"He's always like that," Finn says helpfully. "It sounds ominous. It is ominous. He just doesn't feel the need to dress it up."
"More coffee?" he adds, already rising.
"Another donut?"
My eyes go wide before I can stop them—a completely involuntary physical response to the word—and Finn points atme with the triumphant expression of a man whose theory has been confirmed.
"I can't," I say. "It's—that was already a luxury, I shouldn't?—"
Declan moves.
He crosses the room to where I'm sitting, and reaches down, and two fingers find the few strands of hair that fell across my face during this conversation and tuck them back with the same deliberate, unhurried care he applies to everything. His knuckles brush my cheekbone in passing, light and brief, and the cedarwood-and-whiskey scent is close.
"Have as many as you want," he says quietly, "while you're with us."
He says it simply.
Not as a grand gesture. Not with weight or performance. Just as the statement of a fact he's decided: while you're with us, the desserts are not a luxury you have to earn.
I look up at him.
The grey-green eyes, close, with that same patient attention I first noticed on a balcony with roses on the columns and champagne in my hand.
"Finn," he says, still looking at me.
"On it," Finn says immediately, already at the hotel phone.
My scent is doing something. I can feel it—the lime zest coming back in a way it hasn't in eighteen months, sharp and present, the specific note that surfaces when something has genuinely surprised me and my body is deciding what to make of it. The honey-and-vanilla warming underneath it. I am sitting in a hotel living room with an ex-masquerade Alpha's hand having just brushed my face and two more men orbiting the situation with complete normalcy, and for the first time since I can clearly remember?—
I dare to think that maybe the next twenty days will prove to me what it's like to be in a good pack.
CHAPTER 21
Lucky Charm Goes Shopping
~MILA~
"The registry wait in the city is two weeks minimum," Rowan says from somewhere outside the curtain. "Oakridge has the same backlog. But there's a town forty minutes east that had a cancellation—we secured an appointment for this afternoon."
I hear the information. I'm not fully processing it, because I'm standing in a small dress shop changing room looking at myself in a three-panel mirror and having a minor internal reckoning.
The dress is white.
White with layers—the base a fitted sheath and then layers of lightweight yellow organza over it, each one catching the light differently as I shift, giving the whole thing a kind of soft, luminous movement that doesn't photograph the way it looks in person. White flowers embroidered at the neckline and the hem, small and precise, the kind of detail that only registers up close. The wedges the shop owner suggested are the braided rope variety—comfortable, which matters more than anything rightnow given I've been in bar-shift shoes for the last eighteen hours of my life.
My hair.
The champagne blonde catches the changing room light in a way that makes the whole look cohere—the warm tone of the hair against the white, the yellow of the layers pulling it together in a way that a brunette version of this dress wouldn't achieve. Elowen knew. She always knows. I argued with her for two hours about the dye and she delivered something that is now, in this specific moment, working more architectural weight than I gave it credit for.
I press my lips together.
I look feminine.
Not in the way of someone performing femininity for an occasion—not the masquerade version, where the gown and the mask and the whole production were Elowen's vision executed correctly. This is something quieter. The dress is light enough that I'm not managing it, not negotiating with the skirt or calculating the physics of movement. It simply moves when I do, and the effect is?—
When did I forget this was something I could wear?
The pack years. That's the honest answer. Three years of calibrating myself to what Dante and Kieran and Seb needed me to be in whatever room we were occupying, and the gradual erosion of anything that didn't serve the function. Dresses were performance. Femininity was a tool deployed strategically. By the time they left, I'd been in bar-shift jeans and functional jackets for so long that I'd stopped thinking of this category of clothing as something that belonged to me at all.
