Chapter 5 Lucky Charm #2
She's there. Underneath everything. A little worn at the edges but present.
"You're allowed to enjoy yourself tonight," Elowen continues.
"You're allowed to talk to people, dance if you want, stand in a room that someone made beautiful and let it be beautiful.
You're allowed to be someone that other people want to spend time with—because you are that person, Mila, you've just spent fourteen months convinced you aren't."
"And if the fifty thousand dollars also happens," I say.
"Then jackpot." She grins. "And if it doesn't, there's a backup, and the backup isn't going anywhere, and I meant what I said.
But—" she presses one hand briefly to my arm, light and certain "—lead with the version of yourself that walked into every room before Dante and Kieran and Seb turned you into someone who apologizes for taking up space.
She was brilliant. I liked her enormously. "
I swallow.
She was, wasn't she.
Before the pack. Before the debt and the pleading and the offices with bad fluorescent lighting and forms to sign that didn't have my name on the original agreement but apparently had space for it everywhere on the consequence.
Before the particular education of learning that some Alphas look at an Omega and see a person, and some look at an Omega and see a resource they haven't finished using yet.
Before all of that, she was pretty decent company.
"Go," Elowen says warmly. "Meet mysterious masked Alphas. Win large sums of money. See what it feels like to be Mila Castellanos when she isn't actively on fire. And bring the lucky coin."
"The coin is in my purse," I confirm.
"Then you're fully equipped."
I look at the mirror one final time.
The gown catches the apartment light differently at this angle—the gold threads in the seams catching and releasing in those small, glimmering flashes I noticed earlier, and the emerald panels have depth at this distance that they don't have up close.
The mask is on the vanity where I set it; I pick it up and hold it—black lace and gold filigree, a delicate thing, the kind that covers the top half of a face and changes it completely while leaving the mouth free.
Leaves a person recognizable to themselves and unreadable to everyone else.
Which, for tonight, is exactly the point.
I move toward Elowen, and she steps back automatically before realizing what I'm doing—and then I have my arms around her, which is a thing I do rarely enough that it constitutes an event.
She makes a sound.
"Oh my GOD." She freezes for approximately half a second before her arms come up and she squeezes back. "I said be a new person but I did not authorize a woman I've never met—AHH. I'm being hugged by the bestie who hates hugs."
I laugh into her shoulder. Her scent is close now—peonies and lavender, warm and clean, and underneath my own perfumed signature the honey-vanilla is present in a way it only gets in moments that feel genuinely good.
Elowen smells like safety and I don't say that because there aren't words for it that don't sound excessive, but it's true.
"I don't hate hugs," I say.
She pulls back to look at me. "Excuse me."
"I don't hate them. I'm just—" I take a breath. The right way to say this, which is the honest way rather than the deflection way. "I'm not used to them. Affection like this wasn't part of the house I grew up in. It wasn't—demonstrated, the way it is in some families. And my pack—" I stop.
Elowen is watching me with the particular quality of attention she gives when she has decided not to fill a silence before it's ready.
"Touch with them was conditional," I say, finally. "It happened when emotions were running high—after an argument, or—" I gesture vaguely at the space where the word for the other thing would go. "The kind of touch that comes with an agenda attached to it. Never just—this."
Just this.
Just two people in an apartment above a florist shop in a small town in March, one of them in an emerald gown about to go to a masquerade ball, one of them in wine-colored silk having made sure every detail is exactly right—and a hug, freely given, no agenda, no aftermath.
"We're going to work on that," Elowen says quietly. No fanfare. Just a statement of intent.
"I know you will," I tell her. "Whether I cooperate or not."
"The fact that you know that is personal growth." She squeezes my arm once and then steps back because she is Elowen and she understands when a moment has been fully spent. "Okay. Your ride's downstairs." She checks her phone. "They're two minutes out."
"Train station is five minutes from the venue," I say, already moving toward the door, reaching for my clutch and the invitation folded inside. "Last one's just after midnight. I won't stay more than an hour."
"Mhm."
"I'm serious. In, observe, maybe talk to a few people, out. One hour."
"Absolutely." She is nodding with a great deal of enthusiasm and the exact expression of someone who has already decided she will be receiving a very different story later tonight.
"One hour. Very sensible. If for any reason the sensible one-hour plan becomes a different plan, I'm one call away.
And I want a text when you're home, I'm not even negotiating on that. "
"You'll get the text."
"Thank you."
I lean over to the side table where my jacket is folded and my purse sits.
The coin is in my purse, just where I put it—I can feel the weight of it before I even slip my fingers in.
I touch it carefully, hearing the soft sound it makes settling against the lining, and something about the solid familiarity of it, the heft of it in a small bag on my wrist, settles something in my chest.
Scottish and Chinese and old.
For the occasions that mattered, from someone's mother to someone's daughter to me.
I look back at Elowen.
She has her phone up.
The shutter sound.
"Eep." She turns the phone toward me and I can't see the screen from here but her face says enough. "Mila. You look so damn good. Like a lucky charm about to walk into that room and make every pack forget how to form complete sentences."
"If you say so."
"I do say so. Go work it. Be knotty."
I pause at the door.
Be knotty.
"Knotty," I repeat, and the word sits in my mouth with a quality I wasn't expecting—something that sounds like permission, like a joke that's also serious, like someone handing you the door handle and saying yes, you're allowed to open it.
"All right. I'll try to work the lucky charm. See if I can be a little knotty."
Elowen's laugh comes from her whole chest. "Yes. That's exactly it. A knotty lucky charm. I love that, we're using that—if this goes well, we're doing it again for Easter. The Easter Bachelorette."
"Absolutely not."
"Maybe the Easter Bunny delivers a knotty desire of his own—"
"Elowen."
"Five packs pursuing one Omega through a springtime garden, very competitive, very floral—I'll do the flowers, I know people—"
"That is a fever dream and I'm leaving now."
"Let's pray it happens!" she calls as I open the door. "Your girl needs her happy ever after too, and if it takes a themed bachelorette circuit to get there, so be it!"
I pause in the doorway, the cool stairwell air of the building hitting me—different from the warm apartment, smelling like old wood and the faint botanical trace that drifts up from Bloom and Brier below, green and growing and earth-rooted, the scent of a place where things are kept alive on purpose.
"Your happy ever after's coming, Ell," I say. I mean it. "It's absolutely coming."
She leans against the doorframe with her phone in one hand and her wine-colored skirt pooling at the floor and she's smiling—the real one, the one she doesn't perform—and she looks like someone who has done everything she can do for tonight and is now trusting the rest to the coin and the gown and whatever force in the universe decides when things finally turn.
"Go," she says softly. "Have a good night, Mila."
I nod.
I start down the stairs.
The gown moves with me—the weight of it at my feet, the gold threads in the seams catching the stairwell light in those small flashing intervals, the emerald panels settling with each step.
The perfume is fully absorbed now, sitting clean and warm against my skin, and underneath the iris-and-jasmine my own signature is present and unhurried—honey-whiskey, vanilla, the lime zest there but restrained, a version of myself that isn't braced against something.
A version of myself that is simply—going somewhere.
The door to the street is at the bottom of the stairs.
The car is already there—dark, quiet, waiting with the indifference of hired transport.
I stop with my hand on the door and breathe once, fully, in through the nose.
March air and cold stone and somewhere beneath both the faint clean green of Bloom and Brier, which I will probably always associate with Elowen and the particular quality of someone who makes everything around them a little more alive just by existing in it.
One hour.
In, observe, out.
And if the fifty thousand happens, jackpot.
I push the door open.
Cold air meets the perfume at the seam—white tea and iris and something like amber and clover, my honey and vanilla underneath it all, the gold threads on the emerald gown catching the street lamp as I step out onto the pavement with four-inch heels and a coin in my purse and a mask in my hand and the kind of cautious, qualified, fully-prepared-to-be-disappointed hope that I've decided to let myself feel anyway.
Because Elowen needs her happy ever after too.
And so do I.
Me too, Bestie. Me fucking, too.