Use it.
CHAPTER 7
Cedarwood And Consequence
~MILA~
The interior of this castle is having a conversation with itself.
Outside: 1847 stonework, gold gates, grounds that belong to a different century. Inside: something that looks like a very wealthy person found a vintage Pinterest board and said yes, all of it, and handed someone a blank budget. The bones of the castle are still here—the high ceilings, the stone archways, the fireplaces large enough to stand in—but everything within those bones has been curated into something that sits between eras rather than in one.
Velvet chairs in deep green alongside low-slung modern sofas in cream. Antique sideboards displaying floral installations beside gallery lighting calibrated for contemporary art. The gold-and-green palette running consistently through it all, a thread that ties the historical and the current together into something that should clash and doesn't.
It's beautiful.
I keep saying that and meaning it, which is becoming its own kind of problem.
You're here for one hour.
You're not here to fall in love with a room.
The compliments started before dinner.
First from the host, which was professional courtesy, and then from the woman on my left at the table—the one with the grass-and-vanilla signature who lowered her competitive radar somewhere around the second course and turned out to be, under the armor, genuinely funny. Then from an Alpha who was circulating during pre-dinner drinks with a scent of dark amber and bergamot and a smile that didn't require much maintenance because it just sat on his face like a permanent fixture.
Then, from two Omegas at the parallel table who leaned toward each other and said something I wasn't meant to hear but did, which translated roughly to: where did she get that gown.
Elowen would be insufferable about this if I told her. I'm going to tell her.
Envy is the thing that's harder to navigate.
Not because I don't understand it— but I didn't come here to win an aesthetic competition.
I came here with a negative number attached to my name, a coin in my clutch, and a plan that involves leaving in approximately forty-five minutes, regardless of what the room is doing.
The room is making the forty-five minutes feel flexible.
Dinner was seven courses.
Seven.
I counted. Not because I was skeptical but because by the third course I was genuinely curious about the organizational confidence required to commit to that number for a table of forty, and by the fifth I had revised my estimate of the Lucky Clover Society's budget upward by several orders of magnitude.
The food was the kind that arrives with intention rather than volume—small plates that knew what they were doing, each one a complete argument for itself. A celeriac velouté so smooth itregistered as temperature before flavor, with a black truffle oil finish that arrived afterward like a second sentence. A lamb preparation over something charred and green that I couldn't fully identify but ate completely.
The dessert course involved gold leaf and a praline that the person beside me actually made a small sound about, involuntarily, which is the highest compliment food can receive.
Open bar.
That was the detail that caught my attention when I noticed it. The Lucky Clover Society had committed to an open bar at an event where the entire point was to observe Alphas in a social setting, which is either brave or strategic.Both, probably.Alcohol at a controlled event is a truth serum of sorts. It doesn't create behavior; it removes the architecture that keeps behavior contained, and what surfaces in the gap tells you more about a person's character than six months of careful presentation.
I've spent three years watching Alphas drink.
I know what it shows:their true colors.
So I went to the bar.
The bartender's name was Cole, and he had been doing this for twenty-two years. He had opinions, which I appreciated deeply. His setup was clean—spirits organized by category rather than alphabetically, which tells you something about the mind behind the bar; the citrus station properly stocked and fresh rather than pre-cut, which tells you something about respect for the craft. He was making a French 75 when I arrived, the champagne going in last the way it should, and I watched his pour ratio with the specific attention of a person who has opinions of her own.
