The screen does nothing.
She tries again. The phone remains dark.
We both look at it.
The silence that follows is the specific quality of a silence that has received one too many pieces of information and isn't sure how to process the accumulation.
Mila bites her lower lip. Looks up. Something happens in her face—the moment where a person calculates everything that has happened in a single evening and decides whether to treat it as a disaster or a data point.
"Welp," she says. "Just my luck."
The delivery is—not defeated, which would almost be easier. It's the tone of someone who has metabolized so much bad fortune that they've developed a dark fluency with it. A personwho can say *just my luck* and mean it without breaking, because breaking is a luxury you lose access to after you've done it enough times.
I look at her.
My eyes have been reading rooms and numbers and people for fifteen years, and they are reading her now—not as a calculation, which is the only context in which I usually read people with this level of attention. As—something else.
Her scent has changed again.
Very faint—the honey and vanilla almost gone, just a trace of warmth underneath the wet-paper-and-rain smell of the apartment. But the lime zest has returned. Not bright, not sharp—a thread of it, newly present, the specific note that her body produces when she's processing something with the part of her that pushes back rather than folds.
She's not done.
Everything in this room and everything in this evening says she should be done, and she's not, and her own scent is the evidence.
I have spent years being tired of Omegas who wanted the outcome rather than the work. The ones who entered rooms and performed versions of themselves calibrated to attract the resources they were after. I'd been a resource for long enough that I'd developed something close to indifference about the whole category.
This woman is standing in a water-damaged apartment with a dead phone at four in the morning telling me about a bar she's been designing in her head for two years that she's never told anyone about—not the friend who would fund it, not the boss who believes in her—and she said it the way you say the truest things: quietly, almost to herself, not to impress but because the question found the answer.
My phone buzzes.
Finn: *5 mins. Dec is sulking. Also what's happening*
I type back: *I'll explain when you get here.*
I pocket the phone and look at Mila, who is looking at her dead device with the expression of someone who has decided to accept the full absurdity of the evening rather than be surprised by any individual component of it.
"My pack is five minutes out," I say. "One of them—" I stop, because explaining Finn is a task that requires more setup than I have time for. "One of them will talk a lot. I apologize in advance."
That produces a real reaction—not a smile exactly, but the preceding movement, the one that happens in the face before a smile decides whether to commit. Her eyes change first.
"And the other?"
"The other is—" I consider how to describe Declan in a sentence that is both accurate and doesn't alarm a woman who has just discovered her apartment has been deliberately damaged by people with a financial interest in her distress. "—reliable. In the specific way of someone who was trained to assess risk and protect accordingly."
Mila tilts her head.
"Protective services," she says. "Someone mentioned that at the bar tonight."
I nod.
"We came to town for the masquerade," I say. "As a favor for a pack that couldn't make it. We weren't planning to stay beyond the weekend."
The words stay in the space between us, and I'm aware of it landing, and I don't retract it or elaborate on it because both would be worse than letting it sit.
Mila looks around the apartment again.
The water drips through the ceiling holes with the consistent, indifferent rhythm of a storm that has no awareness of what it's falling into.
