Chapter 18 #2
"Has to be cleared before an annulment processes cleanly. Otherwise it follows the provisional bond into dissolution and it becomes complicated."
"We can handle the debt."
Silence on the line—the specific silence of a man who has known me long enough to know that a five-word response covering fifty thousand dollars of someone else's liability means I've already decided and am not being talked out of it.
"Aren't you worried she'll—"
"I know what you're going to ask."
"It's been happening. Omegas targeting packs specifically during the St. Patrick's window because of the annulment delay. They get twenty days of pack protection and financial support and then file the dissolution. It's not—"
"I know the pattern."
"Then—"
"We'll know how things sit in three weeks.
" I look at her. Asleep, in Finn's too-large pajamas, her champagne blonde hair spread across a hotel pillow with the emerald tips that were a masquerade detail but turned out to be her actual hair underneath.
"Get the paperwork rolling. Electronic signatures only tonight—Finn and Rowan are in the building. "
"I'll have it ready in two hours."
"One more thing." I lower my voice further, not that she can hear anything right now. "The footage. The crew. I want full identification before morning."
"You'll have it."
"And Marcus."
"Yeah."
"Run the ex-pack through the standard financial exposure assessment. Reeves, Walsh, Moretti. I want to know where they're vulnerable and what a sustained legal interference with their current arrangement would cost them."
A pause, and then Marcus makes the sound he makes when something has impressed him, which is not a sound he makes often and which I take as appropriate confirmation that I've correctly assessed the situation. "You're going to play this back at them."
"I'm going to make sure they understand the cost of continuing."
"Right." Another pause. "Be careful with the collector crew. They're not sophisticated, but they're committed. If they've been contracted to escalate and the escalation doesn't produce results, they sometimes—"
"I know what they sometimes do." I spent fifteen years in environments where that pattern was an occupational variable. "That's why we're registering tonight."
He hangs up.
The room is quiet.
Outside, the storm runs its latest chapter against the hotel windows—rain horizontal in the wind now, the kind of March weather that has decided to make a point.
The St. Patrick's green bunting across the street that was festive at midnight is now just wet fabric doing its best against a gust that doesn't care about the holiday.
I look at Mila.
The scent of her is present even from here—honey and vanilla, resting, the lime zest completely absent in sleep.
Her face in profile: the sharp cheekbone, the dark brow, the specific quality of rest in someone who hasn't had enough of it in a long time and has finally, completely, surrendered to it.
She doesn't know it's me.
That's the part I keep turning over. She was half-asleep when I carried her out of the apartment, and whatever register she recognized the scent on, she didn't surface.
Finn told me she murmured something about the masquerade—which confirmed what Rowan had already suspected when he put the timeline together, that the masked Omega he'd been asking about since midnight and the Omega Rowan found on the side of a road were the same person.
The universe's geometry, apparently, requires a castle and two separate vehicles and a storm to close the distance it opened on a train platform.
Finn is going to be insufferable about this.
The door opens quietly—Finn, returning from the corridor, who takes one look at me standing at the window with my phone pocketed and reads the situation with the accuracy he always applies to my silences.
"You called Marcus."
"He's processing the paperwork."
Finn is quiet for a moment. Not surprised—Finn is rarely surprised by anything I do, which is one of the things that makes him useful—but absorbing it, adding it to his own read of the evening. "Twenty-day window."
"Until Easter."
"Rowan's going to say it's financially straightforward."
"It is."
"And you're going to say it's operationally sound given the collector situation."
"It is that too."
Finn looks at me. Then at Mila. Then back at me, with the expression of someone who has two separate pieces of information about the same situation and is watching them align in real time. "She doesn't know it's you."
"No."
"She's going to figure it out."
"Yes."
"And then she's going to have opinions."
"Almost certainly."
A beat, and then Finn's grin arrives—slow, warm, the specific expression of a man who is going to enjoy the next twenty days considerably and has already started enjoying them. "You found our lucky charm," he says.
I look at the window.
The gold coin is in my jacket pocket. Has been since the train station.
I reach in and close my fingers around it—the weight of it, the worn four-leaf clover face, the old lettering around the rim—and think about what Marcus said and what the paperwork means and what twenty days in Oakridge Hollow looks like when you arrived for a weekend and are staying for a reason.
Behind me, Mila breathes in the even, unguarded rhythm of someone finally getting the rest they needed.
Her honey-and-vanilla scent, soft and low, fills the room.
"Get Rowan," I say. "We need the signatures before morning."
Finn goes.
I stand at the window with the coin in my hand and the storm running itself out against the glass and the particular stillness of a decision that's already been made finding its final shape.
Let's see what these collectors have in store for us...but for now, I'd like for us to play our lucky shot.