"I know what they sometimes do." I spent fifteen years in environments where that pattern was an occupational variable. "That's why we're registering tonight."
He hangs up.
The room is quiet.
Outside, the storm runs its latest chapter against the hotel windows—rain horizontal in the wind now, the kind of March weather that has decided to make a point. The St. Patrick's green bunting across the street that was festive at midnight is now just wet fabric doing its best against a gust that doesn't care about the holiday.
I look at Mila.
The scent of her is present even from here—honey and vanilla, resting, the lime zest completely absent in sleep. Her face in profile: the sharp cheekbone, the dark brow, the specific quality of rest in someone who hasn't had enough of it in a long time and has finally, completely, surrendered to it.
She doesn't know it's me.
That's the part I keep turning over. She was half-asleep when I carried her out of the apartment, and whatever register she recognized the scent on, she didn't surface. Finn told me she murmured something about the masquerade—which confirmedwhat Rowan had already suspected when he put the timeline together, that the masked Omega he'd been asking about since midnight and the Omega Rowan found on the side of a road were the same person. The universe's geometry, apparently, requires a castle and two separate vehicles and a storm to close the distance it opened on a train platform.
Finn is going to be insufferable about this.
The door opens quietly—Finn, returning from the corridor, who takes one look at me standing at the window with my phone pocketed and reads the situation with the accuracy he always applies to my silences.
"You called Marcus."
"He's processing the paperwork."
Finn is quiet for a moment. Not surprised—Finn is rarely surprised by anything I do, which is one of the things that makes him useful—but absorbing it, adding it to his own read of the evening. "Twenty-day window."
"Until Easter."
"Rowan's going to say it's financially straightforward."
"It is."
"And you're going to say it's operationally sound given the collector situation."
"It is that too."
Finn looks at me. Then at Mila. Then back at me, with the expression of someone who has two separate pieces of information about the same situation and is watching them align in real time. "She doesn't know it's you."
"No."
"She's going to figure it out."
"Yes."
"And then she's going to have opinions."
"Almost certainly."
A beat, and then Finn's grin arrives—slow, warm, the specific expression of a man who is going to enjoy the next twenty days considerably and has already started enjoying them. "You found our lucky charm," he says.
I look at the window.
The gold coin is in my jacket pocket. Has been since the train station. I reach in and close my fingers around it—the weight of it, the worn four-leaf clover face, the old lettering around the rim—and think about what Marcus said and what the paperwork means and what twenty days in Oakridge Hollow looks like when you arrived for a weekend and are staying for a reason.
Behind me, Mila breathes in the even, unguarded rhythm of someone finally getting the rest they needed.
Her honey-and-vanilla scent, soft and low, fills the room.
"Get Rowan," I say. "We need the signatures before morning."
