30. Ethan
Ethan
A couple weeks after we get back from Harte of Steele, close to a month now since the night Brick took those bullets for her, we're finally ready.
Brick's stronger every day, steady enough on his cane that Cam's stopped hovering quite so close, and Cassie and the old ladies have spent the back half of that month turning the backyard into something even more beautiful than the rushed version we threw together the first time around. There’s no gunfire waiting in the wings this time.
No officiant bleeding out across town. Just us, choosing each other on purpose, in the open, with nothing left to run from.
I stand at the makeshift altar in the same white tee and cut I wore the first time, because Cassie told me she fell for exactly this man, not some version of me dressed up for the occasion, and I wasn't about to argue with my own wife about what makes her happy.
Brick's in the front row, still moving slower than he used to, a cane propped against his knee that Cam won't let him leave the house without, but he's there, upright, alive, and every time my eyes land on him something in my chest goes tight and grateful all over again.
Pops takes his spot at the altar, grinning at me the way he has been since the church door opened on my patch-in ceremony all those months back. "Never thought I'd get to do this twice for the same couple. Not complaining, mind you."
"Wouldn't have it any other way, Pops."
Behind me, Knuckles, Cash, Ramsay, and Shadow stand lined up as my groomsmen, all four of them cleaned up as much as a Black Saint ever cleans up, which is to say pressed shirts under their cuts and boots polished for once. Cash leans over just before the music starts. "You good, Shotgun?"
"Better than good."
"Good. Because if you cry, I'm recording it for posterity." He grins, and even Shadow's mouth twitches at that, the closest thing to a laugh I've ever gotten out of him at a ceremony.
The music starts, and I turn toward the aisle, and there she is.
Cassie's in a different dress this time, one she picked without anybody rushing her, without an officiant's blood on the clock, and she looks like every good thing I've ever let myself want without believing I'd get to keep it.
Dante walks her down the aisle this time, something Cassie asked for herself, and the sight of her brother giving her away with actual tears in his eyes nearly undoes me before she's even reached me.
She takes my hands at the altar, and Pops clears his throat, and the whole yard goes quiet in a way it never managed to the first time around.
"Wrote something down this time," I say, pulling a folded, slightly grease-stained piece of paper out of my jeans pocket, and the crowd laughs before I've even started. "Pops told me to. So blame him if it's terrible."
"Get on with it, Shotgun," Cash calls from the groomsmen's line, and I flip him off without looking, which gets an even bigger laugh.
"Alright. So Pops told me I'm supposed to write something down instead of just winging it, which, if you know me, you know is a real ask.
But here goes." I clear my throat, glancing down at the paper once before I decide I don't actually need it.
"Cassie, I've fixed engines that gave me less trouble than falling for you, and I loved every damn minute of it.
You showed up in a bar looking like you were daring the world to try you, and I've been trying, gladly, every single day since.
"I'm not a poet. I'm not going to stand up here and compare you to a sunset or whatever.
What I can tell you is this: you make my coffee taste better in the morning, you make this clubhouse feel like a home instead of just a place I sleep, and you make me want to be the kind of man my father's actually proud to call his son, not because he has to be, but because I earned it. You did that. You and nobody else.
"I promise to always keep gas in your tank, literally and otherwise.
I promise to never, ever let you win an argument just because you're pretty, though God knows you make it hard to argue at all sometimes.
I promise that whatever this life throws at us, and babe, we both know by now it throws plenty, I'm not going anywhere.
Not for the Del Torros, not for the Estradas, not for anybody.
"You're my old lady, my wife, and the best thing that ever happened to a prospect who couldn't even keep a keg cold right. I love you. All the way down. No fine print."
Half the yard's laughing and the other half's crying, and Cassie's doing both at once, which I figure means I did alright.
"I don't have a fairytale to offer you," she says, voice steady despite the tears, and I recognize the words, remember them from a rushed ceremony under threat of gunfire, except this time there's nothing underneath them but truth all the way through.
"I spent two years of my life learning how to disappear.
How to walk into a room and make sure nobody remembered my face.
I was good at it, better than I ever wanted to be.
Then I walked into a bar in a town I only meant to pass through, and you looked at me like disappearing was the last thing you were ever going to let me do again.
I didn't believe in homes before you. I believed in exits, and backup plans, and the particular kind of quiet you learn to live in when you've decided trusting people costs too much.
You didn't ask me to hand any of that over all at once.
You just kept leaving the door open, every single day, until walking through it stopped feeling like a risk and started feeling like the only thing that ever made sense.
You have loved me through a fake wedding, a very real kidnapping, and a father who took two bullets for me before either of you had any real reason to trust I was worth it. I don't know many people who'd have stayed for even one of those things, and you never once treated any of it like a burden.
So today isn't me choosing safety, or convenience, or an easy way out of a hard family.
Today is just me choosing you, the way I'll keep choosing you every single day for the rest of my life.
Not because I have to. Because I finally believe I'm allowed to want something good and just let it be good, without a catch waiting on the other side.
I love you, Ethan. All of you. Every messy, loyal, patch-earning piece of you. I choose you. Today, and every day after this one."
Pops has to clear his throat twice before he can get through the rest of it, and when he finally tells me I can kiss my bride, the whole yard erupts, no gunfire this time, just cheering, just family, just every single person who matters most in this world standing here to watch us choose each other properly.
I kiss her slowly, and somewhere behind us I hear Cam sobbing happy tears into Brick's shoulder, and Rosie whooping loud enough to wake the whole county, and my father's voice, rough and unmistakable, cutting through all of it.
"That's my boy."
The party runs long into the night. Knuckles mans the grill like he did for Brick's homecoming, refusing anybody else's help.
Cash and Ramsay get roped into a dance-off by the old ladies, which Ramsay loses badly and Cash claims to have thrown out of pity, which nobody believes for a second.
Spook and Abby slow dance near the edge of the string of lights, foreheads pressed together, and I catch Brax actually laughing, head thrown back, at something Pops says that I don't catch the front half of.
At some point I catch Dante standing off to the side near the tree line, drink in hand, watching the whole loud, warm chaos of it with an expression I can't quite name.
Cassie catches my eye and nods toward him, and I understand without her saying it.
He's not looking at us like a man who's happy for his sister and nothing more.
He's looking at us like a man who's starting to wonder if a life like this could ever actually belong to him too.
I don't know what that means yet, not for him, not for us. But I file it away anyway, the way you file away the first spark of something that might, eventually, turn into a whole different story.
Tonight, though, tonight belongs to me and my wife, married twice over now, once by paperwork and threat, once by nothing but choice, and as I pull her out onto the makeshift dance floor under string lights that took the old ladies two full days to hang, I think that maybe a shotgun wedding was never really about the rush, or the danger, or the gun that started it.
Maybe it was always just about a man deciding, the second he saw her, that he wasn't ever letting her go.
I got that part right from the very beginning.
We slip away from the party a little after midnight, the noise of it fading behind us as I carry her up the stairs the same way I did the first time, except tonight there's no danger sitting underneath it, no war waiting on the other side of the door, just the two of us and everything we've earned to get here.
I set her down slowly on the edge of our bed, still in her wedding dress, and just look at her for a long moment.
"What?" She smiles up at me, a little breathless.
"Just memorizing this. All of it. I want to remember exactly what you look like right now for the rest of my life."
"You've got the rest of your life to look, Ethan." She reaches up and pulls me down by my collar. "Right now I need my husband."
I don't need telling twice. I kiss her slowly, savoring it, working the zipper of her dress down inch by inch until it pools at her waist and I can finally get my mouth on her skin, over her collarbone, down between her breasts, worshipping her the way I've wanted to every single day since the morning she agreed to marry me for real.
"I love you," I say it against her skin, over and over, punctuating every kiss with it. "I love you, I love you, I love you."
"Prove it, then." Her fingers thread into my hair, tugging just enough to sting. "Prove it, husband."
The word does something to me every time she says it, and I ease her back onto the bed, dragging the dress the rest of the way off her before I settle between her thighs and taste her slowly.
There’s no reason left in this world to rush any part of tonight.
She comes undone under my mouth first, quiet and shaking, her fingers curling tight into the sheets.
I kiss my way back up her body and finally free myself, joining us together slow enough to feel every single inch of it, a low sound escaping both of us at once.
It’s familiar now in a way that only makes it better, not less.
She hooks one leg high around my hip, pulling me deeper still, and I brace above her, staring down at my wife on our wedding night, twice married and finally, completely mine.
"You feel like coming home," I tell her, moving slow and steady, savoring every single inch of this.
"Then don't ever stop." She rocks up to meet every stroke, palms flat and urgent against my chest. "I want to feel this all night, Ethan. Every single time."
I give her exactly that, slow at first, building until neither of us can hold back the pace any longer, her voice climbing right along with mine until she goes rigid beneath me, a soft, broken cry filling the room right before she comes undone completely.
I follow right behind her, her name the last coherent thought I manage to hold onto, and I hold her through every last tremor of it.
We lie tangled after, her head on my chest, my fingers tracing lazy patterns down her spine, and for a long while neither of us says anything at all, just breathing each other in, married, safe, and completely, finally, ours.
"Best wedding night of my life," she murmurs eventually, half asleep already.
"Only one you're ever getting, wife. Better make it count." I press a kiss to the top of her head, and feel her smile against my chest.
"Already did."
Six months later, the house out past the tree line is finally finished, and Cassie stands in the middle of our empty living room turning in a slow circle, taking in walls we picked out together, floors Brick insisted on helping lay even though Cam threatened to tie him to a chair if he so much as looked at a power tool wrong.
"We did it." She grins at me, dust still in her hair from the last of the cleanup. "Our own house. Our own front door."
"Our own front door." I pull her against me, kissing the top of her head. "Knuckles already volunteered for first watch shift out here, by the way. The man's decided we need our own perimeter now."
"Of course he did." She laughs, easy and unguarded in a way I don't think I'll ever get tired of hearing.
Dante calls that same week, checking in the way he's taken to doing every few weeks now, no agenda attached to it anymore, just a brother making sure his sister's happy. Marisol's settled into a quiet life two towns over, according to him. She’s safe, she’s working, and slowly letting herself believe it's permanent.
Rafael's been stripped of everything the Famiglia ever gave him, exiled some place nobody talks about out loud.
"You should come visit the new house," Cassie tells him near the end of the call, and I catch the small, surprised pause on his end before he answers.
"Yeah." His voice comes out rougher than usual. "Yeah, I'd like that."
Sometimes, watching him on the rare visits he does make, I catch him looking around at all of it, the noise, the found family, the easy way this club holds onto its own, with something unmistakable in his face.
Not envy, exactly. Something closer to hope, still deciding whether it's allowed to want a life like this too.
But tonight, standing in our own house with my wife in my arms, I don't need to know. I just need this, exactly this, for as long as I get to keep it.
Turns out a shotgun wedding was never about the rush after all. It was always just the beginning.