Page 111 of The Florist and Her Alphas

Now there is nothing but bramble and rot and a silence so total it presses against my eardrums. Tears burn behind my eyelids as I try not to cry.

My vision starts to go soft at the edges and the garden tilts.

“Liana.” Cole’s voice, low, close. His hand is already at my elbow.

The world goes gray at the corners, my knees buckle, and then his arm is around my back, solid, taking my weight before I even fully understand I’m falling.

“I’ve got you,” he says. “Breathe.”

I breathe. The gray recedes slowly, in pieces, until the garden swims back into focus, still ruined, still wrong, but visible again.

“Maybe that’s enough for today,” Ezra says, quiet, careful. His pale eyes are on my face, searching it the way he does when he’s trying to decide how much to push and how much to protect. “We can come back another time. When you’re stronger.”

“No.” The word comes out harder than I intend. “I don’t want to leave yet.”

Nobody argues with me. Cole keeps his arm around me, steady, and I lean into it more than I mean to.

August crouches near the edge of the brush, peers into the tangle, and looks back at me over his shoulder, glasses catching the gray afternoon light.

“Let us clear it,” he says. “Just the space around the bench. So you can sit.”

I nod because I can’t speak.

The three of them go to work without another word between them. Julian rolls his sleeves up, Cole pulling a folding knife from his jacket to hack through the thicker bramble, and August yanking weeds up by the root with his bare hands, not caring that his fingers come away streaked with dirt and green. It takes them almost twenty minutes. I watch every second of it from where I stand with Ezra’s arms coming around me from behind, his chin resting against the top of my head, his chest a solid warm wall at my back.

Slowly the shape of the bench emerges from the wreckage. Wrought iron, the white paint flaking, one wooden slat cracked clean through. It looks so much smaller than it did in my memory. Everything here looks smaller.

August straightens, wipes his hands on his jeans, and holds his palm out toward me like he’s presenting something precious.

Ezra walks me the last few feet himself. I sink down onto the bench slowly, testing the wood before I let my full weight settle, and the relief of finally sitting rushes through my legs, up through my spine.

The garden spreads out in front of me, ruined and beautiful and impossibly hers. I can almost see her there, kneeling in what used to be the peony bed, sun on her white hair.

“I want to restore it,” I say.

Ezra’s jaw tightens.

I watch the protest gather behind his eyes, the same look he gets before a contract negotiation. He glances at the boarded windows of the house behind us, at the collapsed stretch of stone wall, at the six years of neglect stacked up in front of him.

“Liana,” he starts.

“I want our wedding here,” I say, before he can find a gentler way to say no. “In this garden. Right here, where the bench is.”

Silence drops over all of them at once. Julian’s hands go still on the bramble he’d been dragging aside. August looks up from where he’s crouched by the wall, dirt streaked to his elbows. Even Cole, still standing close enough that I can feel the heat off his arm, goes very quiet beside me.

Ezra doesn’t answer right away.

I watch him look at the wreckage the way I do and the ghosts of my family.

“If that’s what you want,” he says in a low voice. “Then we’ll build it back exactly the way you remember it.”

“It won’t be the same,” I say. My eyes sting again, hot and sudden. “I know that. I’m not asking for the same. I just can’t let this be the last thing they touched. Magnus took my family. I won’t let him keep this too. I won’t let the last version of this place be the one where everyone I loved bled into the dirt.”

My hand is still pressed to my belly. The babies shift again, small and insistent, and something in my chest that has been clenched tight since the moment I stepped through that rusted gate finally begins to loosen.

“This was the happiest place I ever knew,” I whisper. “Before. I want it to be that again. I want our children to grow up knowing it as somewhere good.”

Ezra crosses the space between us and kneels in front of the bench, taking both my hands in his.