Chapter 5 Lucky Charm
Lucky Charm
~MILA~
The heels goes on last.
I've been building upward for two hours—dress first, the straps settled carefully over bare shoulders, the multi-layered emerald skirt falling into place like it was cut for someone who expected to stand in candlelight, because it was, because Adina on Carver Street understood the assignment in a way I am still processing.
Then the jewelry Elowen laid out: small gold drops at my ears, a thin chain at my throat that catches light without demanding it, nothing heavy, nothing that competes with the gown's own quiet authority.
Then the mask, held in place with a ribbon at the back—gold filigree over black lace, the trim precise and detailed and not remotely the kind of thing you find at a costume shop, which means Elowen either sourced it from somewhere that requires knowing someone or she has contacts in the masquerade supply world and I've stopped asking questions about her range of connections.
The heel clicks against the hardwood of her apartment floor above Bloom and Brier, and I straighten.
And look at the mirror.
For a moment I just—stand there.
The woman in Elowen's full-length mirror is someone I have to locate before I recognize.
Champagne blonde waves falling past her collarbone, the emerald fading in at the tips in a gradient that makes the whole thing look intentional rather than seasonal—which it is, but it reads as something more considered than that.
The gown: floor-length, the skirt built in layered panels of deep green that shift between forest and emerald depending on how the light finds them, with gold threads worked into the seams that Adina added to the reconstruction and that I didn't see on the hanger but that are visible when I move, a glimmer at the edges of the fabric that appears and disappears.
The bodice fits like something measured twice.
The neckline sits where it's supposed to sit on a woman who is built the way I'm built, which is to say it requires no apology and offers none.
The jewelry sits right.
The mask sits right.
Everything sits right, and I am standing here looking at a complete stranger who happens to have my exact face.
I turn slightly. The skirt moves with the particular sweep of fabric that has been constructed rather than simply sewn—a weight distribution that makes motion feel like statement. I watch it settle.
Something in my chest does something small and inconvenient.
Is this how Cinderella felt?
When she got the whole production—the gown, the glass shoes, the fairy godmother's complete conviction that she was exactly who she was being dressed to be—did she stand there in the pumpkin carriage looking at her own hands like they belonged to someone elevated, someone the room would actually make space for?
Or is that the kind of thought that only makes sense in a fairy tale because real women who work double shifts don't get fairy godmothers, they get Elowens, which is arguably better even if less magical in the technical sense.
I allow myself a smile. Just a small one. The kind I give when something surprises me into it before I can make it smaller. The woman in the mirror smiles back with the particular expression of someone who has remembered, for the first time in a long time, that she has a face worth wearing.
"Found it!"
Elowen arrives from the back room at a pace that suggests victory—she's holding a bottle, small and amber-colored, shaped in the way of something genuinely old, a bulb atomizer at the top with a tassel that she has to hold steady or it swings with a kind of cheerful independence.
The bottle is the sort that belongs on the dressing table of a woman from a different era, a woman who had a dressing table rather than a bathroom counter, and Elowen carries it with the care of something irreplaceable.
"Hold your breath," she says.
I arch an eyebrow at the bottle. "What is—"
"Hold it."
I hold it.
She presses the atomizer. Once—fine, I think, manageable—and then again, and then again, and by the fourth press I have been thoroughly and comprehensively committed to by whatever is in that bottle.
It descends around me in a cloud that I am experiencing entirely through my closed eyes and my not-breathing nose and the awareness that it is settling into every layer of the gown with the dedication of something that has decided to stay.
I breathe.
My nose registers it all at once—floral and complex and deep, the kind of scent that takes a moment to unpack: the opening is something like white tea and iris, clean and sharp, before it softens into a warmer middle of jasmine and dried rose that smells genuinely old in the way perfume used to be old, the kind that costs a fortune now because they don't make them like this anymore.
And underneath all of it, a base that I can't immediately name—warm resin, something like amber, a trace of something herbal that might be clover.
It is a lot.
My nose begins the process of lodging a formal complaint.
"—hh—"
"Don't—"
"—hhCHOO."
"Mila—"
"—hh—hhCHOO—" I press my wrist under my nose and wave my other hand at the cloud of perfume with the energy of a woman who has been ambushed. "—hhCHOO—Elowen, why—HHCHOO—why have you bathed me—"
"It's settling! Give it a moment!"
"—in a BOTTLE of—" I manage to stop the next sneeze through sheer force of will and stand there breathing carefully through my mouth while the perfume finishes settling and my sinuses reconsider their position.
"Why," I say, once I'm confident I can finish a sentence, "would you spray me with that much of anything. "
"It's not about volume, it's about coverage." Elowen sets the bottle down with the care it deserves. "It's a repellent. In a sense. A very old formula—my mother's."
I look at the bottle. "A repellent."
"It lowers the baseline of arousal signaling.
" She says this with the directness of someone who grew up in a household that discussed Omega biology the way other families discuss weather.
"Not completely—it doesn't suppress your scent, it works with it.
But it smooths the edges. Reduces the involuntary spikes.
The kind that happen when an Alpha surprises you, or when you're nervous and your body overcommunicates.
" She tilts her head. "It also has the secondary effect of heightening your natural signature to the right people.
Anyone who genuinely resonates with your scent will pick it up through the formula.
Anyone who doesn't is just meeting a very beautifully dressed woman at a party. "
I consider the bottle.
The perfume is still settling on my skin and into the fabric around me, and where the sneezing was an honest reaction to volume, what's left is—actually beautiful.
The iris and white tea have quieted and the warmer middle is coming forward, and underneath the formula I can catch the thread of my own scent emerging through it: honey and vanilla, the warmth of whiskey, a soft version of the lime zest that's present but not broadcasting.
Like the best version of my signature. The version of it that exists when I'm not stressed, when I'm not running on bad sleep and collectors and the specific adrenaline of trying to hold a collapsing situation together with my hands.
This is what I smell like when I'm okay.
I'd forgotten.
"Your mother gave this to you?"
"When I presented." Elowen touches the bottle lightly, a brief contact, the way you touch something that has history in it. "She said it was for the occasions that mattered. The ones where you want to walk into a room on your own terms."
I look at her. She's dressed tonight too—soft and unhurried about it, a deep wine-colored dress that she threw on in approximately four minutes while I was managing the heel situation, her strawberry-blonde hair loose, a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose that the light in this room is catching and making look like something intentional.
She smells like she always does—peonies and clean rainwater and the lavender she absorbs from the shop, the comfortable, undemanding signature of a woman who is entirely at ease in her own skin.
"Elowen." I stop.
"Don't," she says, before I can continue.
"I'm just—"
"I know what you're going to say and it's not a waste. It is the opposite of a waste. You're my best friend and your happiness matters to me the way your unhappiness keeps me up at night, which—for the record—it does. More than you know."
She says it plainly, without asking for anything in return for the plainness, and it arrives somewhere in the center of me and sits there.
"I know," I say, quietly.
"Good."
She comes to stand beside me, both of us looking at my reflection together—which is the kind of moment that doesn't happen often and that I won't know how to talk about afterward, but that I will remember.
I'm certain of that. The mirror, the dress, the perfume settling into the gown and onto my skin and smelling like the best version of myself, and Elowen beside me in wine-colored silk looking like exactly what she is: the one person in my life who has shown up every single time without being asked.
"Tonight," she says, and her voice has the quality it gets when she means something all the way down, no surface irony, no banter as armor, "you get to just be a person at a party.
" She turns to look at me rather than my reflection.
"Not a debtor. Not an ex-pack Omega. Not someone who's managing something.
Just—you. The version of you that existed before those three idiots got their hands on your life. "
The version before.
I try to locate her, that Mila—the one who walked into rooms without running the mental math of what she owed, who made decisions from want rather than necessity, who had opinions about her own life that weren't all in the conditional tense.