Chapter 4 #2
I’d washed my hands of it. All of it. Walked away at twenty-two with nothing but an academy acceptance letter and the stubborn conviction that I could build something that didn’t require blood money as a foundation.
And the punishment for that choice was simple: solitude.
If you won’t submit to your drug lord father, you don’t benefit. Period. No safety net. No family name as a shield. No pack of loyal operatives watching your back. Just you, your badge, and whatever you can build with hands that chose to be clean.
That could have been why the academy assigned us to polar opposite departments.
Maggie’s influence, her family’s donations, the careful institutional pressure that ensures certain cadets land in certain places and never cross paths again.
By the time we graduated and pursued our careers, there was no going back to the past.
Until now.
Almost laughable, really. Like the universe has been stockpiling jokes all day and decided to deliver the punchline in the form of a six-foot-four blonde with a grudge and a jawline that should require a permit.
I pull myself out of the past just as Roman closes the distance between us.
His stride is exactly as I remember—measured, deliberate, the walk of a man who has never once in his life been in a hurry to reach someone because the world has always been expected to wait for him.
His frozen-pine scent precedes him like a cold front, the smoked oud and black tobacco intensifying with proximity until my sinuses are filled with winter forest and barely restrained aggression.
He stops three feet away—close enough to communicate, far enough to maintain the pretense that this is professional.
“Well.” His voice has deepened since the academy. Darker. Carrying the resonance of someone who’s spent a decade issuing commands that people don’t question. “If you’d look at what the past dragged in. Hazel Martinez.”
My name in his mouth sounds the way it always has—like a challenge issued and accepted in the same breath.
“Chief Hazel Martinez,” I correct, and the title lands between us with the weight of every promotion, every commendation, every sleepless night that separates cadet from command.
I let it sit. Let him feel the rank differential that doesn’t technically apply between our jurisdictions but absolutely applies in this conversation.
“Of this very station. Long time, Roman.”
He tries to smirk.
Tries.
But the expression doesn’t fully form because the vein at his temple is already pulsing—that specific, telltale throb that I remember from academy days, the one that appeared every time I outscored him, every time an instructor acknowledged my performance before his, every time reality reminded him that the Omega he’d been conditioned to underestimate was standing on the same podium.
“Commander,” he corrects, and the title comes out clipped, bitten off at the edges, served with enough barely restrained irritation to season a full-course meal. “Commander Roman Kade. Oversight unit lead.”
Commander.
Now that makes me smirk.
Full, unrestrained, devastatingly satisfied. The kind of expression that I know from experience makes Roman’s blood pressure spike because it communicates in no uncertain terms that I am impressed against my will, and my will is something he has never once managed to override.
Commander. He climbed the ranks. Fought his way up, probably with the same obsessive, sleep-deprived intensity that carried us both through the academy. Built something from the competitive fury that used to have us at each other’s throats.
Good for him. Genuinely.
Still going to give him hell about it, though.
Our eyes hold. The stare between us generates the kind of tension that makes the October air feel thinner, charged, like the atmosphere before lightning finds ground.
His frozen-pine scent and my eucalyptus frost collide in the space between our bodies, creating a microclimate of cold that anyone with functioning olfactory receptors could read as territorial from fifty yards.
Two predators. One parking lot. Zero intention of backing down.
I check him out.
Deliberately. Slowly. From the polished tactical boots up through the gear-fitted frame, across the broad chest, along the tattooed forearms, to the ice-blue eyes that track my assessment with the coiled awareness of a man who is being evaluated and cannot decide whether to be offended or pleased.
He really has become extra attractive. The bastard. As if the universe hadn’t already handed him enough genetic advantages, it went back and added a second coat.
“Wait—”
Oakley’s voice breaks through the standoff like a pebble dropped into a frozen lake, cracking the surface tension with the cheerful obliviousness of someone who either doesn’t read rooms or reads them perfectly and chooses chaos.
“Y’all know one another?”
He’s materializing at the edge of my peripheral vision, leaning against the cruiser’s hood with his arms crossed and his auburn hair catching October light like bottled fire.
His green eyes bounce between Roman and me with the delighted curiosity of someone who’s just stumbled into the most interesting thing that’s happened all week.
“How do you even know her?”
Alaric’s voice comes from behind me.
Not beside me. Not at a respectful conversational distance.
Behind me.
I have to look over my shoulder to confirm what my senses are already screaming, and sure enough—Alaric Venezuela is standing directly behind me.
Close enough that the burnt vanilla of his scent is curling into the space between my shoulder blades like a hand resting on my back.
Close enough that if I stepped backward, I’d collide with a wall of beige coat and cedarwood and the kind of quiet, territorial proximity that most Alphas are too smart to attempt with me.
Most.
I arch an eyebrow.
The expression is slow, deliberate, loaded with the same energy I’d deployed on Dennings in the bullpen—except this time, it’s not aimed at incompetence.
It’s aimed at the audacity of a man who has known me for approximately twenty minutes and is already testing the perimeter of my personal space like a cat seeing how close it can get to the counter before getting sprayed.
Alaric smirks.
And the audacity of that smirk—warm, unbothered, carrying the confident amusement of a man who knows exactly what he did and is waiting to see what I’ll do about it—should be grounds for immediate ejection from my airspace.
“Are you going to give me a lecture on personal space?” he asks, and the question is so precisely calibrated between genuine curiosity and playful challenge that I can’t determine which side it lands on.
I begin to cross my arms.
The motion is automatic—my default posture for delivering the kind of corrective assessment that has made grown Alphas reconsider their proximity choices. My elbows start to lift, my fingers start to tuck, the full-body language of a woman about to deploy a verbal missile at close range.
Alaric is already moving.
Before my arms complete the cross, he’s stepping backward—one stride, two—putting distance between us with a speed that contradicts his usual measured composure.
The beige coat swings with the motion, and his expression shifts from amused to something that looks suspiciously like a man who just remembered that the animal he was poking has claws.
He reads body language like a crime scene. Saw the arms starting to cross and evacuated before the detonation.
Smart man.
I pause.
My arms hover at half-mast, the cross incomplete, the lecture chambered but not fired.
Something about the speed of his retreat—the genuine, reflexive quality of it, more instinct than performance—disarms the response I’d been building.
He didn’t wait for the warning. He read the precursor and adjusted. That’s not arrogance. That’s awareness.
I let out a huff and drop my arms to my sides.
Alaric exhales.
The relief in the sound is so palpable, so undisguised, that it bypasses my defenses entirely and lands somewhere in the vicinity of my chest where it has no business being.
“I think,” he says, his composure rebuilding itself brick by brick as the safe distance gives him room to breathe, “if she lectures me, I’ll fall in love.”
The statement is delivered to the parking lot at large rather than to me specifically, but his dark eyes cut to mine for just long enough to communicate that the joke isn’t entirely a joke.
Oakley groans.
The sound is theatrical, full-bodied, the groan of a man who has watched his colleague say something spectacularly inadvisable and cannot intervene quickly enough.
“Please don’t.” He pushes off the cruiser’s hood, auburn hair catching the breeze as he gestures at Alaric with the exasperated energy of a younger sibling who’s been managing his elder’s social missteps for too long. “You’re like a senior citizen in comparison to her. Have some dignity.”
Alaric chokes.
Not a figurative choke—an actual, physical coughing fit that racks his frame with the indignity of a man whose own saliva has betrayed him. His hand flies to his chest, the beige coat bunching under the grip as he struggles to regain respiratory control while simultaneously defending his honor.
“Fuck—I’m thirty-eight,” he manages between coughs, his voice strained with outrage that is at least forty percent genuine. “Not even fucking forty. Senior citizen—are you—” Another cough. “I am in the prime of my—”
“Well, I’m thirty.” Oakley shrugs with the devastating nonchalance of a man wielding his youth like a weapon he didn’t have to sharpen.
His green eyes slide to mine, and the wink he delivers is so precisely timed that my hindbrain registers it before my rational mind can file a complaint. “So I probably have a better chance.”
“Neither of you,” Roman’s voice cuts through the exchange like a blade through warm butter, “are having a chance with her.”