"It's settling! Give it a moment!"
"—in a BOTTLE of—" I manage to stop the next sneeze through sheer force of will and stand there breathing carefully through my mouth while the perfume finishes settling and my sinuses reconsider their position. "Why," I say, once I'm confident I can finish a sentence, "would you spray me with that much of anything."
"It's not about volume, it's about coverage." Elowen sets the bottle down with the care it deserves. "It's a repellent. In a sense. A very old formula—my mother's."
I look at the bottle. "A repellent."
"It lowers the baseline of arousal signaling." She says this with the directness of someone who grew up in a household that discussed Omega biology the way other families discussweather. "Not completely—it doesn't suppress your scent, it works with it. But it smooths the edges. Reduces the involuntary spikes. The kind that happen when an Alpha surprises you, or when you're nervous and your body overcommunicates." She tilts her head. "It also has the secondary effect of heightening your natural signature to the right people. Anyone who genuinely resonates with your scent will pick it up through the formula. Anyone who doesn't is just meeting a very beautifully dressed woman at a party."
I consider the bottle.
The perfume is still settling on my skin and into the fabric around me, and where the sneezing was an honest reaction to volume, what's left is—actually beautiful. The iris and white tea have quieted and the warmer middle is coming forward, and underneath the formula I can catch the thread of my own scent emerging through it: honey and vanilla, the warmth of whiskey, a soft version of the lime zest that's present but not broadcasting. Like the best version of my signature. The version of it that exists when I'm not stressed, when I'm not running on bad sleep and collectors and the specific adrenaline of trying to hold a collapsing situation together with my hands.
This is what I smell like when I'm okay.
I'd forgotten.
"Your mother gave this to you?"
"When I presented." Elowen touches the bottle lightly, a brief contact, the way you touch something that has history in it. "She said it was for the occasions that mattered. The ones where you want to walk into a room on your own terms."
I look at her. She's dressed tonight too—soft and unhurried about it, a deep wine-colored dress that she threw on in approximately four minutes while I was managing the heel situation, her strawberry-blonde hair loose, a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose that the light in thisroom is catching and making look like something intentional. She smells like she always does—peonies and clean rainwater and the lavender she absorbs from the shop, the comfortable, undemanding signature of a woman who is entirely at ease in her own skin.
"Elowen." I stop.
"Don't," she says, before I can continue.
"I'm just?—"
"I know what you're going to say and it's not a waste. It is the opposite of a waste. You're my best friend and your happiness matters to me the way your unhappiness keeps me up at night, which—for the record—it does. More than you know."
She says it plainly, without asking for anything in return for the plainness, and it arrives somewhere in the center of me and sits there.
"I know," I say, quietly.
"Good."
She comes to stand beside me, both of us looking at my reflection together—which is the kind of moment that doesn't happen often and that I won't know how to talk about afterward, but that I will remember. I'm certain of that. The mirror, the dress, the perfume settling into the gown and onto my skin and smelling like the best version of myself, and Elowen beside me in wine-colored silk looking like exactly what she is: the one person in my life who has shown up every single time without being asked.
"Tonight," she says, and her voice has the quality it gets when she means something all the way down, no surface irony, no banter as armor, "you get to just be a person at a party." She turns to look at me rather than my reflection. "Not a debtor. Not an ex-pack Omega. Not someone who's managing something. Just—you. The version of you that existed before those three idiots got their hands on your life."
The version before.
I try to locate her, that Mila—the one who walked into rooms without running the mental math of what she owed, who made decisions from want rather than necessity, who had opinions about her own life that weren't all in the conditional tense.
She's there. Underneath everything. A little worn at the edges but present.
"You're allowed to enjoy yourself tonight," Elowen continues. "You're allowed to talk to people, dance if you want, stand in a room that someone made beautiful and let it be beautiful. You're allowed to be someone that other people want to spend time with—because you are that person, Mila, you've just spent fourteen months convinced you aren't."
"And if the fifty thousand dollars also happens," I say.
"Then jackpot." She grins. "And if it doesn't, there's a backup, and the backup isn't going anywhere, and I meant what I said. But—" she presses one hand briefly to my arm, light and certain "—lead with the version of yourself that walked into every room before Dante and Kieran and Seb turned you into someone who apologizes for taking up space. She was brilliant. I liked her enormously."
I swallow.
She was, wasn't she.
Before the pack. Before the debt and the pleading and the offices with bad fluorescent lighting and forms to sign that didn't have my name on the original agreement but apparently had space for it everywhere on the consequence.
