They're bright.
When did that happen?
I look—and this is embarrassing to admit even internally, even to the private committee that runs the part of my brain I don't show anyone—I look the way the Omegas in Elowen's books look on the covers. Not the airbrushed impossibility of a stock photo. The real thing. The look of a person who'sbeen through something and come out the other side of it still standing, and who someone, somewhere, for one bewildering evening in a masquerade castle, looked at like she was worth looking at.
The most alive I've looked in years.
That's the thought, landing with the quiet weight of something true.
The most alive I've looked in years, and it took an emerald ball gown and a whiskey discussion and a stranger's cedar-and-leather scent wrapping around me like an argument I couldn't win and a single shot of Jameson to get here.
Elowen is going to lose her mind.
She's going to hear about tonight and lose her entire carefully maintained mind.
She'd want you to lean into this.
She'd say ‘the coin leaving your purse on those steps was the luck doing its thing’.
She'd say the three men at the platform were a sign.
She'd make you tea and stack four paperbacks on the counter and say, with the complete serene confidence of someone who has never once been betrayed by hope: 'Mila. What if this one is real?'
I laugh.
It comes out small and private and aimed directly at the girl in the mirror, that specific laugh I only do alone—the one that's fond and exasperated and knows exactly what it's laughing at.
I shake my head, and the emerald-highlighted strand falls further across my cheek, and I look ridiculous and beautiful in equal measure, and the train rocks gently, and Oakridge Hollow is forty minutes away, and I have a shift in less than an hour, and this is my actual life.
"This is simply fairytales," I whisper to the mirror.
To the girl with the bright eyes and the glowing mark and the cedar-and-leather ghost still faintly clinging to her borrowed gown.
I take a breath.
Deep and steady, the bar breath, the one I use when everything is backed up and the night still has three hours left, and the work doesn't care about any of it.
I know how to do this.
Have always known how to do this.
I let it out.
"Time to get back to reality," I tell my reflection quietly, "cause sadly, we're just not that lucky."
We’ve never been…and I’m pretty certain we never will.
CHAPTER 1
One Week Before
~MILA~
Iforget about the plank every single time.
Every. Single. Time.
The left corner board near the bathroom door has been lifting for six weeks. Six weeks of me meaning to fix it, six weeks of me writing 'fix the plank' on mental to-do lists that live and die in the same thought, and six weeks of doing absolutely nothing about it because the moment I'm home, the last thing I want to do is maintenance on a three-hundred-square-foot apartment that I am paying for alone while carrying fifty thousand dollars of someone else's catastrophic decision-making on my back.
