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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
publish date:
2026-04-09 02:23:05KNOX
I cried through the whole ceremony.
I want to be accurate about that. Not the tasteful-single-tear version but the actual version, which involved Grayson passing me a handkerchief about halfway through Riley's vows and me using it without shame because there are things that are bigger than your dignity and this was one of them.
The vows she'd written were — I don't know how to describe what it is to hear someone you hurt very badly enumerate, in front of witnesses, the exact nature of what was broken and the exact nature of what was rebuilt. The blood-red dress and the shoebox. The kitchen floor. The bikes and the road and the barn in Utah, which she referenced without explaining and which nobody else in the field needed explained.
She said: "You were seventeen and you were clumsy and you wrote me fourteen letters and none of them were good and all of them were true and I kept every single one. That was always going to be the part of the story that mattered."
The pack was quiet.
Grayson was holding the rings and experiencing what I can only describe as a profound involuntary emotional event that he handled with as much composure as a person can handle something like that while holding rings.
Luna said, somewhere around the middle of my vows, "Daddy is okay, right?" in a very audible whisper directed at Riley.
Riley said, "He's very okay."
I had three sentences. I'd written a page and crossed it out and written three sentences because every time I tried to say more I lost it before I could finish, and three sentences I could manage.
I won't reproduce them here. They were ours.
The reception was on the pack land, long tables, fire pits, the particular noise of wolves who have been under a cloud and are now in the sun. Hunter appointed himself Head of Security at some point in the early evening and was taking the role extremely seriously, circulating the perimeter with the focused expression he usually saved for engineering problems. Luna had found three new friends within the first twenty minutes and established a secondary party near the east fire pit where she was clearly running something.
A pack member named Dario — who I'd known for eight years, solid wolf, no nonsense — looked at my phone screen at some point in the night and frowned at the lock screen photo. "Is that..."
"Riley," I said. "The day of the first wedding."
"In the—"
"Yes."
"Why is your lock screen—"
"Reminds me not to be that stupid again."
He looked at me for a moment, then at Riley across the fire, then back at me, and decided this made a kind of sense he didn't need to interrogate further.
At the end of the night it was just us. The fire dying down, the twins asleep inside with Mara, the last of the pack heading to their vehicles. Riley came and sat beside me on the low stone wall and we were quiet for a while in the way we'd gotten good at being quiet, the kind that's a complete sentence rather than an absence of one.
"If you reject me at this one," she said, "I will actually kill you."
I laughed. The real laugh — the one I'd apparently been saving up for the last six years — came out full and unguarded and genuine and she turned to look at me like she was surprised by it and then she was laughing too.
"Never again," I said, when I could. "Not even as a joke."
She believed me.
She was right to.
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Alpha Bikers CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
RILEYThe first anniversary of the bond completion was a Sunday in May.I didn't plan anything for it. Knox didn't plan anything for it. We'd discussed, briefly, whether it was the kind of thing that wanted marking, and we'd arrived at the same conclusion without having to explain it to each other: not a ceremony. Just the day being what it was.The twins knew — I'd told them in the general terms appropriate to their ages when the completion had happened, and they were both good at retaining dates and their significance. Hunter had it in his notebook, filed under *family history: key dates.* Luna had it filed in whatever system she kept inside herself, which was more precise than any notebook and which I'd stopped trying to fully map.We rode to school in the morning. The six minutes, the same route, Knox on the Harley and the twins behind him — Hunter's hands on Knox's jacket, both of them, for the whole six minutes, his knuckles exactly as pale as they'd been at the beginning becaus
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Alpha Bikers CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX
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Alpha Bikers CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE
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Alpha Bikers CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
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