And somehow, without ever meaning to, she became the pulse under my ribs. The oxygen in my lungs. The thing that tethered me back to myself.
She was the reason I was standing here. The reason I wanted forever.
I blinked hard, staring out at the horizon until it blurred. The light bent and shimmered, and for a second it looked like it was moving, like the world itself was holding its breath with me. My chest felt too small for everything inside it. My brain couldn’t keep up with the fact that we’d actually made it here, to this place, to this inevitable, perfect day.
I’d imagined it a hundred times. What she’d look like. What she’d feel like walking toward me. Every version of that dream ended with my heart splitting open to make room for more love for her, and still, standing here now, it wasn’t enough. None of it prepared me for the ache of it—the quiet, brutal kind that felt like reverence and ruin all at once.
Marco sniffed beside me, failing spectacularly at subtle. I didn’t even have to glance over to know his eyes were wet. “Don’t start,” I muttered, voice rough.
“I’m fine,” he whispered back, and sniffed again.
Kimi was on Marco’s other side, hands folded, jaw set tight, pretending to be carved from stone.
“Mate,” Kimi said dryly from his other side, “at this rate, you’ll need a saline drip before she even gets here.”
“You cry atThe Parent Trap,” Marco hissed, wiping his cheek.
“Not in public.”
“And yet you brought matching tissues.”
“They’re neutral toned,” Kimi replied, deadpan. “It’s called coordination.”
I didn’t even try to fight the quiet laugh that shook in my chest. That was what Auri had done too—taught me how to hold more than one thing at once. Joy and grief. Love and fear. Hope and holy terror.
Ivy was to my left, where she’d stand beside Auri, muttering curses at herself for being such a sap while subtly dabbing the corner of her eye with a knuckle.
And then there was Colette, serene as ever, her voice carrying on a soft breeze. “It’s time.”
My lungs locked, just as Lucy’s song swelled. The olive branches whispered above me. And suddenly everything I’d ever known, everything I’d ever been, felt like it was converging into this one single point in time.
I could feel her. It was a shift in the air—a warmth that slid across my shoulders, a prickle at the base of my spine, a pull I couldn’t fight if I tried.
My fingers flexed. My pulse stuttered to a stop before restarting an accelerated rhythm.
Then I turned, and the whole fucking world tilted.
The world didn’t stop, butI did.
Auri was there, maybe thirty feet from me, walking toward me in white like she promised. My girl. Mywife.
Every cell in my body seized. She was sunlight and silk and sin and surrender and salvation, and I couldn’t fuckingbreathe. Not because she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, thoughfuck, she was. But because I knew her. Iknewher. And she was still coming toward me, choosing this, committing to her line for the rest of her life. She choseme.
Her hair was down, curled the way she liked it when she wanted me to stare. And Idid.God, I stared. I couldn’t stop. The veil floated behind her like a specter, as though the air itself refused to let her go. She looked like a holy matrimonial vision, and something in me misfired, short-circuited so violently I almost staggered.
It hit me that this wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a memory. It washer, in white, walking toward me, and I was the one waiting at the end of the aisle.
And that dress. Christ. That dress looked like it had been poured over her in liquid devotion and stitched by the hands of every lustful saint in heaven. Ivory silk clung to her curves like it had memorized them the way I had with my hands, like it wanted me to drop dead right there for eventhinkingabout peeling it off. Thin straps bit into her tanned shoulders, framing the soft slope of her collarbone.
It was soft and flowing, with a plunging neckline that dipped low enough to make my spine go stiff. Low enough that I could see the fading mark I’d left just below her collarbone.Mine.A bite, a promise, a fucking prayer half-shadowed by the whisper-thin straps on her shoulders, straps I’d pictured and fantasized about pulling down all fucking morning.
It was indecent. It was ethereal. It wasperfect.
It was the kind of dress that made a man want to sin his way through eternity just to peel it off with his teeth.
I’d always imagined what she’d wear, but nothing could’ve prepared me for this. For the way that dress turned her intosomething between an angel and a warning. A soft, glorious omen of the rest of my life.
In her hands, a bouquet of pink peonies, delicate and in full bloom, a shade softer than the color flushing up her throat and staining her cheeks. The same shade her lips turned when I kissed her too long and when I ruined her just right.
