41. And Then There Was None #3
I don't understand any of it. My hands are shaking. "What—" I look up at her, at the bride who was never getting married. "What is he talking about? A video? What—"
Amber gathers her skirt and comes down a step, looking at me over her shoulder with an expression I have never once seen her wear. Not anger. Not grief. Just focus. The mild, patient focus of a woman running an event who's been interrupted by a vendor problem.
"They're shooting a music video," she says. "For Sloane and Nolan's honeymoon."
"Honeymoon." The word doesn't fit in my mouth. "Amber, they're not — the wedding's next week. Everything's confirmed, I have the whole timeline, the—"
She sighs. It's a small sound, and a pitying one. The pity guts me worse than any shout ever could. She pouts, just slightly, the way you'd break bad news to a child.
"They're already married, Cade." She says it gently.
She says it like a knife going in slow. "The Carroways and the Reeves said their vows three days ago, in a room with twelve people in it, four counties from here.
They're on a plane to an undisclosed island as we speak. " Her head tilts. "Check your phone."
I fumble it out of my pocket. My thumbprint won't read the first time. Won't read the second. On the third try the screen unlocks. There's a message waiting at the top, and the sender is Nolan Reeve.
I read it standing there in a wedding tent that was built to bury me.
Cade. It's a genuine shame, learning the leaks were coming from the one man on my team I trusted most. But I'll take it as a valuable lesson, and I'm grateful it didn't cost me my actual wedding — because we caught it early and planned the whole thing around you.
I'm in the air right now with my wife, headed off to a place nobody will ever find us, and not one soul knows where, because the real plan was never one you were told.
We left you out of it on purpose. Consider your contract terminated, effective immediately.
In a way I'm doing you a favor — you'll finally be free of the exclusivity clause I've held on you all these years, the one keeping you from binding yourself to anyone else.
You're welcome. You'll also be blocked, and blacklisted.
None of my contacts will touch you, and you know how a small town talks.
I'd start looking to move your business well outside Honeybell Harbor. — N.
The phone nearly slips out of my hand.
The clause. The clause that's kept me legally locked out of the pack this whole time, the mysterious thing nobody could explain, the wall between me and Amber's registration — it was Nolan's.
A career exclusivity clause I signed at twenty-four without reading, back when I'd have signed anything to work with a name that big.
Nolan's had me on a leash for years and I never even felt the collar.
He just cut it. He cut it in the same breath he ended me.
There's a bitterness in it so complete it nearly loops back around to funny.
For five and a half years I told myself I couldn't fully be with Amber — couldn't commit, couldn't put my whole name on that pack — because some careful part of me was always holding a little back for safety.
Turns out the leash was real. Turns out there was a literal clause, a legal wall, standing between me and binding myself to her even if I had ever once found the nerve to try.
Nolan had me penned this whole time and I never felt the fence.
The single honest excuse I ever owned for my cowardice, and I only learn it was real on the same gray afternoon it stops meaning a thing, because I have already burned every reason she would ever have to take me back.
I look up. Amber is watching me read it, and there's nothing in her face. No sympathy. No leftover tenderness. No trace of the woman who once stood on a staircase and let me make her cry. Just that clean, focused calm, a woman looking at a closed account.
"To be clear," she says, and her voice is even, almost kind, which is the worst part, "the reason the contracted pack ended up as four and not five was never a punishment.
It was that clause. You were legally bound to Nolan the whole time.
I didn't understand what it was tied to, and I still don't understand why a man would sign such a thing over his own future, but it doesn't matter now.
" She smooths a nonexistent wrinkle from her skirt.
"The government pack confirmation doesn't include you, Cade.
It never did. You're not bound to me. Not in any way that a piece of paper recognizes.
" Her eyes hold mine, steady. "Which means you're free.
Free to go to Iris. Free to go to any woman, any Omega you like.
There's nothing holding you to a single one of us. "
"Wait." The word scrapes out of me. "Wait — what?"
I can't hold it in my hands. Any of it. The tent tilts.
She turns away from me. She turns away like I'm a thing she's already set down.
"If you want to talk it through properly," she says, over her shoulder, already moving, "you know where I am.
My cottage. Seabriar — you remember it, from before we took the temporary place.
That lease is up, so we'll be back there a while yet, until the new house is ready.
" A pause. "If you want to sit down and discuss logistics like adults, that door's open.
But right now?" She lifts her chin toward the far tent, where the music is already starting to swell. "I have a campaign to shoot."
She walks. Skirt gathered in one fist, spine straight, chin high, straight down the petal-strewn aisle toward the arch, the music, the man waiting to make her beautiful on camera. Away from me.
My foot lifts. My whole body lurches after her on instinct, one desperate step, wait, Amber, wait, please —
A wall of black polos steps into my path.
The security team. The same four men who spent the last twenty minutes holding a mob off this tent, calm and enormous, closing ranks in front of me now with folded arms and flat expressions.
Not to protect her from the crowd. To protect her from me.
One of them, a guy I've bought a beer for at the Driftglass, doesn't even meet my eyes.
I stop. I stand there in the wreckage of a wedding that never was, in a tent full of dying flowers and my own name burning across every phone in the county, and I watch her go.
The white of her dress gets smaller. She reaches the arch.
The music lifts. She doesn't look back — not once, not for a second — and why would she.
She stopped looking back a long time ago.
I'm the only one still standing in the doorway, five and a half years later, watching everyone I ever loved walk off toward a life I'm not allowed to follow.
The tent smells like the end of something.
Bruised petals and blown-out candles and the cold ghost of Amber's scent already thinning in the air, that warm new honey note going with her toward the arch.
My knees want to fold. I keep them locked out of the last scrap of pride I've got left.
A little girl with her mother's hair. A cowboy to teach her the ropes.
A gentle man in a field of flowers. The whole picture the fortune-teller painted for me an hour ago, every piece of it real, every piece of it coming true — for four people who aren't me.
The realization settles into me slow and cold and final, the way the water finally closes over a thing that's been sinking for a long, long time.
I just lost my career… lost my pack… and I'm just watching myself lose the omega I thought I could envision without…