Then I set it back down and go take a shower, because I smell like bar and whiskey and the particular composite of a long shift, and I'll look at it after. I'll open it when I'm clean and slightly less likely to make decisions from a place of exhaustion.
That's practical. That's responsible. That's a perfectly reasonable approach to important correspondence.
Also the power nap starts in eight minutes and the envelope can wait.
But somewhere between the shower and the pillow, I catch myself thinking about it—about tall rooms and candlelight and emerald silk, about what it would feel like to walk into an event where the Alphas had been chosen rather than gathered, where the architecture of the evening was designed rather than deposited. Where someone had decided this should be curated.
Where luck might actually mean something.
Or where it'll be exactly like every other time and you'll come home to the same kitchen island and the same plank and the same debt and the same careful, steady, ongoing project of trying to survive a disaster that isn't your fault.
Both things are equally possible.
You know that.
I curl up on the narrow bed—four hours until the café, three and a half if I want time to be human before I get there—and feel the residual warmth of Danny's whiskey shot still somewhere low in my chest, the same place the coin's weight has been sitting all shift. I close my eyes.
The last thought before I go under is Danny's face when I clocked out early and told me I'd be paid full shift anyway. Theease of it. The complete absence of drama or negotiation or the need to explain why he was doing it. Just—a decision made by someone who has the power to make it and uses that power like a person who actually has his priorities straight.
One day.
I don't know when, don't know what it looks like, don't have the shape of it yet.
But deep down I hope I can pay him back one day.
CHAPTER 3
Dearest Gentle Omega
~MILA~
My phone vibrates itself off the nightstand.
I catch it on instinct before it hits the floor, eyes still closed, operating entirely on the muscle memory of someone who has worked enough odd-hour shifts to develop reflexes independent of consciousness. I squint at the screen.
6:04 AM.
Not the alarm.
Of course, it's not the alarm.
The number is one I don't have saved because saving it would mean acknowledging it as a recurring feature of my life, which I refuse to do on principle. But I know it. I know it the way you know the specific creak of a floorboard in a house you've lived in too long—not because you looked it up, but because it's repeated itself enough times to become part of the architecture, whether you wanted it to or not.
Collectors.
Six in the morning.
Six.
I decline the call with the flat press of a thumb and drop the phone face down on the mattress. Two hours. I've had two hours of sleep that weren't even fully uninterrupted because the building's heating made its throat-clearing noise at 4:30 and I half-surfaced, and now this. There are people at desks somewhere who wake up, drink their coffee, open their computers, and immediately begin calling people who are already aware of every cent they owe—who have not forgotten, who think about nothing else, who are in fact dreaming about it—just to make sure the reminder lands first thing.
I hope their coffee is always slightly too cold.
I hope it is never quite the right temperature for the entire duration of their employment.
I pull the pillow over my face.
My body is made of lead and poor decisions. Every muscle below my shoulders is filing a formal complaint about the double shift, and the back of my skull has that particular weight that comes from not enough sleep after too many hours on my feet. My scent is muted in the way it gets when I'm exhausted—the honey and vanilla still there but quieted, the lime zest absent entirely, my own body too tired to broadcast anything.
