Chapter 1
One Week Before
~MILA~
Iforget about the plank every single time.
Every. Single. Time.
The left corner board near the bathroom door has been lifting for six weeks.
Six weeks of me meaning to fix it, six weeks of me writing 'fix the plank' on mental to-do lists that live and die in the same thought, and six weeks of doing absolutely nothing about it because the moment I'm home, the last thing I want to do is maintenance on a three-hundred-square-foot apartment that I am paying for alone while carrying fifty thousand dollars of someone else's catastrophic decision-making on my back.
My toe catches it perfectly.
The universe's aim is impeccable.
I go down fast—no graceful stumble, no dramatic slow-motion save, just the complete and immediate surrender of a human body to gravity in a very small hallway—and the floor comes up and introduces itself to my cheekbone with the blunt enthusiasm of something that has been waiting to do this for a long time.
Ow.
I lie there for a moment. Face-down on the laminate. Cheek pressed against flooring that smells like cleaning solution and every bad decision I've made in the last fourteen months.
A whistle cuts through the apartment—low, slow, genuinely impressed.
"Didn't I say," Elowen calls from the kitchen, and I can hear the absolute lack of surprise in her voice, "that if you didn't get a man in here to fix that plank you were going to trip and fall?"
I groan into the floor. "I don't want to hear it, Ell."
"I said it in January."
"I know."
"And February."
"I know."
"It's March, Mila."
I push myself onto my knees and consider the state of my life from this particular vantage point. It tracks, honestly. This is about where I am.
"Girl." I look up at her from the hallway floor. Elowen is turned from the stove, spatula in hand, one perfectly shaped brow arched in the direction of someone who has known me long enough to have predicted this moment to the exact floorboard.
"I'm not blessed with a man. I don't have a man.
I don't have men, plural. What I have is—" I gesture broadly at the apartment, at myself, at the specific atmosphere of a woman who is twenty-seven years old and actively losing a fistfight with her own square footage.
"My lot of testosterone decided to leave my poor, financially devastated ass behind and drop a hefty bag of fifty thousand dollars for me to carry.
Because I'm apparently a sumo wrestler. I can hold the full weight of their stupid choices while I work myself into the ground.
So. No man. No plank fix. This is my reality, and I live here. "
Elowen sets the spatula down.
"Is your Heat coming up?" she asks, squinting at me with the clinical assessment of someone who has weathered enough of my spirals to categorize them by type. "You've been a bigger bitch than usual this week."
"No." I press my palm to the floor and haul myself upright. "My Heat is not coming because I'm on those stupid blockers again, so you can—"
"The sexual health lecture—"
"Elowen. No." I put one finger up before she can shift into the expression that means a careful, well-researched, loving but thoroughly exhausting conversation about suppression cycles and Omega wellbeing is incoming.
"It is twelve in the morning. I have thirty minutes to eat something and probably need a shot of something before I work the night shift.
I also took the morning shift because Rosemarie's sick, so I'm looking down the barrel of a twelve-hour stretch, and I haven't slept properly since—" I pause.
"Tuesday? Monday? One of the days with a y in it. "
The lecture retreats to her eyes. Still there. Just waiting.
Elowen closes her mouth.
The frown that replaces the lecture is softer—not sharp with concern, just weighted.
She tilts her head, thinking something through, and I watch her do it the way I always do, which is with the particular combination of gratitude and low-grade guilt that comes from having someone in your corner who cares considerably more than your situation deserves.
She smells like she always does—fresh peonies and clean rainwater and a thread of lavender that she's probably absorbed from the flower shop, her natural scent and her entire professional existence becoming indistinguishable after six years in Bloom and Brier. It's the most comfortable smell I know.
The olfactory version of a couch you've owned so long it has your exact shape pressed into it.
"Does Rosemarie need help at the café?" Elowen asks.
I sit on the kitchen floor because my knees still feel like they've filed a formal complaint, and think about it.
"Hazel's on mat leave. Reverie's on tour with her pack—lucky her—and Rosemarie just got back from her Rio trip.
" I pause. "Which, for the record, she went to with her pack.
Her pack that she met. Because she went to my mixer invitation when I was sick.
Which means Rosemarie went to a government mixer in my name and met three incredible Alphas, and I, the actual Omega on the invitation, have a loose plank and a debt that's developed a personality. "
Don't think about Rosemarie's pack.
Don't think about the way she glows now.
Just don't think about how you may be a tad jealous because you never luck out…ever.
Elowen's face does something that is diplomatically not a smile.
"Anyway," I continue, "Rosemarie's sick.
I already called it—she's pregnant. If she is, the café is going to be genuinely short-staffed because we can't run that place on two people during the morning rush.
I've been thinking about asking Ruby since she's going to be around Oakridge Hollows until at least summer, and she's brilliant with beverages, but even with Ruby we might need to hire out.
The problem is, Hazel wants to keep the main staff as Omegas—you know, to actually help out our own people, because half the businesses in this town won't hire an Omega past a reception desk.
" I rub my face with both hands. "I don't know if I have the energy to do interviews right now. "
"I volunteer as tribute."
I lower my hands and look at her.
"Elowen."
"I'm serious."
"You don't need to work," I say it plainly, not cruelly. "You were born into a trust fund. You were literally showered in money on Chinese New Year, which—from what I understand of family lore—involved actual cash."
She laughs, the sound bright and genuine, and it does what Elowen's laugh always does, which is improve the immediate quality of whatever room it enters.
"First of all," she says, leaning one hip against the counter, "I'm half Chinese, and as of right now I look like the whitest woman in the postcode.
We have to be genuinely grateful that my Scottish blood only delivered freckles and not the full ginger-hair package, because if it had, I promise you every person in this town and their auntie, uncle, and estranged cousin would be falling over themselves to ask where my parents are from and how they met. "
"They already ask that."
"They do ask that," she agrees without any visible irritation, which is one of Elowen's many gifts.
"But there's something charming about a Scottish bagpipe player meeting a Chinese clàrsach player on a cruise through Europe.
That's genuinely the most perfect How I Met Your Mother story that has ever existed. "
"How I Met Our Omega," I correct.
"Exactly." She crosses to me and offers her hand.
I take it, and she pulls with the deceptive strength of a woman who lifts and carries flower arrangements for a living and has developed forearms you wouldn't expect from her general aesthetic of softness.
I get to my feet. She pats my shoulder in the way she does, which is the Elowen version of a long hug—efficient, warm, sufficient.
"Listen. I may be born into money. That doesn't mean I can't help my best friend.
This week we're training two new florists, so I genuinely don't need to be at Bloom and Brier every hour—I can go in, check that they haven't cremated the roses, and come by the café in between.
We're not going to be slammed until Easter, when everyone suddenly remembers they believe in God and needs centerpieces. "
She's not wrong about Easter.
"Plus St. Patrick's Day is coming up," she adds, "and Oakridge Hollows goes about thirty percent more Irish than it has any geographic right to be for forty-eight hours, but after that it's dead until bunnies and chocolate."
I stare at her for a moment.
Elowen stares back with the patience of someone who has already decided the outcome of this conversation and is simply allowing me the dignity of arriving at it myself.
She's going to come in and be incredible and make everything better, and I'm going to let her and be embarrassed about needing help for a week before I get over it. We both know this is how it goes.
"Mila." Her voice goes quiet but steady—the register she uses when she means something, when the softness isn't decoration but foundation.
"I know it's hard. What those Alphas did to you…
leaving that debt, walking out like your years of loyalty meant nothing, that's not a small thing to carry.
But you're not carrying it alone unless you choose to.
You've got people in your corner." She squeezes my shoulder once.
"Rely on me. Let people help. That's not weakness. "
I look at her for a long moment.
She smells like peonies, means every word, and she showed up at midnight on a Tuesday because that's what Elowen does, and sometimes a person's kindness is so consistent it becomes its own form of overwhelming.
"I could use your help," I say. "Please."
Her whole face shifts into something warm and satisfied.