They say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
Life didn't give me lemons. Life aimed a truck at full speed, took out everything in its path, and then reversed to check if anything was still standing.
I'm sitting near the apartment door with my knees pulled to my chest, which is both the warmest position available in a room that is now effectively outdoors and also the only configuration that makes me feel like I still have a shape. The cold has settled in properly—the seeping kind that gets under your clothes and into your joints and tells you it's not leaving until you give it something better to do. My teeth are doing their level best not to chatter. I'm doing my level best to let them.
The floor is wet.
Everything is wet. My clothes from the ambient ceiling rain that's been falling on me since I walked in. My hair from the dash between the car and the door. The books. The jacket. Theone corner of this apartment I was hoping might have been spared—it wasn't. The universe was thorough about it.
Phone: dead. Permanently, from the feel of it. No amount of button-pressing is going to resurrect that particular device, which has been on borrowed time for eighteen months anyway but picked tonight to make it official.
Car: fifteen minutes away, stuck in whatever mood the engine has decided is its final one.
Apartment: currently functioning as a very poor impression of the outdoors.
Clothes: what I'm wearing and nothing else, since everything in the bedroom has been either scattered or destroyed.
I rest my chin on my knees and close my eyes.
If I'd had a pack, this wouldn't be happening.
That thought arrives with the particular cruelty of 5 AM logic, which has no filter and no mercy. With a pack—with three Alphas who actually meant what they said about protecting what was theirs—there'd be someone on the phone right now. Someone calling in a favor. Someone making sure whoever decided to send a message tonight understood the specific consequences of delivering it. I wouldn't be sitting on a wet floor hugging my own knees and shivering.
Instead I have Rowan, who I met forty-five minutes ago on a road in the rain and who has now seen me cry on a wet floor and describe the full inventory of my worst year to a total stranger. Which is either deeply embarrassing or simply the state of things at 5 AM and I've stopped having opinions about which.
I didn't call Elowen.
I told Rowan she wouldn't pick up an unknown number, which is true. But the fuller truth is that Elowen would have gotten in her car before the call ended. She would have shown up with blankets and snacks and the specific kind of warm, relentless love that makes everything worse before it makes itbetter because it makes you feel how much you needed it. And I can't—I won't—be the thing that her money and her time and her care keep going toward without end. She bails me out, I spiral, she bails me out again. At some point that stops being friendship and starts being a dependency that neither of us is willing to name.
I'm not going to be that.
My scent is flat. I can tell even from the inside—the honey and vanilla that usually sits somewhere in my awareness like background warmth is completely absent, nothing to broadcast, my body finally running out of signal. I smell like wet clothes and bar shift and whatever the floor has been absorbing since the ceiling made its opinions known.
Rowan's black-pepper-and-dark-chocolate is still present in the room somewhere behind me, which should feel strange—a man I don't know standing in my ruined apartment at this hour—but doesn't. Something about his particular quality of stillness makes him easy to coexist with. He doesn't fill silence with noise. He doesn't ask questions when he doesn't have answers to offer alongside them.
My eyes drift.
The cold is doing something to my consciousness that sleep deprivation finishes off—the particular floating sensation of a body that has genuinely reached the end of its reserves and is starting to make unilateral decisions. I drift. Come back. Drift again.
This is what wishing gets you.
Last night—was it only last night?—I stood in this apartment and told the universe out loud that I wanted to see the masked Alpha again. Real life, no masks, a proper moment. And the universe responded with thunder and then delivered a collector's break-in and a dead car and a dead phone as if to say: concentrate on the actual problems, Mila.
I hear the building entrance below.
Footsteps on the stairs—two sets, one lighter and faster, one heavier with a longer stride. Rowan's voice from across the room, brief, acknowledging. And then the door.
"—said the ceiling, but I didn't think—" The voice cuts itself off. Warm, familiar from somewhere I can't place in my current fog. "Wait a minute."
Something settles across my shoulders.
Warm and heavy—a jacket, I understand dimly, draped around me from behind with the particular efficiency of someone who assessed the situation and acted on it without making it a production. The bourbon-and-orange scent wraps around the jacket's warmth and I place it immediately.
The bar.
"She's the Omega from Clancy's." The voice is lower now, directed away from me but not making any real effort at discretion. "The one I stepped in for. That fist was about to?—"
"I know," Rowan says. A pause. "You mentioned it."
