Knot on the RSVP (Heat Seekers Omegaverse #3)

Chapter 1

chapter one

. . .

nitsa

The champagne sat sweating in its bucket while three grown women pretended none of us wanted the first glass, the way you pretend a wedding morning is calm when it isn't.

I'd been finished for twenty minutes and had spent most of them watching Celia get painted into the definition of bridal. She moved only when the makeup artist asked, which was how I knew the serenity was mostly restraint.

"You're doing the thing," Celia said without opening her eyes.

"I'm sitting here being supportive."

"You're cataloging." She cracked one eye open, found me in the mirror. "You've got your inventory face on."

I had my inventory face on. The bridal suite at the Cobalt Meridian was a study in warm-neutral luxury: cream walls, walnut trim, a chaise longue in some pale fabric I'd need to touch before I could identify, and enough flowers to stage a small funeral.

Three dresses hung from a garment rack near the window: Celia's, mine, and the maid of honor's, all zipped into protective plastic that caught the light.

Jeanine, said maid of honor, was in the bathroom having her hair done.

The lighting in the main suite was better, so for a few minutes I got to sit with my childhood practically-a-sister friend and feel the excitement of the day with her.

Someone from the hotel had set out a fruit plate I was fairly certain had been styled for photography rather than eating, the strawberry slices fanned in a spiral precise enough to annoy me, next to the champagne bucket.

"Fine," I said. "I'm cataloging. The hotel welcome card on the desk has inconsistent kerning between the 'e' and the 'r' in 'Meridian,' and it's been bothering me for an hour."

Celia laughed with the well-worn exasperation of twenty years. "Kerning?"

"The spacing between letters," I huffed.

"Don't tell them and don't correct it."

"I'm not going to correct it." I'd already corrected it. In my head. Flawlessly. "I'm being professional."

"You're being you." She closed her eyes again, let the makeup artist tilt her chin. "That's the same thing."

The makeup artist, a beta woman with a steady hand and the blank expression of someone who'd learned not to react to client conversations, blended something into Celia's cheekbone.

I watched the motion: small circles, even pressure, the technique that comes from doing something ten thousand times.

Competence. I knew it even in an unfamiliar medium.

I wondered if I could do something similar to rough card stock, pressing color into it from flower petals.

"You're worried about Denil," I said.

It wasn't a question. Celia had been performing calm since I'd arrived that morning, managing the day hard enough to keep herself outside it. She'd gotten the trick from her brother, one of those ironies the universe delivers without charging for.

"I'm not worried about Denil." She didn't open her eyes. "I'm worried about Denil being right. Which he will be. Quietly. Without saying it. For years."

"He'll get over it."

"That's not the same thing as him being wrong."

"No," I said. "It isn't."

Celia was seven years younger than her brother. She'd grown up in his wake, in his shadow, in his quiet, unshakable conviction that keeping her safe was the same thing as loving her completely. She loved him for it. She also, on occasion, wanted to put him through a wall.

"He had a vision," Celia said. "For the wedding.

He'd been planning it since I met the pack.

Not planning it—" She waved a hand, careful not to disrupt the artist's work.

"Designing it. Crafting it. The ceremony on the lawn at one of the Stillwater sites, the reception in the new space, everything intimate, perfectly controlled, unmistakably his. "

"And you chose a three-hundred-person hotel ballroom wedding instead."

"I chose a three-hundred-person headache instead." She met my eyes in the mirror. "Eighteen packs, my mothers’ entire extended family, and two uncles who think scent blockers are government mind control and everyone who takes them is falling for the propaganda."

"You have multiple uncles who think scent blockers are mind control?"

"They're pack. To each other. It's very complicated. My aunts are lovely, though. I don't know how they do it."

I felt my mouth twitch. "That's the most alpha thing I've ever heard."

"They've been bonded for forty years. They run a hardware store. They're sweet, genuinely, and also one of them cornered a waiter at the rehearsal dinner to explain that suppressants are 'chemical obedience' and the government wants us all 'nose-blind and docile.'"

"Probably while Marshall was telling me he'd invited twenty more people under my nose, which meant twenty more programs. What did you do when they started in on the waiter?" Celia's omega was painfully shy; he'd delivered the number in a near-whisper, like volume might make it less true.

"I let Denil handle it." She said it in the tone of someone who'd both resented and appreciated the intervention. "He's very good at handling things."

That was the problem, of course. That was always the problem.

Denil was good at handling things, and that was how he showed love.

The people he loved sometimes felt handled instead.

Celia had spent her whole life in the gap between those two, and she'd gotten good at it.

She'd also, for her wedding, decided the gap wasn't worth the stress.

She had three other siblings besides Denil, and somehow her family bookended itself with the strong, stubborn alphas: him at one end, her at the other.

At least no one could present as a kid, or the house might not have survived.

I only knew as much as I did about her brother because of how often he and Celia had squared off, two alphas puffing up like bighorn sheep over who outranked whom.

"He'll forgive you," I said. "Not because he'll decide he was wrong. Because you're his sister, he loves you, and he can't stay angry at you longer than about six months."

"Six months is a long time."

"You got married at a different venue. You didn't fake your own death."

"To Denil, those are comparable betrayals."

"Then he'll get over a comparable betrayal.

" I leaned back, crossed my ankles. The hotel robe was a silk blend in a soft blush, and I'd been wearing it two hours longer than I'd meant to.

Getting dressed before the bride felt like rushing her, and I would not be the bridesmaid who rushed the bride.

"You made the right call. Their property couldn't handle the scale.

You needed neutral ground. You needed a space that wasn't?—"

"That wasn't his."

"That wasn't anyone's," I said. "That was the point. And I'll remind you, you've got a pack of other people who might have had opinions if you'd told them they could only invite six guests apiece."

Celia was quiet for a moment. The makeup artist had moved on to her lips, something sheer and pink that would read as natural in photographs.

Through the window, the city skyline sat bright and flat against the afternoon sun, glass towers reflecting glass towers, a view that came with a room rate I didn't want to think about.

"You backed the call," Celia said. "Professionally."

"I did."

"You could have told me to use Stillwater. All that work for a wedding this size would have been easier on you."

"And I told you to do what would make you happy, and to let me donate my time how I saw fit. You aren't a client I was going to take a commission from."

"No." She smiled, small and private. "But maybe you should have. You could run a whole second business in event planning."

"Not for a million dollars. This is gorgeous, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat for you, but no. Not even when the client is my best friend and is currently having her face painted and can't argue with me effectively."

"Bridesmaid of the year."

"I want that on a plaque."

The makeup artist finished with a final sweep of powder and stepped back to admire her work.

Celia looked bridal now, elevated and luminous, the face I'd known for twenty years lit from within.

Not that she needed it. She was gorgeous on her worst day, and she'd been glowing since the first night she spent with her pack.

The effect was intentional, expensive, and worth every cent.

"You're done," I said. "You look like yourself but more."

"Is that a compliment?"

"It's the highest compliment. You look like the version of yourself that gets photographed from dozens of angles and displays them for decades."

She turned from the mirror, and for a second her composure cracked. "What if I made the wrong call?"

"You didn't."

"What if Denil doesn't forgive me?"

"He will. You know he will. You're not worried about him forgiving you. You're worried about disappointing him, and those are different fears."

She looked at me for a long moment. The makeup artist had retreated to her brushes, giving us the privacy professionals learn to manufacture out of busy hands and averted eyes.

"You're very good at this," Celia said.

"At what?"

"At being the person I need."

I didn't know what to say to that. I never did. Compliments about my work were easy; I'd earned the work, controlled it, improved it. This one asked for an answer with skin in it. I reached for the nearest practical fact.

"Your programs are done," I said. "I finished them last night. After the rehearsal dinner."

"All of them?"

"All three hundred and twenty. Hand-lettered headings on every extra I had to make when your mother added her bridge club three weeks ago."

Celia winced. "I told her not to."

"You told her. She didn't listen. I charged her double for the rush." I winked and stood, smoothing the robe where it had creased at my hip. "They're in my bag. I need to get them to the ceremony space before guests start arriving and your uncles explain chemical obedience to the florist."

"Take someone to help you carry them."

"I can carry a stack of paper, Celia."