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Steph took the bouquet. Looked at herself one more time. The woman in the mirror was wearing a silk dress and wildflowers and the faint, permanent scar of a claiming bite on the curve of her neck, and she was about to walk to a lake and marry a tiger shifter who'd learned to stay because she'd been worth staying for.

"Ready."

The path to Moonmirror Lake was strung with fairy lights, hundreds of them, woven through the oaks along the trail like captured fireflies. The late afternoon sun filtered through the canopy in gold columns, and the air smelled like honeysuckle and warm grass and the mineral sweetness of the lake.

The clearing opened up and Steph stopped at the edge.

Twyla had outdone herself. Chairs lined the lakeshore in loose rows, filled with faces she recognized. Maeve in the second row, arms crossed, looking uncomfortable in something that wasn't bar clothes. Edgar and Rufus Tansley sharing a bench, Edgar dabbing his eyes preemptively. Nora from the learning center, wire-rimmed glasses catching the light. Freya with Sage on her lap, the little girl's copper hair crowned with a wreath of daisies she'd clearly been given to keep her occupied. Leora in the front row, composed, her amber eyes already bright.

A fiddler stood to one side, playing something slow and sweet that carried across the water.

And at the end of the aisle, under an arch of woven branches and white blooms, stood Criss.

He wore a dark suit that fit him like it had been cut to his body, which it probably had, because Twyla left nothing to chance. No tie. The collar open, a concession to the man who'd never be fully domesticated. His golden-brown hair was pushed back from his face, and his eyes found her the moment she stepped into the clearing.

The grin disappeared. The charm, the performance, the practiced ease. All of it fell away, and what was left was a man looking at a woman with his whole chest open, unguarded, every wall down.

She walked toward him. Alone. No arm to hold, no hand at her elbow, no one giving her away because she wasn't being given. She was arriving. Her own feet on the grass, her own pace, her own choice made visible in every step.

The fiddler played. The fairy lights glowed. The lake caught the sunset and threw it back in shades of copper and gold. And Steph walked the length of the aisle with her wildflower bouquet and her steady hands, her steady hands that had stopped shaking the moment she'd seen his face.

She reached him. He took her hand. His fingers were trembling.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi." His voice was rough. "You're wearing a dress."

"Don't get used to it."

A silver-haired wolf named Camille who served as Hollow Oak's ceremonial officiant now, spoke the words that bound them in the old tradition: vows of partnership, of honesty, of the choice to build something together that neither could build alone. The language was simple, direct, stripped of the ornamental excess that Steph had always found suffocating in ceremonies. It asked them to promise only what they meant, and to mean everything they promised.

"Do you choose this man?" Camille asked.

"I choose him," Steph said, and her voice carried across the water without wavering.

"Do you choose this woman?"

"Every day," Criss said. "For the rest of my life. Yes."

Camille smiled. "Then by the authority vested in this community and the magic that sustains it, you are bound. You may kiss."

He kissed her, and the clearing erupted.

Maeve whistled. Edgar sobbed openly. Sage shrieked with delight and threw her daisy crown into the air. The fiddler launched into something fast and bright that had people on their feet before the kiss was finished, and Twyla appeared from somewhere with a glass of champagne in each hand and tears streaming down her face, insisting she wasn't crying, it was allergies, she was fae, they had allergies.

The reception blurred into warmth and noise and the particular chaos of a small town celebrating one of its own. The dessert table was magnificent, three tiers of pastries and tarts and a chocolate torte that Steph suspected was enchanted because nobody could stop eating it. The fiddler played for two hours straight, joined eventually by a guitarist and someone with a hand drum, and the dancing spilled from the chairs onto the grass onto the lakeshore where people kicked off their shoes and danced in the shallows.

Criss danced with his mother first. Steph watched from the dessert table, a champagne flute in her hand, and saw Leora say something that made him duck his head and press his forehead to hers, his shoulders shaking once with something that wasn't laughter.

Then he danced with Steph, and the world reduced to the circle of his arms.

His hand on the bare skin of her lower back, warm and sure. Her head against his shoulder, the silk of the dress moving with her body. The fiddler had slowed to something that barely qualified as a song, just a melody that drifted across the lake while the fairy lights reflected on the water and the sky turned from gold to violet above them.

"You walked yourself down the aisle," he said against her hair.

"I did."

"It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."