"You would have googled the dye and found one bad review from 2019 and called the whole thing off." She says this with the confidence of someone citing a pattern of behavior she has personally witnessed enough times to reference without checking her notes. "Also, your phone doesn't have a camera, so the before photo situation was going to be a disaster regardless."
I groan.
"It's a perfectly functional phone."
"It's an ancient brick, Mila. It sends texts. That's it. It has no camera, it doesn't run apps from this decade, and I once watched it autocorrect 'coffee' to 'corfu' three times in one message."
"Corfu is a real place."
"That's not the point."
I think you're forgetting I'm practically homeless.
I don't say it out loud. I mutter it, which is a slightly different thing, directed at the middle distance between me and my reflection rather than at Elowen directly.
She hears it anyway. She always does.
"You're also forgetting," she says, steady and without heat, "that I'm a millionaire who has offered to buy you a phone two hundred and fifty-seven times—yes, I've been counting, I have a tally—and you have declined every single offer with the stubbornness of a person who has decided poverty is a personality trait rather than a circumstance." She raises an eyebrow at my reflection. "At this rate I should simply show up with one and not give you the option to return it. Which I would have already done except you'd never use it out of principle and that would be a waste."
I look at her.
She looks back.
She puts her arms on her hips and tips her head to one side in the way she does when she's done negotiating and has decided to simply be correct. The morning light in her bathroom is soft—she has one of those warm-spectrum bulbs installed above the mirror because she read something about cooler lighting and skin tone and acted on it immediately, because that's Elowen, and in it she looks like exactly what she is: put-together, genuinely kind, and approximately three seconds from making a declaration.
"Seriously." Her voice drops slightly. Loses the banter and keeps the warmth. "You look incredible. The Alphas are going to need a moment."
"I don't need the Alphas to need a moment, I need fifty thousand dollars and a debt collector to stop calling me at six in the morning."
"Those two things are not mutually exclusive tonight." She picks up the applicator again with the finality of someone who has already decided and is simply executing. "Hold still."
I hold still.
Because she's right. Because I've been tired for a week in the specific, bone-deep way that comes from nightmares rather than late hours, and Elowen standing here with green hair dye and a plan is the most momentum anything in my life has had in months, and I am too exhausted to fight momentum when it has good intentions.
The week has been its own particular brand of awful.
Every night since I opened the invitation, the dreams have arrived with the punctuality of the collectors—earlier than wanted, impossible to dismiss. The same material: floor, knees, ruler, pale eyes. But the details shift each time in the way dreams do, adding and subtracting, sometimes Dante is there at the edges of it, sometimes Seb's voice is in another room, sometimes the man in the black suit has the invitation in his hand instead of the ruler and reads from it in the same conversational tone he uses for punishment.
Dearest Gentle Omega.
What a shame.
I wake up every morning to the phone. The collectors have a rotation now—different numbers, same purpose, the administrative persistence of a system that doesn't care about sleep cycles or nightmares or the fact that the person on the other end of the line already knows, has always known, will not forget no matter how many 6 AM calls they make.
I've lost weight. I noticed it this week when I pulled on a pair of jeans I've owned for three years and they sat differently at the hip—not drastically, not alarmingly, but enough to register. Enough to be one more thing I'm carrying on a body that'salready running on protein shakes and short-order café food and the particular fuel of having no option but to keep going.
I haven't slept a full night since before the invitation arrived. Maybe before that. Maybe the last full night of sleep I had was sometime in November, when the collectors were still just a threat on the horizon rather than a fixture of my mornings.
This needs to stop.
One way or another, this cycle breaks.
Elowen works the green into the last two inches of my hair with the careful precision of someone who does not consider this a casual task. The color goes in slowly—deep emerald at the roots of the section, softening toward a lighter jade at the very tips, the kind of gradient that looks deliberate rather than accidental. She has, I notice, a technique. She has product knowledge. She has clearly done this before or watched enough tutorials to constitute a secondary education in hair color, and the part of me that isn't currently panicking about my reflection acknowledges that she is genuinely good at it.
The bathroom smells like developer and something floral from her product line and underneath both of those, Elowen's natural scent—peonies and clean rainwater, the lavender note that follows her from the shop. My own honey-whiskey warmth sits muted beneath the chemical smell of the dye, the vanilla subdued, the lime zest absent. I smell like a woman in the middle of a transformation, which is either poetic or just the literal situation.
Her hand touches my shoulder.
