Chapter 18
Lucky Shot
~DECLAN~
She looks peaceful.
That's the first thing I notice after I finish smoothing the blanket across her shoulders—the specific quality of her face when the body has finally won the argument against staying conscious.
All the tension that's been running through her since the apartment is gone.
No jaw set against something. No careful management of her own expression.
Just sleep, the deep and genuine kind that only comes after a body has been pushed past the point of arguing with itself.
We got lucky with the hotel.
Three rooms available at six in the morning on a St. Patrick's Day that turned into a full storm—the manager barely blinked, which means he's either seen everything or was too tired to register the strangeness of a pack checking in at this hour with an unconscious Omega and the collective look of people who have been awake too long and solved too many problems in one night.
The storm cleared the building of the usual overnight guests. Their misfortune, our room.
We got her cleaned up first.
That required coordination—the logistics of warm water and borrowed hotel toiletries and the kind of careful, impersonal efficiency that you develop when you've operated in close-quarters situations long enough that modesty becomes a separate question from decency.
She barely surfaced. Murmured something once, shifted, and went back under.
The pajamas are Finn's—the only soft thing any of us had in our bags that came close to appropriate, the bottoms folded over twice at the waist because Finn runs tall and she doesn't.
Her scent is different like this.
The honey and vanilla that I've been aware of since the masquerade—since she walked into that ballroom and the room shifted in the specific way rooms shift when something has entered them that changes the atmospheric conditions—is quiet now.
Present, but low and warm, the resting signature of a body that has powered down completely.
The lime zest is gone. What's left is just the base of her, and even that stripped-down version of her scent does something to my chest that I'm going to deal with at a time when I have more than six operational hours behind me.
Rowan is on the terrace with a cigarette.
Finn is in the corridor, which is his version of giving a space air when the density of conversation in it needs thinning.
I can hear him occasionally from where I'm standing—a fragment of his voice, the particular tone he uses when he's talking to himself rather than someone else, which is how he processes things he hasn't decided how to say yet.
It's been a night.
I look at her again.
Mila.
Rowan told me the name in the car on the way here, delivered alongside the summary of her situation with the same even precision he uses when he's briefing me on something he wants me to have full context for.
The pack. The debt. The collectors escalating to the apartment.
The dead phone and the dead car and the eighteen months of trying to hold everything together alone in a town where nobody knows her history and she was counting on that anonymity to buy her enough time to find a way out.
And I knew the name.
Not from Rowan's briefing—from a dance floor.
From a rose-covered courtyard and the specific gravity of forty-five minutes that had rearranged my understanding of what an evening could be.
From a train platform at midnight and a gold coin in my palm and Finn asking why I was smiling when I didn't know her name.
I know it now.
The phone vibrates in my pocket and I've already missed the first call by standing here thinking, which is not a habit I normally indulge. I answer.
"You're awake," Marcus says, which is his version of a greeting at irregular hours. He doesn't waste time on pleasantries when he has information to deliver, which is why I pay him what I pay him.
"Tell me what you found."
"The pack." A sound of papers—or the digital equivalent, the scroll of a file.
"Three men. Dante Reeves, Kieran Walsh, Seb Moretti.
Currently residing in Cambridge. Reeves is in property development.
Walsh is consultancy, financial services adjacent.
Moretti operates in event management—high-end private events, the kind that require connections rather than just capital. "
"Current situation?"
"They completed a bond with a new Omega three months ago.
Family money, clean financial profile, no outstanding liabilities.
" A pause. "Which is partly why the collectors are accelerating on your Omega.
The ex-pack's new arrangement is built on a clean slate.
Any outstanding association with previous liabilities is a pressure point on that arrangement.
If the debt is tied to your Omega's name and the collectors can demonstrate she's unable to service it, there's a path for the ex-pack's new family to absorb the resolution and close it—for a price. "
"They're using the collectors to push her toward a forced settlement."
"That's my read. The apartment tonight wasn't random. That's an escalation designed to reduce her options until she has no choice but to engage on their terms."
The torn clothes.
I move to the window. The storm is still running at full expression outside—the kind of March weather that has no justification, the sky doing something specifically designed for inconvenience.
The hotel sits at the quieter end of Oakridge Hollow’s main stretch, and from this height I can see a few lights still on in buildings further down the road, the last stubborn participants of a holiday evening that the weather eventually ended for everyone.
"The footage I sent," I say. "The building cameras."
"I reviewed it." Marcus's voice drops half a register.
"I can get identifications. The methodology matches a crew that's been operating on collector contracts in the eastern region for about eighteen months.
They're efficient, they leave specific signatures, and they don't stop until the job is resolved or the contract is terminated. "
"What terminates a contract with them?"
"Payment of the outstanding amount. Or—" He stops.
"Or?"
"The target acquiring a pack. They're on contract from whoever's running the debt recovery operation, and that operation is predicated on her being a packless Omega with no one to intervene on her behalf.
If that status changes, the risk calculus for continuing the contract changes significantly.
Especially if the pack she acquires is—" Another pause, the specific kind that means he's deciding how to phrase something.
"—the kind that makes the people running the contract reconsider their exposure. "
I look at the sleeping figure in the bed across the room.
The blanket rises and falls with the even rhythm of genuine deep sleep.
"Walk me through the temporary pack registration," I say.
Marcus takes a beat. "You'd need all three of you to sign.
I can do the filing electronically—it's a provisional bond registration, not a full claim, which means it's legally recognized for all service and protection purposes without triggering the full bonding protocols.
It's designed for exactly this kind of situation: an Omega in an unstable circumstance who needs immediate structural protection. "
"Timeline?"
"I can have it processed in a few hours. Backdated to this morning, which covers the hotel and any services sought tonight." He clears his throat. "There is a complication with the current legislation. The St. Patrick's Day window."
"Explain."
"Government put it through last autumn. Any pack bond—provisional or full—registered during St. Patrick's Day week through the following three days carries a mandatory hold period before annulment can be filed.
It was designed to prevent men from claiming Omegas during the holiday rush and dropping them the following week.
The intent was protective." A pause. "The effect is that any bond you register tonight can't be dissolved before Easter. "
Twenty days.
"So if we register tonight—"
"You're her provisional pack until Easter at the earliest."
I look at the window.
Twenty days of Oakridge Hollow.
I think about what Rowan told me on the way here—not just the facts of her situation but the specific details he included, which with Rowan are always deliberate.
The Lucky Clover Lounge. The menu in her head.
The blueprint she's been carrying for two years and has never told anyone about because believing in something and losing it is worse than not believing.
I think about the masquerade.
About the woman who danced like she'd been trained for better rooms than the ones she'd been allowed into, who drank whisky and discussed Cole's pour technique with the fluency of someone who loved the craft rather than the occasion.
Who kissed me like she meant it and ran for a train because she had a shift in the morning and didn't slow down even when the night was worth slowing down for.
About a gold coin on a staircase and Finn asking why I was smiling when I had no name to attach to any of it.
"There's an upside to the Easter window," Marcus says, and I can hear him assembling his case the way he does when he's already landed on a recommendation and is building the logic backward.
"Twenty days is long enough for the collectors to verify the pack registration and reassess the contract.
If you're who you are—" He means the company, the profile, the specific kind of notoriety that comes from building a security operation from the ground up and taking on the cases nobody else wanted "—they're going to check whether continuing the contract is worth what it costs them in exposure.
Men like that don't stay in business by taking on packs they can't outrun. "
"And the debt itself?"