-through, arriving with an uncanny sense of timing.
We've kept them close, the four of us, no sense frightening Amber over shadows.
But I've been watching. I've been watching since the night Cade muttered that it would all go downhill if we kept "associating ourselves" with her, like that was a warning and not a confession.
As if a man rattling off doom is going to shoo me off the woman I've decided is mine.
Here's the thing about underestimating a wedding planner.
People do it constantly. They see the mood boards and the ribbon and the seating charts and they file me under harmless.
What they miss is that you do not run four-hundred-guest events for the obscenely wealthy without collecting friends in every corner of a room.
My contacts run high and they run low. Some of them do security.
One of them wears a badge. One of them, an old college roommate I still owe a fishing trip, does very quiet work for the federal government and answers when I call.
I haven't called a single one of them yet.
That's the part people never grasp about leverage — the second you use it, it's spent.
A favor cashed is a favor gone. The real trick is to gather every card quietly, learn the exact weight of what you're holding, and let the other man's imagination do the heavy lifting.
He doesn't need to know which strings I can pull.
He only needs to lie awake wondering how many there are.
Amber doesn't know we're here. That was the one hard call.
She'd have insisted on coming, chin up, ready to stare the old man down herself, because she has never once in her life let somebody else carry her fight.
But this fight was never hers to carry. It's the bill for a thing that was done to her, and the three of us are the ones who'll pay it down tonight, quietly, so that tomorrow she wakes and thinks of nothing but the color of the light and the taste of the cake.
She has spent five and a half years bracing for the next blow.
Tomorrow she braces for nothing. We'll have seen to it.
You never lay your whole hand down at once.
You let the other man believe you know nothing, that you're a soft thing in a nice suit, a bystander who wandered in.
Then, when he's comfortable, you let him hear the rattle.
I'm a snake in a burgundy tie, and I have been shaking my tail politely at this man for two weeks. Tonight I strike.
My phone buzzes against my ribs. I pull it out, read the single line from the assistant upstairs, and let a slow smile spread.
He'll see us now.
"Gentlemen." I pocket the phone. "Our client will see us. You ready? Because I want to be clear — we walk through that door, there's no turning back. No flinching. No going home to lick a wound. This ends tonight, one way or the other."
They look at me. Neither one blinks. Beckett gives a single grim nod. August's calm doesn't so much as ripple, and it occurs to me — not for the first time — that the gentlest man in our pack might also be the least breakable.
"Good. Then here's how it goes." I flick an invisible speck off Beckett's lapel, because I can, because they let me.
"I lead. Start to finish. The second we cross that threshold I'm not your packmate, I'm the planner, and this is the hardest client I've ever pitched.
You follow my rhythm. You let me take the reins.
I know exactly what that costs the pair of you.
You're both Alphas built to stand at the front of a fight, not behind a wedding planner in a nicer suit.
Beckett wants to lead, because leading is how he protects.
August wants to smooth, because smoothing is how he loves.
Tonight I need you to want neither. I need you to trust that the softest-looking man in this pack is also the one with a knife up his sleeve, and let me do the cutting.
" I hold Beckett's gaze, then August's. "He is going to say things designed to gut you.
About the past. About her. He'll aim straight for the softest part of you and twist. You will not react.
Not a word, not a fist, not a growl he can use.
If it bruises your ego — and it will — we bleed about it in the truck afterward, in private, like grown men.
Not in front of the audience. We clear?"
"Clear," August murmurs.
"Clear," Beckett grinds out, and I can hear exactly how much it costs him to promise it.
"Beautiful." I turn to the tall double doors and square my shoulders. "Let's go plan a wedding."
That's the trick I've never bothered to explain to them.
This isn't so different from the job. A hostile client, an impossible timeline, a room full of people convinced they hold every card — I've been walking into versions of this exact room my whole career, smiling, holding a folder, making the impossible look inevitable.
The stakes have never once been a woman I'd lie down in traffic for.
But the muscles are the same. You breathe.
You smile. You make them believe the outcome was their own idea all along.
I open the door.
The office beyond is the kind of room built to make a person feel small — a cathedral of dark wood and cold glass, a wall of windows throwing the city's lights across a desk you could land a plane on.
Alistair Whitlock sits behind it with a phone to his ear, silver hair swept back, a suit that costs more than my truck, the whole predatory stillness of a man who has never once in his life been the one waiting.
Aged leather and cold bergamot and cigar smoke roll off him, expensive and joyless, a scent with a blade folded inside it.
He glances up. One brow lifts at the sight of the three of us filling his doorway, and something flickers across his face — surprise, quickly leashed.
"I'll have to call you back," he says smoothly into the phone, eyes never leaving us. "It seems I've a meeting I didn't schedule."
He sets the phone in its cradle. We step inside, and the doors swing shut behind us with a heavy, final click. At the edges of the room, two silent butlers stand like furniture, hands folded, waiting on a man who collects people the way other men collect watches.