Chapter 31
Thirty-One
LIANA
One Month Later
“Hold still,” Mira says through her teeth, somewhere behind my left shoulder blade as she works at the zipper on my wedding dress. “Hold still, Liana, I swear to god.”
“I am holding still.”
“You’re breathing.”
“Oh my god, Mira.”
The little metal tab is jammed, and at seven months pregnant I can’t exactly suck my stomach in.
In the mirror, Mira’s chopstick bun is coming apart at the crown, dark waves slipping loose around her temples, and there’s a fine gray film of dust along the hem of her cream wrap dress from all the stairs she’s run today.
“This is not happening,” she says, mostly to the zipper. “Your dress is not going to be the reason sixty people sit in that garden for an extra twenty minutes.”
“Mira.”
“You are in a five-thousand-dollar dress,” she says, working the tab in tiny, furious increments.
“I told you to go to the place in the city with the good machines instead of the sweet little grandma with a hand-crank sewing machine in her basement, and now we are going to get married in a half-zipped dress.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. It comes out of my chest before I can stop it, and Mira glares up at me in the mirror, eyes narrowed, a single loose curl stuck to her damp forehead.
“This isn’t funny.”
“You’re the most competent person I have ever met in my life,” I tell her. “I know you’ll eventually find a way to fix this.”
She huffs. But something in her shoulders loosens, just slightly, and she goes back to it. Smaller pulls now, careful, working the fabric with her thumb before easing the tab, and I watch her in the mirror instead of watching myself.
“Thank you,” I say, quiet now. “For all of it. The dress, the flowers, today. You’re my best friend, Mira. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
Her hands go still against my spine.
She looks up at me in the mirror, and her eyes have gone bright and wet, and her mouth twists like she’s fighting something.
“Don’t,” she whispers. “Don’t make me cry and ruin my makeup before we even get downstairs.”
She gives the zipper one more pull, careful and sure, and it slides the rest of the way home in one smooth motion, and she lets out a small broken sound of relief that is half laugh, half sob.
She comes to stand beside me at the mirror.
My wedding dress is ivory silk, simple, cut in clean lines that flow softly over the curve of my belly. My hair is half up, the rest falling in loose waves over my shoulders.
“You look stunning,” Mira says.
“We picked a good one,” I tell her, and she wipes her eye with one careful knuckle so as not to smudge her liner.
She crosses to the small writing desk under the window, where my bouquet waits. I personally made my own bouquet of beautiful white wedding hydrangeas and peonies, cut from the garden below an hour ago. She picks it up. Comes back. Presses it into my hands.
“Okay. I’m going to go make sure sixty people are actually sitting down and not still drinking champagne on the lawn. I’ll see you down there,” she says, kissing my cheek, and then she’s gone, the door clicking shut behind her, and I am alone in the bridal suite for the first time all day.
I turn slowly in front of the mirror.
I lay one hand flat against my belly through the silk.
Something rolls beneath my palm, small and insistent, and then again, a second smaller flutter answering the first, and some days I still can’t quite believe it, even with the sonogram photos taped inside my kitchen cabinet where I see them every morning.
I walk to the tall window.
The garden spreads out below me, and for a long moment I just stand there and let myself look at it.
Seven months ago my family’s estate was bramble, rot and a stone wall half swallowed by ivy. Now it’s peonies in cream and pale pink along every border, foxglove standing tall as I remember it, white heather lining the stone path like a fall of snow that never melted.
Rows of white wooden chairs are on the lawn with about sixty guests in them. Near the back, I spot Toby, curls escaping his beanie, leaning in to say something to the small woman beside him who must be his mother.
In the mountain ash tree above the bench, Pepper sits on a low branch with a yellow rose tied at his throat on a thin length of green ribbon, preening one wing feather at a time with the focused, self-satisfied attention of a bird who has already decided he is the most important guest here.
He looks up. Finds my window. Finds me.
He fluffs himself to twice his size, and even from here I can see his beak moving, and I don’t need to hear him to know what he’s saying.
Below him, four men move into place at the front of the garden, facing the aisle, and my breath catches.
Ezra in pale charcoal. Julian in cream. Cole in dove gray. August in soft fog. All four in matching shades of a color that isn’t quite a color, with peridot chips glinting at their cufflinks to match the stone on my finger, with a small sprig of mountain ash pinned at the lapel.
They start to glance around, restless, the way men get right before something they’ve waited a long time for, and I step back from the window before any of them can catch me watching.
I pick up my bouquet from the desk. Hold it in both hands. Walk to the bedroom door.
I walk down the stairs alone.
Nobody’s arm under mine. Nobody steadying me at the elbow. I am the last of the Marsh line, and I am the one who decided, weeks ago, that I would walk myself into this.
The string quartet beside the bench lifts into the first slow, aching bars of the wedding march, and the guests rise to their feet in a soft ripple, and at the very front, in cream silk with her bouquet already trembling in her hands, Mira is crying before I’ve even taken my first step.
I rest one hand on my belly, and the bouquet shakes in my other hand. I pass Toby in the back row, and he is sobbing audibly into his mother’s shoulder.
I reach the empty bench in my family’s honor.
I stop.
Slowly, carefully, I lower myself and lay one small peony stem from my bouquet across the sage-green wood, still warm from the sun, and I press my palm flat against it and close my eyes for half a second.
“I’m getting married today,” I whisper, feeling their ghosts nod in approval, smiling down at me. Tears spring to my eyes as I smile and imagine them all sitting on the bench watching me get married.
Ezra’s eyes are bright, wet at the rims, his jaw set the way it gets when he’s holding something enormous very still. Julian smiles at me. Cole’s eyes are wet as he gazes at me, and I smile at him. August is biting his lower lip, hard, glasses fogging faintly at the corners.
I walk the last three steps and hand my bouquet to Mira. Then I turn to face all four of them.
The officiant speaks for a while about pack, about chosen family, and then he says, quietly, that if my family could see this garden today, see me standing in it, they would be so proud, and my eyes go hot and blurred all over again.
He turns to me. “Do you accept these men as your lawfully wedded husbands?”
“I do,” I say, my voice steady.
Ezra’s chest lifts, visibly, pride and love moving plainly across his face. The officiant turns to each brother in turn, asking if they would accept me as their wife, and each of them says yes with full confidence, making my heart flutter.
The officiant nods. “And the rings?”
Cole lifts two fingers to his mouth and gives a short, sharp whistle.
Pepper drops into the air in one clean sweep of green and gold, wings snapping wide, and flies the length of the aisle at chest height, a green ribbon trailing from one foot, four small rings knotted along its length, glinting as they catch the light.
He lands on Cole’s outstretched palm, and the whole garden lets out a breath at once.
“Good boy,” Cole murmurs softly. He unknots the ribbon with careful fingers and passes each brother his ring.
Julian goes first, taking my left hand in both of his and sliding on a simple gold band streaked with diamonds. “My love.”
“It’s beautiful,” I say, only having one second to admire it before Cole slides on the ring he got for me on my right hand. It’s a thin gold band.
August follows, a delicate diamond band twisted through with vines that echo the engraving on my engagement ring, his hands trembling faintly against my knuckles.
Ezra is last, a plain diamond band, and by the time all four rest together on my finger, the whole of it catches the afternoon light and throws it back gold and silver in every direction.
The officiant clears his throat, soft, and looks between the five of us.
“By the authority given to me,” he says, “I pronounce you married.” A pause, the corner of his mouth lifting. “You may all kiss the bride.”
Ezra kisses me first, deep and slow, with a hand pressed against the back of my neck, against the veil. Cole kisses me next, cradling my jaw as if I might shatter. I’m breathless by the time we pull away from each other, and I turn to August.
“My turn,” says August, smiling, his eyes lighting up as he kisses me softly on the lips a little too long until the crowd cheers and whoops. He presses his forehead against mine afterward, his breath unsteady.
“My beautiful pregnant wife,” says Julian, as he places a hand on my pregnant belly.
“My husband,” I say, blushing when he pulls me into his arms without a care in the world or what the wedding guests might think, as he kisses me hard on the lips.
From somewhere overhead, into the noise, Pepper announces, with enormous satisfaction, “bedtime.” The crowd laughs, and I giggle as Julian grins.
“Well, he’s right,” Julian whispers only to me. “You’ll experience a proper bedtime for your wedding night, baby.”
Heat rises through my face as I clench my thighs underneath my poofy dress. “Let’s see if you can.”
The world tips as he lifts me in his arms. One arm locks under my knees, the other bands hard across my back, and he hauls me up against him.
The whole garden goes up at once. Sixty people on their feet. Champagne rising. Toby’s whoop cutting through it all from the back row.
“Julian,” I gasp, breathless, as I grab a fistful of his lapel. “Put me down. I am seven months pregnant. You are literally going to drop me in front of everyone we know.”
“I have never dropped anything in my life,” he growls, settling me higher against him like I weigh nothing, and looks down at me with that slow, dark heat that always means he has already decided how the rest of the night goes.
“You walked yourself down that aisle. Alone. In front of God and sixty people. That was the last thing you’re doing on your own two feet today, sweetheart.
” His mouth drops to my ear, his voice going low enough that it’s for me and me alone.
“Because once we’re out of here, I’m going to take my time reminding my wife exactly why she married me.
All night. Your scent during the vows was outrageous. ”
Heat floods me from throat to thighs. I press my knees together against nothing, and he feels it, because of his knowing, filthy grin.
“Behave,” I manage.
“Not a chance.”
Behind him, the others close in, and there is nothing soft about them.
Ezra with his jaw set and his hand coming to rest at the small of my back, steady, claiming, a promise of his own written all over his face.
Cole watching me like he's already planning every place he intends to worship.
And August leaning down to whisper in my ear how much he loves me.
Overhead, Pepper sweeps down the length of the aisle and lands on Ezra’s shoulder, making the guests dissolve into laughter and cheers.
I’m back in my family’s garden and full of flowers that I planted with my bare hands.
But this time, I’m surrounded by four alphas who chose me, and the two small hearts beating under my ribs.