Chapter 20 Twenty Days #2
The bourbon-and-orange scent of him is close, warm and steady, and the blue eyes are the specific shade of blue that exists when someone is being completely sincere and knows it and isn't asking for anything in return for it.
"Okay," I say quietly.
"No matter what happens with the twenty days—"
"The what?"
Finn's eyes go to Declan.
Declan clears his throat—the specific sound of a man who was going to build to something and has been jumped ahead in the sequence. He sets his coffee down and leans forward, elbows on knees, the deliberate posture of someone who is about to explain something he wants received correctly.
"When we got to your apartment last night," he says, "and we understood the scope of the situation—the collectors, the damage, the state of things—we realized that getting any practical help for you was going to require navigating the current legislation.
Packless Omegas can't access most emergency property services without pack documentation.
The building owner could have cited you for damage to the structure and filed for compensation, which in this town would have—"
"Jail," I say.
"A night in a holding cell while paperwork was processed, which is not the same thing but is also not something you were going to experience if we could prevent it.
" He pauses. "So we registered a temporary pack bond.
Provisional, administrative—it gives you the legal status of a pack-affiliated Omega for purposes of service access, property rights, and protection. "
I absorb this.
"You—without asking me—"
"You were asleep," Finn says from his position on the floor, which he has transitioned from kneeling to sitting cross-legged with the ease of a man who is comfortable with floors. "We were trying not to let you get charged for your own apartment being destroyed."
"The complication," Declan continues, "is the St. Patrick's Day legislation window. Any pack bond registered during the holiday period can't be dissolved before Easter. It was designed to prevent men from claiming Omegas during the holiday and dropping them within the week."
"So you're stuck with me."
"Twenty days," Declan says. "After Easter, the provisional registration can be dissolved cleanly if that's what everyone wants."
I look at the three of them.
Finn on the floor, comfortable, watching me with the steady patience of someone who has accepted that this news requires time.
Rowan with his coffee, dark eyes over the rim, expression calibrated to nothing-in-particular which I've learned means he's paying the most attention.
Declan, leaned forward, waiting for my read.
"I'm the burden here," I say. "I want to be clear that I understand that. Twenty days of my bad luck streak in your vicinity is not a small ask."
"You make it sound like we're the prisoners," Finn says.
"You're the ones who got voluntarily attached to a woman whose apartment has holes in the ceiling and whose car is stuck in the mud and whose collectors are apparently escalating. I'm not the one making sacrifices here."
"Without you guys, I would have been in jail, or the hospital, or worse," I say. "This predicament, terrible as it is for all parties, is the thing currently keeping me alive, so I'll take the twenty days and be grateful."
"If you put it like that," Rowan says, which from him constitutes a full endorsement.
Finn tsk-sounds at him. Declan dismisses both of them with the practiced efficiency of a man who has been serving as the neutral party in this dynamic for a significant stretch of time and has developed the ability to do it without engaging.
"Twenty days gives us time to work the actual problem," Declan says.
"The collectors, whoever's running them, the ex-pack's interest in accelerating this.
With you in a registered pack—our pack—the people who broke into your apartment are going to encounter a different risk calculation when they look at continuing the contract. "
"What if they don't back off?"
A sound from Rowan. Low, not quite a laugh—the exhale of a man who has just been asked a question he finds more amusing than threatening.
He sets his coffee down and stands, unhurried, the dark eyes carrying the specific quality of someone who has already assessed the situation completely and is now simply confirming the assessment.
"Then they should pray," he says, "to whatever they hold sacred, that they have the good sense to back off. Because nobody enjoys the part of the story where they're the one who didn't."
He walks toward the bedroom.
I stare at the space he left.
"He's always like that," Finn says helpfully. "It sounds ominous. It is ominous. He just doesn't feel the need to dress it up."
"More coffee?" he adds, already rising.
"Another donut?"
My eyes go wide before I can stop them—a completely involuntary physical response to the word—and Finn points at me with the triumphant expression of a man whose theory has been confirmed.
"I can't," I say. "It's—that was already a luxury, I shouldn't—"
Declan moves.
He crosses the room to where I'm sitting, and reaches down, and two fingers find the few strands of hair that fell across my face during this conversation and tuck them back with the same deliberate, unhurried care he applies to everything.
His knuckles brush my cheekbone in passing, light and brief, and the cedarwood-and-whiskey scent is close.
"Have as many as you want," he says quietly, "while you're with us."
He says it simply.
Not as a grand gesture. Not with weight or performance. Just as the statement of a fact he's decided: while you're with us, the desserts are not a luxury you have to earn.
I look up at him.
The grey-green eyes, close, with that same patient attention I first noticed on a balcony with roses on the columns and champagne in my hand.
"Finn," he says, still looking at me.
"On it," Finn says immediately, already at the hotel phone.
My scent is doing something. I can feel it—the lime zest coming back in a way it hasn't in eighteen months, sharp and present, the specific note that surfaces when something has genuinely surprised me and my body is deciding what to make of it.
The honey-and-vanilla warming underneath it.
I am sitting in a hotel living room with an ex-masquerade Alpha's hand having just brushed my face and two more men orbiting the situation with complete normalcy, and for the first time since I can clearly remember—
I dare to think that maybe the next twenty days will prove to me what it's like to be in a good pack.