I keep reading.
Attending Alphas have been individually vetted and selected by the Lucky Clover Society through a rigorous process of professional, personal, and character assessment. No open applications were accepted. Alphas who engage in disrespectful, coercive, or otherwise inappropriate conduct during the evening will be subject to Society-imposed consequences, including but not limited to: professional referral reviews, connection network removal, and formal reports to relevant licensing bodies.
My eyebrows are somewhere near my hairline at this point.
They will actually report them.
To licensing bodies.
Someone built accountability into a mixer and put it in writing with a wax seal.
I keep reading.
This event has been organized with particular care for Omegas who are rebuilding after difficult or predatory pack situations. The Lucky Clover Society believes that every Omega deserves not only safety but genuine opportunity—to connect,to be seen, and to move forward. In that spirit, the Society is pleased to announce a grand prize of fifty thousand dollars to be awarded to one attending Omega as selected by the pack of their choosing at the conclusion of the evening.
I set the protein shake down.
Slowly.
My eyes go back to the number.
Fifty thousand dollars.
Fifty.
Thousand.
Dollars.
I read that paragraph three more times. Four. I'm not counting. The words don't change, no matter how many times my eyes track across them, and I've been in this industry long enough to know that the words not changing is significant, because when something is too good to be real, you look for where the language gets slippery. Where the conditions are buried. Where the fine print does what fine print always does, which is quietly renegotiate everything the headline promised.
I look for the fine print.
The conditions are on the back of the card, printed in the same forest green, smaller but no less legible. The prize is awarded freely, with no strings attached to the recipient. The Omega who receives it is under no obligation to the selecting pack beyond the evening itself. Attendance confirmation required by the date marked below. One guest may accompany the invited Omega to the venue but will not be admitted to the event floor.
I flip the card over. Flip it back.
No strings.
They wrote no strings in a legal-adjacent document with a wax seal.
My brain is doing the math before I ask it to. Fifty thousand dollars is the debt, rounded. Not exactly—the debt has been accumulating interest the way debts do when you're not quite keeping pace with them, a living, breathing, compounding disaster—but fifty thousand dollars is the baseline. It's the number that's been sitting at the center of everything for fourteen months. The number that shows up in my dreams wearing a black suit and holding a ruler.
I sit down on the kitchen stool.
I don't remember deciding to sit down. My legs made the decision independently, which is probably the correct call given what my nervous system is currently doing.
This is real.
The paper is real, the seal was real, the number is right there in forest green ink on cream paper that costs more per sheet than my cable bill.
Is this a dream?
I just had a dream. Am I still in it.
I pinch the inside of my wrist.
Awake. Definitively, annoyingly, kitchen-island-and-cold-protein-shake awake.
