Chapter 3 #2
Attending Alphas have been individually vetted and selected by the Lucky Clover Society through a rigorous process of professional, personal, and character assessment.
No open applications were accepted. Alphas who engage in disrespectful, coercive, or otherwise inappropriate conduct during the evening will be subject to Society-imposed consequences, including but not limited to: professional referral reviews, connection network removal, and formal reports to relevant licensing bodies.
My eyebrows are somewhere near my hairline at this point.
They will actually report them.
To licensing bodies.
Someone built accountability into a mixer and put it in writing with a wax seal.
I keep reading.
This event has been organized with particular care for Omegas who are rebuilding after difficult or predatory pack situations.
The Lucky Clover Society believes that every Omega deserves not only safety but genuine opportunity—to connect, to be seen, and to move forward.
In that spirit, the Society is pleased to announce a grand prize of fifty thousand dollars to be awarded to one attending Omega as selected by the pack of their choosing at the conclusion of the evening.
I set the protein shake down.
Slowly.
My eyes go back to the number.
Fifty thousand dollars.
Fifty.
Thousand.
Dollars.
I read that paragraph three more times. Four.
I'm not counting. The words don't change, no matter how many times my eyes track across them, and I've been in this industry long enough to know that the words not changing is significant, because when something is too good to be real, you look for where the language gets slippery.
Where the conditions are buried. Where the fine print does what fine print always does, which is quietly renegotiate everything the headline promised.
I look for the fine print.
The conditions are on the back of the card, printed in the same forest green, smaller but no less legible.
The prize is awarded freely, with no strings attached to the recipient.
The Omega who receives it is under no obligation to the selecting pack beyond the evening itself.
Attendance confirmation required by the date marked below.
One guest may accompany the invited Omega to the venue but will not be admitted to the event floor.
I flip the card over. Flip it back.
No strings.
They wrote no strings in a legal-adjacent document with a wax seal.
My brain is doing the math before I ask it to.
Fifty thousand dollars is the debt, rounded.
Not exactly—the debt has been accumulating interest the way debts do when you're not quite keeping pace with them, a living, breathing, compounding disaster—but fifty thousand dollars is the baseline.
It's the number that's been sitting at the center of everything for fourteen months.
The number that shows up in my dreams wearing a black suit and holding a ruler.
I sit down on the kitchen stool.
I don't remember deciding to sit down. My legs made the decision independently, which is probably the correct call given what my nervous system is currently doing.
This is real.
The paper is real, the seal was real, the number is right there in forest green ink on cream paper that costs more per sheet than my cable bill.
Is this a dream?
I just had a dream. Am I still in it.
I pinch the inside of my wrist.
Awake. Definitively, annoyingly, kitchen-island-and-cold-protein-shake awake.
I breathe.
In through the nose: the apartment, the morning, the faint ghost of yesterday's Elowen-peonies still somehow present, my own honey-and-vanilla scent threading up around me with a brightness it hasn't had since before the dream—the lime zest back now, sharp and present, because apparently my body's response to fifty thousand dollars is the same as its response to something it wants and hasn't fully decided to want yet.
Out through the mouth.
Okay.
The date on the confirmation line is six days from today.
This Saturday. The letter has been sitting on my kitchen island for—I count backward from when Elowen brought it—two days.
Two days that I didn't open it because I didn't want to confirm that it was exactly what I expected it to be.
Another standard parade. Another evening of standing in a room and being assessed and coming home to the same island and the same debt and the same plank.
This is not that.
This is categorically, documentably, wax-sealed, not that.
I set the card down flat on the island and look at it from a slight distance, the way you look at something you're trying to see whole rather than in pieces.
The green ink. The clover seal, broken now, the two halves of the wax sitting on either side.
The cream paper catching the kitchen light.
Beside it, the coin—Elowen's family heirloom, Scottish and Chinese and warm from sitting on a counter since 4 AM, its four-leaf clover face upright, looking at me.
The life-rearranging kind.
My phone buzzes.
I look at it.
Elowen: Good morning! I'm outside the café. Take your time. I brought the good pastries.
I look at the time.
8:07.
Late. You're late. You are standing in your kitchen in a jacket that's half on reading an invitation that has rearranged the inside of your chest and you are seven minutes late and Elowen is outside with pastries.
I shove the card into my jacket pocket. Grab the coin. Think about it for half a second and shove that in too, because the coin has been on my person since yesterday and today feels like a day to keep it close.
I finish the protein shake in four swallows, leave the bottle on the counter, and get out the door.
The morning air is cold and cuts right through the jacket with the specific March opinion that spring is a concept that applies to other places.
I walk fast, hands in pockets, fingers finding the edge of the cream card and the weight of the coin simultaneously.
Six days. The number cycles through my head with the same persistence as the debt number does, which is ironic—fifty thousand dollars going in and fifty thousand dollars potentially coming out, the same figure on both sides of the same impossible equation.
Don't get ahead of yourself.
It's a chance. Not a certainty. One Omega wins out of however many they've invited. You don't know the room. You don't know the Alphas. You don't know anything about this except what's on a card in your pocket and what Danny heard through a bar floor at 3 AM.
But the seal was real.
The no strings was in writing.
I round the corner onto the café block and see Elowen through the window—already inside, already moving behind the counter with the ease of someone who has been watching me open this place long enough to have absorbed the routine.
She's wearing a soft green knit today, her strawberry-blonde hair loose, and she looks like a person who got adequate sleep and woke up before her alarm and has feelings about it in a positive direction.
The complete inverse of my current state.
She looks up when the bell above the door chimes.
"You look—"
"I opened the letter," I say.
She goes still.
"And?"
I pull the card out of my pocket and set it on the counter between us. She picks it up. I watch her read it—the way her expression moves through several positions, the small inhale when she hits the prize amount, the pause at the conditions paragraph, the longer pause at the end.
She sets it down.
Looks at me.
"Mila."
"I know."
"The fifty—"
"I know, Ell."
"And it's masked, so you don't—"
"I know."
She's quiet for a moment.
The café smells like it always does in the morning—ground coffee beans and the first wave of baked goods from the oven, Elowen has apparently already turned on, brown butter and warm vanilla, and something that might be cinnamon, the specific combination that smells like someone decided to make a room feel like a good decision.
My own vanilla undercurrent blends into it almost seamlessly.
I've been working here long enough that I can't always tell where the café ends, and I begin.
"It's in six days," I say.
Elowen nods slowly.
"So."
I look at her.
She looks at me with the expression of a woman who has been waiting a very long time for this exact moment and is extremely committed to not making it weird by showing how much she's been waiting.
She's been waiting.
She put the lucky coin in my pocket. She brought up Bridgerton. She's been building toward this moment since before I knew the moment existed.
"I need to find a dress," I say.
The expression she's been holding back arrives all at once—bright and warm and deeply, privately victorious, the face of a woman whose faith in the universe has been vindicated on a Tuesday morning in a small-town café.
"I know exactly where to start," she says.
Am I surprised?
Of course, Elowen Bloom, trust fund florist, has opinions about where to find a masquerade gown in under a week.
I take the card back. Slide it into my pocket. Feel the coin there beside it, warm and heavy and old, the four-leaf clover pressed into the metal by hands I'll never know, in a tradition that came from two different cultures and arrived at the same conclusion.
Lucky season.
Maybe.
I take my jacket off, hang it on the hook behind the counter, and go wash my hands for the morning shift.
Let’s hope I’m lucky enough to wing this…