Lucky I got out at all.
The Lucky Clover Lounge—that's what I'd call it. That's what I've always called it, in the version of the future I keep in a separate file in my head, the one I don't look at often because hope is a resource I ration carefully. A bar for Omegas. Not exclusively, not with a sign on the door, but in design—in the physical language of it, the way it's lit and seated and staffed and priced, built to be a place where an Omega can walk in alone at ten on a Thursday and feel like the room expected her. Comfortable chairs. Good drinks made properly. The kind of bar where knowing the bartender's name is standard rather than exceptional, where someone asks how you're doing and means it.
That bar doesn't get built with fifty thousand dollars of debt attached to its owner's name.
But it gets built without it.
The car stops.
The driver's door opens first. I watch his reflection in the window as he rounds the car—calm, professional, the particular unhurried efficiency of Elowen's people, who are trained well and paid better—and then my door opens and the cold March air comes in carrying the scent of the grounds: cut grass and old stone and those elaborate floral installations, the green and white up close resolving into trailing shamrock vines and small white ranunculus and something I recognize now as sweet briar, Elowen's signature texture choice for outdoor installations. She uses it when she wants something that looks wild but isn't.
She was here.
She made this. And she didn't tell me.
I'm going to ask her about this.
"Ms. Castellanos."
The driver addresses me by my last name with the professional neutrality of someone who delivers people to places and uses their surname because a surname is a form of respect that requires nothing personal. It lands, though. Around us, people are arriving—other Omegas, other cars, the low sound of conversation and the click of heels on the stone drive—and a few heads turn at the name, which is the intended social function of it: a last name spoken aloud at a place like this is a small claim, a positioning, a yes-she-belongs-here in auditory form.
I step out.
Not quickly. Not with the barely-contained scramble of someone who is overwhelmed by her surroundings and hoping no one notices. Slowly. The heel finds the step, the skirt settles, I straighten with the measured composure of a woman who has been in this exact room before—which I haven't, not this room, not this castle, not this particular echelon of occasion—but I have been in the room adjacent to it, the one where the vocabulary is the same even if the furniture costs more.
Finishing school.
Six months, age sixteen, at the insistence of a grandmother who had certain opinions about what her granddaughters should know even if they never used it, and the curriculum included: book on head, which fork, which glass, how to sit in a chair as if you chose it rather than fell into it, how to enter a room as if the room was expecting you rather than surprised by your arrival. I thought it was absurd at sixteen. At twenty-seven, standing at the base of a castle's entrance stairs in an emerald gown, I am privately grateful to a woman I argued with consistently for half a year.
Fake it till you make it is only useful if you've done the homework first.
I did the homework.
Two Alphas appear at the base of the stairs—not stationed there, exactly, more circulating with the social ease of men who are here because they were invited and are now doing what invited guests do at this type of occasion, which is exist near the entrance and offer arms to those who seem like they might want one. They're both masked, as instructed, and both well-dressed, and the one closer to me has a scent that reaches me before he does—warm cedar and something darker, aged oak, a faint trace of cognac at the base that suggests either a drink earlier or simply a man who carries the scent of good spirits the way Danny does, absorbed rather than applied. Alpha. Clear enough to register in my biology without my permission.
Smooth.
The perfume is already working. The cedar-and-cognac scent is interesting rather than compelling. My pulse stays exactly where it is.
I smile at them both—not the service smile, the other one, the one that exists slightly further back in my face and costs something to produce, which makes it look like it means more when it appears. I decline the offered arm with the gentle, unhurried delivery of a woman who doesn't need one but isn't rude about it. Both of them follow my progress up the stairs with their eyes in a way that I register peripherally and file without comment.
Elowen did say.
I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of confirming it.
I'm giving her the satisfaction of confirming it internally, which is a compromise.
The entrance hall of the castle is—vast doesn't cover it. Tall ceilings, the kind that take your eye upward before you've decided to look up. Stone walls hung with something between tapestry and installation, long panels of green fabric interwoven with the same sweet briar vines from outside, and above those—chandeliers. Three of them, lit with what appears to be actual candlelight though the size suggests it might be very well-designed electric, casting everything below in warm gold. The floors are old stone, warm-toned, and the sound of the room is the particular acoustic of a space that was built before anyone worried about sound absorption—everything carries, but distantly, conversations becoming a comfortable murmur rather than noise.
It smells extraordinary.
I take a moment to simply stand in it—the scent of the entrance hall at full reception: fresh greenery from the installations, that sweet briar sweetness layered over stone-and-candle warmth, and underneath it all the composite of many Omegas and their attendant Alphas, dozens of individual scent signatures threading through each other in the crowded air. Vanilla notes from multiple sources. The sharp bright edge of someone's citrus-forward signature cutting through from my left. Cedar and amber from multiple Alpha sources, well-chosen men—Danny was right, they've been selected, the scent quality is consistent in a way that randomness doesn't produce. And above everything, drifting through from wherever the actual event space is, the particular warm complexity of a room that has good wine open and food arriving and champagne breathing.
I like it here.
I should not be saying that this early.
I'm saying it anyway.
