Prologue: One Last Swig Of Courage
~MILA~
I am kissing a stranger.
Which, in my defense, is not something I planned to do tonight.
My tongue is currently making very poor executive decisions against the lips of a masked man I met forty-five minutes ago over a whiskey tasting display, and the single most coherent thought I can produce in this moment is that he tastes like the good stuff. Not the rail whiskey I pour at Hannigan's on a Thursday when the regulars stop caring about quality. The real thing. A twelve-year single malt with that particular warmth that starts at the back of your throat and unravels downward, slow and inevitable, like the universe itself is telling you to relax for once in your life.
This is the Jameson.
I took one shot of Jameson before walking through those doors tonight. One. That's it. That is the entire explanation for why my fingers are fisted in the lapels of a man I cannot fully see, and my brain has gone completely offline.
One shot, Mila. One.
Except that's not entirely true, and I know it, which is the more embarrassing part.
It's his scent.
That's the real culprit here.
It hits me even now, with my eyes closed and my better judgment somewhere on the floor near the emerald velvet draping of this shadowed alcove—cedarwood, deep and grounding, the kind of scent that makes you think of something solid. Something that stays.
Beneath it, worn leather, lived-in and warm, and then the whiskey underneath all of it, not cologne trying to approximate alcohol but the actual memory of it, like he's been breathing good whiskey for so long it's become part of his chemistry.
There's something else too, something I can't classify and have been trying to for forty-five minutes—a specific warmth. Not a note. A feeling. The olfactory version of a door closing between you and everything that's been chasing you, and for one deeply irrational moment, my whole body believes it.
You are at an Omega selection mixer. You swore, on your abuela's memory and your own deeply wounded dignity, that you would never attend one of these things again after the last disaster. And you are currently kissing one of the Alphas. In an alcove. While wearing Elowen's heirloom gown.
Fifty thousand dollars.
That's why you're here. Remember the fifty thousand dollars. Remember the debt. Remember the collection agency that calls on Tuesday and Thursday mornings with the cheery relentlessness of someone who genuinely enjoys this.
I remember.
And I kiss him anyway…because he kissed me first and I am one shot of Jameson past making responsible choices, and the way his hands came up to frame my face when I leaned in—careful, unhurried, like I was something worth being carefulwith—did something extremely inconvenient to my chest that I refuse to examine in any meaningful way.
He kisses as if he genuinely means it.
That's the problem.
Not hungry, not performative, not the kind of kissing that's actually about the man's ego wearing an omega's face as a mirror. Deliberate. Present. Like he decided to do this and do it properly, and everything else can wait.
You can't afford to feel things about a masked Alpha at a Lucky Clover Society event, Castellanos. You can't afford it literally, and you cannot afford it emotionally.
You have negative reserves on both counts.
He pulls back just barely—a breath of distance, barely an inch—and I feel rather than see him looking at me in the low light. The alcove is tucked behind a stone pillar wound with emerald velvet and clusters of white clover, and the candlelight from the main hall doesn't quite reach us here. Enough to catch the sharp line of his jaw beneath the mask.
Enough to catch his eyes.
Gray-green.
That's what I notice first, back when he appeared beside me at the whiskey display with his Redbreast 21 and his completely unprompted and entirely correct opinion about ice.
Piercing and steady, the color of the sea two hours after a storm when the violence has cleared out but the depth hasn't gone anywhere. They look at me like they're reading something rather than simply seeing, and under normal circumstances, I would find that invasive.
These are not normal circumstances. These are Jameson circumstances.
