Page 73 of Knotting on Heaven's Door

“Hey,” I whispered, voice catching in the breeze.

The grave didn’t answer, but my soul still felt like he heard.

“I’ve been... doing okay. Business is good. The team is good.” I smiled faintly. “You’d like them. Well, some of them. Mia keepsme sane. Liam makes me want to scream, but in the good way. And... there’s a new guy.”

My throat tightened.

“I don’t know what I’m doing with him, Adam. I keep pretending it’s nothing, but it’s not. You’d laugh. You always said I was bad at pretending.”

The wind shifted, brushing against my cheek like a sigh. I closed my eyes.

“I miss you. Not just the bond.You. The terrible jokes. The way you used to burn pancakes and still act proud of it. I miss the way you looked at me like I was your entire world.”

I sat beside the grave for a little while longer, knees to chest, jacket wrapped tight. Let the silence wrap around me, not as an absence—but as something sacred.

The wind threaded through the trees like breath, whispering in a language only the dead could understand. I wrapped my arms around myself, the bouquet already resting at the base of Adam’s headstone. The wildflowers I’d picked with such care at the market now looked too small, too insignificant for everything he had meant to me.

I stared down at his name etched into the stone—sharp and permanent. Just like the scar he left behind.

“Adam,” I whispered, my voice too fragile to belong to the woman everyone thought I was. “What am I supposed to do?”

The silence answered. Familiar. Steady. Like it always did. And yet, somehow, it made everything feel worse.

“I feel like I’m betraying you,” I said, choking back the tears burning the back of my throat. “I feel like just thinking about someone else—feeling something for someone else—is spitting on what we had.”

I looked down, fingers brushing the edge of the marble, cold and unforgiving.

“I never told anyone this, not even Mia… but I didn’t starttaking those suppressants because I hated being an omega. I took them because I couldn’t bear the thought of bonding again. Oflosingagain. What happened to us nearly destroyed me. I can’t go through that twice, Adam.”

A leaf drifted past my cheek, brushing my skin like a ghost’s kiss. I bit my lip hard to keep the sob down.

“But he’s there, Adam. He’s there. Sebastian. And he’s loud and cocky and infuriating, and still—he sees me.Me. And I feel something when he looks at me. I try to ignore it, bury it, but it’s there, and it’s growing. And I’m scared.”

I took a breath, shaking.

“Because if I fall again… if I let myself be open again and it all falls apart—I won’t come back from it. I barely survived the first time.”

I reached forward and laid my palm flat on the grave, grounding myself in the truth of where he now lived—in stone and memory.

“I want to believe you’d understand. That you’d forgive me for letting someone else in. But I don’t know how. I don’t know how to love someone new without feeling like I’m erasing you.”

My voice broke then, the grief rushing in without warning.

“I just need to know… is it okay? Is it okay to move on? To try?”

The breeze curled around me again, warmer this time, like comfort wrapped in autumn air. And for one impossible second, I imagined it was him—telling me it was okay. That I deserved more than mourning. That he would want me to find joy again. That maybe, just maybe, Sebastian wasn’t a betrayal.

Maybe he was the answer to a prayer I stopped believing would ever be heard.

CHAPTER 17

Sebastian

Leaving Ada’s apartment that night was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

And that’s saying something, considering I’ve had my name smeared across half the financial publications in Europe. I’ve watched my bank accounts bleed dry, my so-called friends vanish, and my father—the great Laurent himself—cut ties like I was nothing more than a PR liability. I’ve sat in a courtroom wearing a suit I couldn’t afford, listening to lawyers talk about me like I was some spoiled playboy who deserved to rot.

But none of that came close to the hollow ache I felt walking away from her.

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