This should have been a happy day—one that I had only secretly dreamed about since I had kissed her on her eighteenth birthday.
Instead, I was about to tell her and the rest of my pack that her father wanted every bit of this wedding night to be traditional.
Right down to carrying the bride off and bloodying the sheets while male relatives listened outside.
Bile rose in my throat as people laughed all around me.
Our plan to fake it tonight to buy us some more time was quickly going down the drain.
It had been Plan B after trying to get her doctors to say that she wasn’t healthy enough to carry a child to term right now.
Every single one of her doctors save for Dr. Stedmeyer gave her a ‘clean’ bill of health that I’m sure was bought and paid for by Amante. Dr. Stedmeyer refused to sign off saying that there were certain medications she wouldn’t be able to take if she was pregnant, raising her chances of having a seizure.
It was all so fucked that even Edison Keane seemed almost disgustingly impressed at how callous Cini’s father was about the whole situation.
The man was still laid up in bed even now, making phone calls and coordinating the extermination of all those who tried to wrest his power from him with a precision that scared even me.
Cini turned to face me as I finally made it to the circle of our pack, her blue eyes questioning. Through the strange bond we shared, I could feel a rush of affection for me that was almost as sweet and potent as her scent. She had no clue about what was to come and that almost made it worse.
And despite it all, I couldn’t help but think about how beautiful she looked in her wedding dress.
Since she almost never left the Amante estate it was rare to see her dressed up in anything other than jeans and a blouse—so to see the way that the high-necked dress hugged her slender frame made me want to run my hands down the smooth satin and feel the way her skin warmed under my fingers.
‘Is everything okay?’she asked, her manicured fingers moving through the air as she glanced around my shoulders in the direction of where her father was laughing with his men.
Everything was in fact not okay, but I also didn’t want her only memories of our wedding to be negative and bad.
Glancing up at the somber faces of my pack, I didn’t answer her question and instead took her hand and drew her to the dance floor as the string quartet began to play a slower song.
‘I can’t dance,’she mouthed, her pale brows drawing together with worry as she glanced at the other couples swaying around us.
“Just trust me,” I reassured her, pulling one of her hands up to my shoulder.
Communicating with words would be hard during this—so instead I tried to open myself up and let her feel how I was feeling.
It was hard to separate what I felt for Cini from the guilt that I felt over her brother’s death. Every time I tried, the memories from that night rose fresh in my mind.
How he had told me he saw me kiss her—and how angry he was because of it.
That guilt had forced me to push my feelings down for years while she wasted away in that damn house.
I thought that, if I could just free her from it all, then I would have paid my penance to my best friend who had trusted me not to mess with his little sister.
But then she was taken and I thought I was going to lose her too.
There was no denying how I felt about Cini now. Her strange scent that wasn’t quite omega, but wasn’t quite alpha either was a match for me, and if that wasn’t enough I could feel how she felt about me through our bond.
I didn’t know how the rest of the pack felt, but I was clinging to the threads of her affection and hoping, even if shit hit the fan like I was sure it was going to, that we would come out better on the other side.
The sound of Amante’s grating, boisterous laughter filled my ears over the sound of the music and I felt a stab of irritation.
I just needed to get rid of that asshole first.
Even if I needed to burn the whole Amante family down for Cini, I would gladly do it.
Cini, probably feeling the sudden wash of violent feelings down the bond, glanced up at me with a frown.
‘Sorry,’ I mouthed before twirling her around, reminding myself that Cini didn’t need to feeleverythingI was feeling.
