I push the door open.
Cold air meets the perfume at the seam—white tea and iris and something like amber and clover, my honey and vanilla underneath it all, the gold threads on the emerald gown catching the street lamp as I step out onto the pavement with four-inch heels and a coin in my purse and a mask in my hand and the kind of cautious, qualified, fully-prepared-to-be-disappointed hope that I've decided to let myself feel anyway.
Because Elowen needs her happy ever after too.
And so do I.
Me too, Bestie. Me fucking, too.
CHAPTER 6
Golden Gates
~MILA~
The gates are gold.
Actually, genuinely, not-a-metaphor gold—wrought iron underneath and then gilded, the way expensive things are gilded, which is to say completely and without apology. Two of them, set into stone pillars that have been here long enough to grow moss at their base in that particular combination of intentional and inevitable that old money achieves effortlessly. The attendant at the gatehouse checks the driver's credentials with the practiced efficiency of someone who has done this enough times to have developed a system, and when he nods and the gates begin their slow, hydraulic swing inward, I watch through the car window and feel the specific sensation of being somewhere I have absolutely no business being.
What.
What is this.
What is this hiding in the outskirts of Oakridge Hollow.
The driveway is long. That's the first thing I register after the gates—the length of it, the way it winds through grounds that arelit tonight with lanterns set into the grass at regular intervals, the light low and amber, the kind of exterior lighting that costs more than my monthly rent to install and significantly more to maintain. On either side, old trees. The kind of trees that have been here for generations, their canopies meeting overhead in the stretch before the curve, and beyond the curve?—
A castle.
I don't use that word casually. I've seen large houses. I've delivered drinks to people who lived in large houses and thought they were impressive. But this is a castle in the actual architectural sense—stone, multi-winged, the kind of structure that was built before the word renovation existed and has simply been maintained, carefully, expensively, by a succession of people who understood what they had. The front face of it is lit tonight in a warm gold that makes the stone look amber rather than grey, and the entrance is framed with something green—installations, I realize as we get closer, elaborate floral installations that wind up the columns and across the arch above the doors, four-leaf clovers and deep green trailing vines and small white blooms I can't identify from this distance but that Elowen could name without looking.
Elowen.
Elowen designed those.
I'd bet actual money I don't have on it.
The cars ahead of us in the line are the kind of cars that don't need to announce themselves. Dark. Long. The particular confidence of a vehicle that was built with the assumption that wherever it arrived, it was expected. I watch a woman in deep blue step out of one of them with her hand taken by a driver who materializes like a conjuring, and I think: this is what the money looks like when it's stopped trying to look like anything. It just—is.
I have thought a great deal about money tonight. More than usual, which is saying something, because money is a consistent background frequency in my thinking the way tinnitus is a consistent background frequency—always there, manageable when everything else is loud enough, impossible to ignore in the quiet.
On the drive I found myself cycling through it: the particular calculus of financial disadvantage and how it compounds. The way Omegas who get trapped in bad pack situations don't just lose time—they lose infrastructure. Credit ratings decimated by debts signed in their name without their consent. Savings accounts drained in the years they thought they were building toward something. Employment gaps that look like choices on paper and were never choices at all. The machinery of it is so thorough that getting out is almost beside the point; getting out just means starting over from zero, from below zero, from a negative balance in every account that matters.
Dante. Kieran. Seb.
They didn't trap me with babies.
They trapped me with paperwork.
Which is almost more efficient, actually, because paperwork doesn't cry at 3 AM. It just accrues interest.
The worst part—the part I turn over in quiet moments and still can't fully metabolize—is that with enough money, enough savings, enough of the infrastructure that financial stability actually provides rather than just signals, I could have left the moment I recognized what was happening. Could have seen the pattern in month three rather than year two. Could have had the ground beneath my feet when it all fell apart instead of nothing to land on.
I was lucky. That's the brutal irony of it.
Fifty thousand dollars in debt and collector calls at 6 AM is, by the actual statistics of how these situations end, lucky.
Lucky I got out with my name and not a criminal charge.
