Chapter 12
The tux doesn't fit right across my shoulders.
Nothing off a rack fits right, but today the tailored seams pull tight enough to remind me what I am every time I breathe. Orc, green-skinned, seven feet of muscle and bone and a broken tusk.
I straighten the collar. Smooth the lapels.
My cut hangs over the back of the chair behind me, and I grab it and shrug it on over the jacket because I'm not getting married without it.
The leather settles against my frame the way it has for decades, soft at the creases, warm across the back, the VP patch riding my right shoulder.
Mom's necklace sits heavy in my pocket. Old and orc and saved because even when my brother burns bridges, someone in this family needs to keep the ashes.
I'm giving it to Jess after the ceremony. The ring came from our mother through Knox. The necklace comes from our mother through me. Two pieces of a woman neither of us talk about enough, split between two sons who loved her different and miss her the same.
My phone buzzes on the counter. Sarah: If you come near this apartment before the ceremony I will remove your spleen with a melon baller. I'm not joking. Stay put.
Knox, two minutes later: Listen to my wife.
I pocket the phone and head for the apartment.
The door's unlocked. I push it open and Sarah's voice carries from the bedroom, mid-sentence, something about bobby pins and a veil that won't cooperate. She rounds the corner with a curling iron in one hand and Reeve balanced on her hip, his fist tangled in her hair, she stops when she sees me.
"I literally texted you four minutes ago."
"I read it. Compelling argument."
She narrows her eyes. Reeve stares at me with Knox's gold-flecked irises and shoves his entire hand into his mouth. The expression Sarah levels at me could wilt steel. But the corner of her mouth lifts.
"Two minutes." She points the curling iron at my chest. "If you wrinkle that dress, I'll let Knox deal with you."
She disappears down the hallway with Reeve gnawing on her shoulder and I hear the bedroom door click shut.
Jess stands by the window.
White dress, simple, no beading or lace or whatever else wedding magazines sell for the price of a motorcycle. The fabric skims her shoulders and falls straight, and wildflowers twist through her hair, purple clover and Queen Anne's lace tucked behind her ear.
Through the bond, everything she's feeling rolls into me at once. Nerves winding tight around her ribs. Happiness running hot beneath them. A fierceness that belongs to a woman who makes decisions with her whole body and never second-guesses once she's committed.
She turns, and the air leaves my lungs.
"You're not supposed to see me yet."
"Couldn't wait," I say.
Her lips press together and the fight lasts about a second and a half before she crosses the room, fists my lapels, and kisses me hard.
I catch her waist and pull her in and forget about the dress, the ceremony, the fifty people waiting in the courtyard, all of it gone except the taste of her lip gloss and the sound she makes when I lift her off the floor.
She pulls back laughing. "My lipstick."
"I'll fix it." I run my thumb across her lower lip, smoothing the smudge I left there, and her expression softens in a way that makes my chest hurt. "You look—" The word sticks. I swallow around it. "Jess."
"That good, huh?"
"Better."
She straightens my lapels where she crushed them. Her ring glints, the amber stone throwing a warm glow across my shirt. I close my fingers around hers and press a kiss to her knuckles because I can't help it. She's standing here in a wedding dress and she picked me.
"See you out there, Kitten."
"Don't trip."
"No promises."
The courtyard looks different in December.
The brothers hung lights again, the same way they did for Knox and Sarah's wedding, strings of warm bulbs crisscrossing between the posts.
Mason jars with candles line the aisle. Wildflowers in mismatched vases crowd every flat surface, and the gardens have gone winter-brown except for the patch behind the fire pit.
I stop walking.
The brick circle where Knox burned our father's gifts three months ago sits half-hidden behind a tangle of new growth.
Wild grasses, yarrow, a stubborn cluster of late-blooming asters pushing through the ash.
Nobody planted them. The seeds blew in or survived the fire underground, and the earth filled in what rage tried to empty.
I don't say anything but I take my place at the end of the aisle and watch the candles flicker and keep the observation between me and the asters.
Knox stands beside me. My brother, my president.
Tux and cut, same as me, his tusks pale against green skin, his expression locked down the way it gets when he's holding himself together through force of will.
He got ordained online, spent twenty minutes filling out a form on his laptop while Sarah read the requirements over his shoulder and Jess made jokes about Knox's pastoral authority until he threatened to officiate in Orcish.
"You good?" he asks.
"Yeah." My voice comes out rough. "Yeah, I'm good."
He nods. His hand closes on my shoulder and squeezes once, the same grip he gave me the night I rode into Nightfall Cove at eighteen, four months behind him and too proud to admit I'd been scared the whole way.
Sarah stands across from me, matron of honor, wildflower in one hand, Reeve settled against her other shoulder.
Betty sits in the front row with her arms out, already angling to take the baby.
Gerald Winters two seats down, arms crossed, looking less cranky than usual.
Jax grins from the second row, still lean from recovery, the scars across his left side hidden beneath his shirt.
Colt, Dawson, Rex, Diesel, and Garrett fill the rows.
The brothers who showed up for every road, every fight, every bad night when I drank too much and talked too loud and none of them called me on it because they understood what I carried.
The music shifts. Acoustic guitar, low and simple.
Jess appears at the end of the aisle and my pulse doubles.
She walks alone. No father's arm, no escort, no one giving her away because Jessica Cooper doesn't belong to anyone to give.
Wildflowers in a mason jar, same as Sarah's bouquet at Knox's wedding, a tradition I didn't know existed until right now.
Her chin stays level. She holds herself straight.
Through the bond I feel her heartbeat hammering against mine, nerves and certainty tangled together.
She reaches me. Sets the jar on the small table beside the candles and looks up at me.
I take her hands.
Knox clears his throat. "We're gathered here because a hurricane forced these two idiots to finally admit what the rest of us knew for months."
Laughter rolls through the courtyard. Sarah presses her hand to her mouth. Betty shakes her head, chin high, the look of a woman who called it from day one.
Knox's voice steadies, but the wet sheen hasn't left.
"Marriage in this club means you ride together.
You fight together. You don't walk away when it gets hard, and you don't pretend it isn't hard when it is.
" He looks at me and holds long enough for years of mountains and garages and loaded silences to pass between us. "Finn. Your vows."
I turn to Jess. Her fingers tighten around mine.
"I promise to always tell you the truth, even when it's hard." My voice holds. "To be your partner, not your protector—unless you need one, and then God help whoever's on the other end." Her lips curve. "To make you laugh when you want to kill me. To love you through every storm."
She blinks fast.
"Jess," Knox says. "Your turn."
She takes a breath and squares her shoulders the way she does before she walks into a trauma bay.
"I promise to trust you, even when I'm scared. To be your home and your safe place. To call you on every line of bullshit you feed me." I grin and she grins back. "To love you through everything—loud noises, burned heirlooms, and all."
My throat closes. She feels it hit, I know she does, and her grip tightens, anchoring me the way she's done since the first night of the hurricane when she looked at me across a darkened clinic and saw through every joke I've hidden behind.
"I now pronounce you husband and wife." Knox's voice cracks on the last word. He recovers. "Finn, kiss your wife before she changes her mind."
I cup her face and kiss her. The courtyard erupts, the brothers howling. Jess laughs against me. I taste salt on her lips and the bond sings between us, bright and wide open.
The reception spills across the courtyard and into the clubhouse, music thumping from speakers Colt rigged to the garage wall.
Knox's speech lands the way Knox does everything, direct and unpolished: "Never thought I'd see my brother settle down.
Then Jessica showed up and proved him wrong about everything. "
Jax finds me at the bar while I'm pouring drinks. He's looking a lot better since the hurricane, the hollowed cheekbones gone, but the way he carries his left side still favors the ribs Jess set in a darkened clinic while his heart stopped on her table.
"VP." He lifts his beer. "Congrats."
"Appreciate it, kid."
"She saved my life." He says it flat, the way men say things that cost them. "I coded on that table and she brought me back. You married the toughest person in this clubhouse, and I'm including Knox."
"Don't let him hear you say that."
Jax grins, but it fades into something steadier. "I owe her. Both of you. I won't forget it."
I grip the back of his neck and squeeze. He nods once, lifts his beer again, and disappears into the crowd.