Chapter 17
Truck At A Hundred Miles An Hour
~MILA~
They say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
Life didn't give me lemons. Life aimed a truck at full speed, took out everything in its path, and then reversed to check if anything was still standing.
I'm sitting near the apartment door with my knees pulled to my chest, which is both the warmest position available in a room that is now effectively outdoors and also the only configuration that makes me feel like I still have a shape.
The cold has settled in properly—the seeping kind that gets under your clothes and into your joints and tells you it's not leaving until you give it something better to do.
My teeth are doing their level best not to chatter. I'm doing my level best to let them.
The floor is wet.
Everything is wet. My clothes from the ambient ceiling rain that's been falling on me since I walked in. My hair from the dash between the car and the door. The books. The jacket. The one corner of this apartment I was hoping might have been spared—it wasn't. The universe was thorough about it.
Phone: dead. Permanently, from the feel of it. No amount of button-pressing is going to resurrect that particular device, which has been on borrowed time for eighteen months anyway but picked tonight to make it official.
Car: fifteen minutes away, stuck in whatever mood the engine has decided is its final one.
Apartment: currently functioning as a very poor impression of the outdoors.
Clothes: what I'm wearing and nothing else, since everything in the bedroom has been either scattered or destroyed.
I rest my chin on my knees and close my eyes.
If I'd had a pack, this wouldn't be happening.
That thought arrives with the particular cruelty of 5 AM logic, which has no filter and no mercy.
With a pack—with three Alphas who actually meant what they said about protecting what was theirs—there'd be someone on the phone right now.
Someone calling in a favor. Someone making sure whoever decided to send a message tonight understood the specific consequences of delivering it.
I wouldn't be sitting on a wet floor hugging my own knees and shivering.
Instead I have Rowan, who I met forty-five minutes ago on a road in the rain and who has now seen me cry on a wet floor and describe the full inventory of my worst year to a total stranger.
Which is either deeply embarrassing or simply the state of things at 5 AM and I've stopped having opinions about which.
I didn't call Elowen.
I told Rowan she wouldn't pick up an unknown number, which is true.
But the fuller truth is that Elowen would have gotten in her car before the call ended.
She would have shown up with blankets and snacks and the specific kind of warm, relentless love that makes everything worse before it makes it better because it makes you feel how much you needed it.
And I can't—I won't—be the thing that her money and her time and her care keep going toward without end.
She bails me out, I spiral, she bails me out again.
At some point that stops being friendship and starts being a dependency that neither of us is willing to name.
I'm not going to be that.
My scent is flat. I can tell even from the inside—the honey and vanilla that usually sits somewhere in my awareness like background warmth is completely absent, nothing to broadcast, my body finally running out of signal.
I smell like wet clothes and bar shift and whatever the floor has been absorbing since the ceiling made its opinions known.
Rowan's black-pepper-and-dark-chocolate is still present in the room somewhere behind me, which should feel strange—a man I don't know standing in my ruined apartment at this hour—but doesn't. Something about his particular quality of stillness makes him easy to coexist with.
He doesn't fill silence with noise. He doesn't ask questions when he doesn't have answers to offer alongside them.
My eyes drift.
The cold is doing something to my consciousness that sleep deprivation finishes off—the particular floating sensation of a body that has genuinely reached the end of its reserves and is starting to make unilateral decisions. I drift. Come back. Drift again.
This is what wishing gets you.
Last night—was it only last night?—I stood in this apartment and told the universe out loud that I wanted to see the masked Alpha again.
Real life, no masks, a proper moment. And the universe responded with thunder and then delivered a collector's break-in and a dead car and a dead phone as if to say: concentrate on the actual problems, Mila.
I hear the building entrance below.
Footsteps on the stairs—two sets, one lighter and faster, one heavier with a longer stride. Rowan's voice from across the room, brief, acknowledging. And then the door.
"—said the ceiling, but I didn't think—" The voice cuts itself off. Warm, familiar from somewhere I can't place in my current fog. "Wait a minute."
Something settles across my shoulders.
Warm and heavy—a jacket, I understand dimly, draped around me from behind with the particular efficiency of someone who assessed the situation and acted on it without making it a production. The bourbon-and-orange scent wraps around the jacket's warmth and I place it immediately.
The bar.
"She's the Omega from Clancy's." The voice is lower now, directed away from me but not making any real effort at discretion. "The one I stepped in for. That fist was about to—"
"I know," Rowan says. A pause. "You mentioned it."
"I mentioned it in the group chat. That's different from actually—she's her. Rowan. The bartender." A low whistle. "You didn't mention she was the one I—"
"I didn't know until you said it just now."
A beat of silence in which I can feel the conversation recalibrating around new information.
"Okay." Finn—it's Finn, that's the name from the bar, the one who went to his knees on a bar floor for my number—"okay, walk me through how this happened. Because you took a different road on the way back—"
"Her car was on the side of it."
"And you stopped."
"It was raining."
"Rowan." The name said with the specific intonation of someone who has known a person long enough to communicate in shorthand. "You don't stop for random cars."
"I do when it's 4 AM and pouring." A pause. "The collectors got to her apartment."
Finn's response is not words. It's a sound from somewhere low in his chest—the kind that doesn't require translation.
"Those fuckers—" He stops. Recalibrates. "The pack situation?"
"Left her the debt. Clean exit, her name on everything." Rowan's voice is even, but there's something underneath the evenness that wasn't there in the car. "Went to Cambridge. She's been here trying to work through it."
"In this?" Finn's voice has gone flat in a way that's the opposite of his usual warm ease. "She's been living in this and working triple shifts and no one—"
"Small town. She doesn't have a pack behind her."
"Obviously." A pause, and then: "You know what I keep thinking about?
The legislation thing. I was listening to conversations at the bar—new rules for licensed properties, Omegas can't get proper help from services without pack documentation.
They literally penalized her twice. Once when the pack left her the debt, and then again structurally, because the system doesn't recognize her without one. "
"Fun," Rowan says, which from him communicates a very specific opinion about the state of things.
"You don't give a fuck about rules anyway."
"I give a fuck about workable solutions."
"Typical." There's a warmth in Finn's voice now even through the frustration—the specific affection of someone who finds a familiar quality reassuring even when the context is grim.
"Okay. Game plan. It's almost five and this town is going to be awake and nosey by seven.
Small places talk and her business spreads fast if we're not careful. "
"Declan."
"Declan can handle discretion, yeah. But there's still the packless issue.
Even if we sort the immediate—car, apartment, somewhere to sleep tonight—she's going to hit walls everywhere she goes trying to get proper help.
Contractors won't take a single Omega's deposit seriously without a pack co-signer on anything substantial. "
Rowan's response is quiet enough that I don't catch it.
Finn says: "You're already thinking about something."
"I'm always thinking about something."
"The specific something you're thinking about right now."
"Let's get her somewhere warm first."
A hand on my shoulder, gentle, two brief pats. "Mila." Finn's voice, directed at me now, at the appropriate volume for someone who might be asleep. "Hey. We're going to—"
But I'm drifting.
I know I'm drifting and I can't stop it, the way you can't stop a tide by wanting it to.
The cold and the exhaustion and the specific emotional weight of everything that's happened in the last twelve hours have compounded into something that my body is not negotiating with any further.
I hear my name again from somewhere further away than the room. I try to respond.
And then a scent reaches me.
Not Rowan's—the black pepper and ink and dark chocolate are still there, familiar now.
Not Finn's bourbon warmth on the jacket around my shoulders.
Something else, from the doorway, carried in on the cold stairwell air and arriving in the room with the specific quality of a thing I've been trying not to think about for twenty-four hours.
Cedarwood. Leather. The deep amber warmth of Irish whiskey.
I'm dreaming.
That's the only explanation, because the last time that combination reached my nose I was standing in a rose-covered courtyard at a masquerade ball and then watching a train platform disappear through a window.
I'm dreaming it because I fell asleep on my wet floor and my tired brain has gone straight to the thing I've been wanting since midnight and assembled it from memory.
"It's her."
The voice is low, careful, and unmistakable.
There's a response from one of the others—I'm too far under to parse the words—and then footsteps, and then the cedarwood-and-whiskey scent is right here, not distant, not assembled from memory but genuinely present and close in the way of something actually in the room.
Warmth arrives.
Arms beneath me—careful, unhurried, the same deliberate certainty I remember from the ballroom floor, from hands that knew where they were and why.
My body doesn't startle. It does the opposite: the last tension I've been holding since I walked through the door and saw the ceiling releases completely, my shoulders dropping, something in my chest unclenching with the involuntary relief of a person who has found something they didn't know they were looking for.
The scent wraps around me as completely as it did in the alcove of a castle. The cold in the room stops mattering.
I'm being carried.
I know this the way you know things in the space between waking and sleep—not with full cognitive engagement but with the body's simpler understanding. The motion is steady. The arms are firm. The cedarwood-and-leather scent is everywhere.
I want to open my eyes.
I want to, but the exhaustion is deeper than the wanting and my body has already made its decision.
I'm warm for the first time since this night went sideways, the jacket Finn draped over me still on my shoulders, new warmth surrounding it from the person carrying me, and my nervous system has simply decided: this is safe, and we are done.
I hope I get to see him. The masked Alpha who made me feel like a person at a ball and then disappeared into a train platform and into twelve hours of wishing I'd gotten his name. I hope the universe has enough left after tonight's performance to deliver that one thing.
But right now the darkness is pulling and the arms around me are steady and the scent that smells like safety is the last thing my senses register before everything goes quiet.
I'll get through this...just need a moment to submit to this endless tired struggle.