I stare at it.
My omega makes a sound that is not a sound. More of a feeling. Something cold moving through me from the chest outward, finding every crack, filling every one.
I pull the sheet around myself, suddenly and completely aware that I am naked and alone in a room that belongs topeople who are no longer in it. The sheet is soft, expensive, and somehow that makes it worse.
All of it makes it worse. The white flowers still perfect on the console table. The untouched fruit basket. The high ceiling, the gold light, the gorgeous indifferent room just sitting there being beautiful while I sit here being a lesson I apparently needed to learn twice.
Is that all I was?
Two nights and most of three days, and I let myself believe it. That’s the part I can’t get past. How they looked at me. Santos saying *tesoro* like it meant something. Matteo’s almost-smile feeling like a gift every time I earned it. Tomas’s hands, always steady, certain, and there.
I believed all of it.
Ricardo never made me feel cheap. Small. Unremarkable. Too much in all the wrong ways. But not this.
I find my dress.
It takes me longer than it should because my hands aren't entirely cooperative and the room is doing that thing rooms do when you're trying to leave them with dignity you're not sure you have left. I get the zip halfway up and stop, and I think about the honeycomb. The strawberries. Santos's mouth at my temple whisperingyou're perfectin the dark.
I almost don't make it through the zip.
I am so angry at my eyes right now. I am furious at them but I am also just really, deeply, quietly sad, and the anger is mostly there to give the sad somewhere to put itself.
I told myself. Standing in that elevator going up, looking at my own reflection, I told myself.Things like this do not happen to girls like me.I said it. I believed it. And then I felt everything anyway because I am constitutionally, irreparably hopeful and there is apparently nothing I can do about that. It is load-bearingin my personality. It is structural. And it will be my downfall every single time.
My heels. One by the sofa. The other has traveled halfway across the room on its own business and I collect it with the energy of a woman who is fine, completely fine, absolutely fine, and also crying, just the quiet kind that doesn't ask for anything.
My omega is not angry. That is the thing. The rest of me is furious but she is just sad in that deep animal way, the particular grief of something that found exactly what it was looking for and then had it removed before it was finished. That sadness is physical. It is in my joints and my sternum and the back of my throat.
My scent has gone cold. Strawberry with no warmth behind it. Rose with every thorn back in place.
I pick up my clutch.
I don’t touch the money.
I walk to the door and leave without looking back, because looking back requires something I don’t have left, and I need what remains of me to make it to the elevator.
The corridor is deep carpet, soft light, and expensive quiet. I walk through it with wet eyes and my heels in my hand, and when the elevator opens, the mirrors inside show me everything. Last night’s dress. Hair down and telling on me completely. Eyes that had four hours of sleep and are doing their absolute best at a job they are not qualified for.
Alphas like that don't fall for omegas like me.
I knew it going up. I felt the truth and turned away from it, because pretending was warmer, and I’d had a terrible week and wanted one good thing. Santos with his Italian, his saffron scent, his you are a gift. Matteo with his hand in my hair, telling me I was always the point. Tomas at the piano in the dark, playing something that sounded like a question finally answered. Andme, wrapped in all that warmth, believing for one stupid moment that I deserved it.
Apparently, I was wrong about the last part.
Before the elevator opens, I run back to the room. Fuck it! I’m taking the money. I spent what little I had on the roulette table, and I need bills to pay until I get a new job.
As I head back to the elevator and it opens, I snatch the money and head into the elevator.
It doesn’t take long to reach the ground floor, cross the lobby and then get the elevator up to my room. Once, I do I slump on to the bed, to cry.
Bad luck happens in three. And they did!
Ricardo and the truck. The job. And now this, which I did entirely to myself, which is the one that stings most because I cannot even be properly mad at anyone else about it.
I find the hotel robe behind the bathroom door, wrap it around me, and sit back against the headboard and look at my phone.
Eleven missed messages from Anna.