Chapter 21 Lucky Charm Goes Shopping
Lucky Charm Goes Shopping
~MILA~
"The registry wait in the city is two weeks minimum," Rowan says from somewhere outside the curtain. "Oakridge has the same backlog. But there's a town forty minutes east that had a cancellation—we secured an appointment for this afternoon."
I hear the information. I'm not fully processing it, because I'm standing in a small dress shop changing room looking at myself in a three-panel mirror and having a minor internal reckoning.
The dress is white.
White with layers—the base a fitted sheath and then layers of lightweight yellow organza over it, each one catching the light differently as I shift, giving the whole thing a kind of soft, luminous movement that doesn't photograph the way it looks in person.
White flowers embroidered at the neckline and the hem, small and precise, the kind of detail that only registers up close.
The wedges the shop owner suggested are the braided rope variety—comfortable, which matters more than anything right now given I've been in bar-shift shoes for the last eighteen hours of my life.
My hair.
The champagne blonde catches the changing room light in a way that makes the whole look cohere—the warm tone of the hair against the white, the yellow of the layers pulling it together in a way that a brunette version of this dress wouldn't achieve.
Elowen knew. She always knows. I argued with her for two hours about the dye and she delivered something that is now, in this specific moment, working more architectural weight than I gave it credit for.
I press my lips together.
I look feminine.
Not in the way of someone performing femininity for an occasion—not the masquerade version, where the gown and the mask and the whole production were Elowen's vision executed correctly.
This is something quieter. The dress is light enough that I'm not managing it, not negotiating with the skirt or calculating the physics of movement.
It simply moves when I do, and the effect is—
When did I forget this was something I could wear?
The pack years. That's the honest answer.
Three years of calibrating myself to what Dante and Kieran and Seb needed me to be in whatever room we were occupying, and the gradual erosion of anything that didn't serve the function.
Dresses were performance. Femininity was a tool deployed strategically.
By the time they left, I'd been in bar-shift jeans and functional jackets for so long that I'd stopped thinking of this category of clothing as something that belonged to me at all.
I reach for the curtain.
Pull it aside.
The three of them are arranged across the small shop's seating area with the specific, unconscious spatial efficiency of a pack that has been in enough rooms together to naturally distribute itself for maximum coverage.
Finn on the low bench near the window, one ankle crossed over his knee, the bourbon-and-orange scent of him warm in the afternoon sunlight coming through the glass.
Rowan leaning against the wall near the rack of formal items, dark and unhurried, his black-pepper-and-ink signature carrying its usual composed weight.
Declan standing, cedarwood and leather and that Irish whiskey warmth that my scent receptors have apparently memorized and will now clock from three rooms away without being asked.
Three pairs of eyes.
Finn whistles—not the bar kind, not the performative kind men produce to make a point about women within earshot.
The genuine kind, the spontaneous audible response of someone who registered something before their social filter could apply the brakes.
He leans forward, blue eyes bright, and the grin is the full version.
Declan's mouth curves. Just slightly—the half-rotation I've catalogued enough times now to read as the real version rather than a social offering.
His gaze moves over me with the specific, deliberate quality of attention that he applies to everything, which means it's not a sweep so much as a consideration.
Rowan has one eyebrow up.
On anyone else that reads as unimpressed. On Rowan, who I'm learning applies his eyebrow with the same precision a conductor applies a baton, one eyebrow raised means something is registering significantly and he is deciding what to do with the information.
"Well?" I say.
"Well," Finn says, with the measured gravity of someone making a formal pronouncement, "Lucky Charm has a whole other dimension we didn't have adequate data on."
"Don't," I tell him.
"I'm going to."
I turn to the standing mirror the shop has positioned near the changing rooms—a proper full-length, oval-framed thing that looks older than the store around it, the kind of mirror that has been reflecting people for long enough that it has opinions. I look at myself in it.
And then, because the afternoon light coming through the shop window is catching the yellow layers in a way that makes me feel slightly reckless, I twirl.
Just once. A slow rotation, watching the fabric follow.
"Wow," I say, to the mirror rather than the room. "I genuinely haven't worn anything like this in ages."
"From the masquerade," Finn says, "you looked like you'd come directly from a fashion editorial. Which means you've been hiding this whole—" he gestures generally at the dress, the hair, the current total effect, "—underneath bar shifts."
"That was entirely my best friend's doing.
" I face him. "Speaking of which—when we get to the next town, can I use a pay phone?
Or a business line or something? She's going to be running scenarios about where I disappeared to and the scenarios will only get more elaborate the longer she doesn't hear from me. "
"You don't have a phone," Declan says, with the tone of someone confirming a thing they already knew.
"It didn't survive last night," Rowan says, and the look he delivers alongside the statement contains a specific opinion about the phone's pre-existing condition that I'm choosing not to respond to.
"It had potential," I say.
The look doesn't shift.
"It had twelve months of borrowed time and then it made a decision," Rowan says. "Which is fair enough."
"The thing is," I say, and this is the practical part, the part where I try to navigate the next step without either being a burden or pretending I have resources I don't, "getting a new phone would genuinely help.
For work, for Elowen, for Danny. If the town has any kind of Omega-consideration loan plan—small towns sometimes do, Danny mentioned the bank here has been flexible with Omegas on essential technology since the legislation push—I could potentially get something basic. "
I watch all three of them frown simultaneously, which is the synchronized expression of a pack that has just heard something and wants to address it without stepping on each other's response. Rowan opens his mouth—
The shop door at the back of the fitting area opens.
The woman who emerges is in her sixties, small and bright-eyed, with the particular energy of someone who has been running their own business for long enough that they've stopped distinguishing between working hours and their general state of being.
She takes in the dress, takes in me, and her face does the thing that certain people's faces do when they encounter something they want to comment on and have absolutely no intention of restraining themselves.
"Oh," she says. "Oh, that is—yes. That is the dress."
"Thank you," I start.
"What a lovely pack," she says, pivoting to take in the three men with the frank appreciation of someone who has seen quite a few packs come through her shop and is upgrading her assessment of today's variety.
"Shopping for their Omega—you don't see this as often as you should, if you ask me. Young men with the right instincts."
"We're not—" I start.
Finn moves.
He unfolds from the bench with the easy, unhurried motion of a man who has made a decision and is executing it, crosses to me, and puts his arm around my waist. The contact is warm and immediate—the bourbon-citrus of his scent wrapping around my general vicinity with the comfortable authority of someone who has decided this is where he's standing.
He presses a kiss to the top of my head, brief, light, the kind that manages to be entirely casual while also being the most disarming thing anyone has done to me before noon in recent memory.
"We really do have to spoil our Lucky Charm properly," he tells the shop owner, with the convivial warmth of someone who has been in enough social situations to know how to fill a room. "She's stunning, right?"
"Absolutely," the woman says, fully delighted.
I look up at Finn.
The blue eyes, when they come down to mine, are doing the specific thing that happens when someone has made a move they know is slightly unfair and is waiting to see how it lands. There's a trace of color across his cheekbones that the shop's warm afternoon light is not responsible for.
"Would you like to wear it out?" the shop owner asks me. "I can take the tags now if you'd like to keep it on."
I have no clothes.
That's the simple arithmetic of the situation: everything I own besides what I'm currently wearing is either in a flooded apartment or stuck in a car on a road and inaccessible until the tow arrives.
The pajamas I woke up in are Finn's. I have the bar apron from last night's shift folded in the bag that Declan retrieved from the apartment alongside the coin and the business card and the two items the rain hadn't fully destroyed.
The dress I'm wearing is technically still the shop's inventory.
I look at Finn.
"Is it okay if I just—" I keep my voice low enough to be just for him. "Wear it now?"
The pink across his cheeks deepens by a shade. He looks away briefly—toward the window, which is apparently very interesting—and then back.
"You can have whatever you want, Lucky," he says.