"Government put it through last autumn. Any pack bond—provisional or full—registered during St. Patrick's Day week through the following three days carries a mandatory hold period before annulment can be filed. It was designed to prevent men from claiming Omegas during the holiday rush and dropping them the following week. The intent was protective." A pause. "The effect is that any bond you register tonight can't be dissolved before Easter."
Twenty days.
"So if we register tonight?—"
"You're her provisional pack until Easter at the earliest."
I look at the window.
Twenty days of Oakridge Hollow.
I think about what Rowan told me on the way here—not just the facts of her situation but the specific details he included, which with Rowan are always deliberate. The Lucky Clover Lounge. The menu in her head. The blueprint she's been carrying for two years and has never told anyone about because believing in something and losing it is worse than not believing.
I think about the masquerade.
About the woman who danced like she'd been trained for better rooms than the ones she'd been allowed into, who drank whisky and discussed Cole's pour technique with the fluency of someone who loved the craft rather than the occasion. Who kissed me like she meant it and ran for a train because she had a shift in the morning and didn't slow down even when the night was worth slowing down for.
About a gold coin on a staircase and Finn asking why I was smiling when I had no name to attach to any of it.
"There's an upside to the Easter window," Marcus says, and I can hear him assembling his case the way he does when he's already landed on a recommendation and is building the logic backward. "Twenty days is long enough for the collectors to verify the pack registration and reassess the contract. If you're who you are—" He means the company, the profile, the specific kind of notoriety that comes from building a security operation from the ground up and taking on the cases nobody else wanted "—they're going to check whether continuing the contract is worth what it costs them in exposure. Men like that don't stay in business by taking on packs they can't outrun."
"And the debt itself?"
"Has to be cleared before an annulment processes cleanly. Otherwise it follows the provisional bond into dissolution and it becomes complicated."
"We can handle the debt."
Silence on the line—the specific silence of a man who has known me long enough to know that a five-word response covering fifty thousand dollars of someone else's liability means I've already decided and am not being talked out of it.
"Aren't you worried she'll?—"
"I know what you're going to ask."
"It's been happening. Omegas targeting packs specifically during the St. Patrick's window because of the annulment delay. They get twenty days of pack protection and financial support and then file the dissolution. It's not?—"
"I know the pattern."
"Then—"
"We'll know how things sit in three weeks." I look at her. Asleep, in Finn's too-large pajamas, her champagne blonde hair spread across a hotel pillow with the emerald tips that were a masquerade detail but turned out to be her actual hair underneath. "Get the paperwork rolling. Electronic signatures only tonight—Finn and Rowan are in the building."
"I'll have it ready in two hours."
"One more thing." I lower my voice further, not that she can hear anything right now. "The footage. The crew. I want full identification before morning."
"You'll have it."
"And Marcus."
"Yeah."
"Run the ex-pack through the standard financial exposure assessment. Reeves, Walsh, Moretti. I want to know where they're vulnerable and what a sustained legal interference with their current arrangement would cost them."
A pause, and then Marcus makes the sound he makes when something has impressed him, which is not a sound he makes often and which I take as appropriate confirmation that I've correctly assessed the situation. "You're going to play this back at them."
"I'm going to make sure they understand the cost of continuing."
"Right." Another pause. "Be careful with the collector crew. They're not sophisticated, but they're committed. If they've been contracted to escalate and the escalation doesn't produce results, they sometimes?—"
