The next question is harder:How do I attract better?
How does someone who smells like a woman who has been carrying too much for too long—whose scent has been flattened and muted and suppressed by fourteen months of collectors, nightmares, and double shifts—how does that woman walk into a room and attract the kind of Alpha who looks at an Omega and sees a person worth staying for?
Hell, worth fighting for when her past finally creeps back to try and ruin her…
I close my eyes.
The evening air moves across my face—cold and clean, carrying the scent of the flower beds below, that green-and-white sweetness of Elowen's installations drifting upward, and underneath it old stone and dark earth and the particular quality that wide open land has in March, when spring is deciding whether to arrive.
The perfume on my skin has settled fully now, the white-tea-and-iris opener long gone, the warm resin base sitting quietly and holding my own signature around it like a frame.
My honey and whiskey.
My vanilla and lime.
Still here.
Still mine.
And then something else arrives.
It doesn't announce itself. Doesn't build from a distance the way other Alpha scents have tonight—the cognac-cedar from the stairs, the bourbon-citrus from the dinner table, the dark amber of the pre-dinner reception. Those arrived as the social information they were, readable and catalogued and processed without particular consequence. This one?—
This one wraps.
That's the only word that applies. It doesn't hit or arrive. It wraps around me the way warmth wraps, the way the particular quality of a room that has a fire in it reaches you before you see the fire. Cedarwood—not sharp or fresh, not pine-adjacent, but the aged variety, the kind that comes from old timber rather than new growth, deep and dark and with a resonance in it that belongs underground rather than at a party. Leather beneath that: real leather, the kind that's been worn and worked and has history in it, the specific signature of a material that was made for use rather than display.
And underneath both?—
Irish whiskey.
Not from a glass. From a person.
As their actual scent, layered into the cedarwood and leather, the way age layers into a cask—deep, smooth, the particular amber warmth of pot still Irish that has had time to become itself.
I take the scent apart automatically, the way I take everything apart, because taking things apart is what I do.
And then I stop, because no one actually smells like this…right?
This is not a cologne. Not a diffuser. Not the castle's HVAC system is making poetic choices.
This is a person...it has to be…unless my senses are simply desperate for this to be a real individual.
"Is the event boring you?"
Low. Unhurried. A voice that has the particular quality of something that has already decided it has time for this conversation before the conversation began.
I open my eyes and turn my head.
He's standing at the balcony entrance—not crowding the doorway, not leaning into my space, positioned with the instinctive awareness of someone who understands the difference between being present and being an imposition.
He's tall.
That's the first complete thought my brain produces, which is not a sophisticated observation but it's accurate: he is genuinely tall, 6'3" at minimum, with the kind of build that isn't the manufactured width of someone who spends their hours in a gym but the structural breadth of a man whose body developed its dimensions through actual use. Wide through the shoulder. Settled in the stance.
The formal jacket fits him correctly, which at this size is either expensive tailoring or luck, and across his face: a mask.
Black, well-fitted, no embellishment, the kind of mask that doesn't try to add anything because the face wearing it doesn't need the assistance. What the mask leaves visible: a jaw that looks like it was cut with a preference for straight lines.
