Chapter 7 #3
He fills the doorway the way he fills every doorway—completely, his six-four frame and broad shoulders occupying the space with the territorial authority of a man who considers closed doors a personal offense.
His platinum-blonde hair is disheveled, his tactical jacket half-zipped over a T-shirt, and his breathing is elevated in a way that suggests he ran the distance from their housing unit rather than drove.
Five minutes. He made it in five minutes on foot.
The housing is at least a mile away.
I roll my eyes.
“Did you want to break her door while you’re at it?”
“Fuck off,” he huffs, the words arriving between breaths that are still catching up to his cardiovascular output. But the dismissal is mechanical, reflexive—the autopilot rudeness that Roman defaults to when his higher brain functions are otherwise occupied.
Because his eyes have found Hazel.
And the change that moves across Roman Kade’s face is the most honest expression I’ve seen from him in two years of partnership.
The aggression drops. The competitive armor, the professional rigidity, the carefully maintained fiction that Hazel Martinez is nothing more than an inconvenient complication from his past—all of it falls away in the space between one breath and the next, revealing what lies beneath.
Regret.
Raw, unprocessed, and so visible that it makes his ice-blue eyes look almost human.
And concern.
The real kind. The kind that makes a man run a mile in five minutes. The kind that turns a commander’s face into something vulnerable enough that I file the image away in the compartment where I keep information that people would rather I didn’t have.
Still in love with her.
The man has been carrying a torch for this woman since they were cadets, and he’s been using competition and distance and professional detachment to pretend the flame went out.
It didn’t.
Who doesn’t love drama.
“Roman.” My voice snaps him out of whatever emotional processing his face is broadcasting to the room. “Outside. Patrol duty.”
He blinks.
The regret and concern don’t vanish—they retreat, pulling back behind the ice-blue walls with the reluctant obedience of soldiers ordered to stand down.
“Wait—what?” His gaze whips from Hazel to me, the commander reasserting itself over the man. “She needs our help. All of us. We should take her to the hospital. Get her proper medical—”
“She’s packless, Roman.”
The word lands like a verdict.
“Or at least, we can assume so while she’s here.
” I keep my voice level, clinical, because one of us needs to operate on logic while the other is busy having a decade-old emotional crisis in a four-hundred-square-foot apartment.
“The hospitals in towns like this don’t service packless Omegas without a pack representative to authorize treatment.
You know the system. It’s bureaucratic garbage, but it’s the reality. ”
The muscle in Roman’s jaw works. His scent—frozen pine, smoked oud, the black tobacco that intensifies when he’s angry—fills the apartment with a territorial sharpness that makes the already-small space feel claustrophobic.
“Stay outside,” I repeat. “Guard the perimeter. Because someone set the station on fire tonight, and we don’t know if it’s random, targeted, or the beginning of something worse. The last thing we need is this apartment going up in flames while we’re inside it.”
I let that reality settle.
“Patrol. Watch. If someone’s targeting her or targeting the station—or both—we need eyes on the exterior. Oakley has the medical background. He can handle the fever.”
“What if an intruder gets past me?” Roman argues, and I can hear the desperation beneath the tactical concern—a man grasping for any justification to stay in the room with the woman on the bed. “What if someone comes through the back while I’m covering the front?”
Oakley, who has been administering the counter-agents with quiet efficiency throughout this exchange, looks up from the bedside with an expression that can only be described as a polite version of are you fucking serious.
“Roman.” His voice is gentle in the way that dangerous things are gentle—calm surfaces over deep water. “Who’s the black belt in this pack?”
The silence that follows is the specific variety that occurs when a man with a valid point meets a man without an argument.
Roman’s mouth opens.
Closes.
Oakley points at the door.
“On duty. Now.”
The command comes from a deputy to a commander, which under any other circumstances would constitute an insubordination incident worthy of a formal write-up.
But Oakley delivers it with the quiet authority of a man who understands that rank is irrelevant when the stakes are medical, and Roman—to his grudging, visible, audibly muttered credit—obeys.
He grumbles something beneath his breath that includes at least two profanities and what I suspect is a Norse invocation requesting patience from a god he doesn’t believe in.
Then he stomps toward the door with the heavy-footed resignation of a man who knows he’s been outmaneuvered and lacks the tactical grounds to appeal.
The door closes behind him.
Hard.
But not slamming. A controlled close that communicates displeasure without damaging the infrastructure of a woman’s home.
Progress.
Oakley’s green eyes meet mine across the room.
I don’t wait for the question.
“I’ll cover for the chief at the station,” I say, already turning toward the door, already shifting into the operational mode that my brain defaults to when personal complications threaten to interfere with professional obligations.
“I’ll tell them she’s on an investigation—potential burglary in the outer district.
Off comms until further notice. That should buy at least twenty-four hours before anyone starts asking questions that require honest answers. ”
I pause at the threshold.
“Change her. Tame the fever. If it gets worse—” I pull a card from my coat pocket, a habit left over from the years before the pager when analog information was the only kind I trusted.
“I have connections. I can get an Omega specialist to make a house call. Someone discreet. Someone who won’t file a report that ends up on the wrong desk. ”
Oakley nods.
“Deal.”
I turn.
Hand on the doorknob. One foot into the hallway. The October air already reaching for me through the gap, carrying the distant scent of wood smoke from whatever is left of the station and the closer, sharper scent of Roman’s frozen pine as he takes up position on the building’s perimeter.
“Alaric.”
Oakley’s voice stops me.
Quiet. Stripped of the charm, the humor, the protective layer of easy warmth that he deploys like camouflage over the sharp, serious man beneath.
“This is due to those dangerous suppressants, isn’t it.”
Not a question.
A confirmation request from someone who already knows the answer and needs to hear the silence that accompanies it.
I don’t say anything.
Because I know where that conversation leads.
Through the case files I’ve processed. Through the bodies I’ve helped recover.
Through the statistical probability that a thirty-two-year-old Omega on high-dose suppressants exhibiting nosebleeds, syncope, and fever spikes is operating on borrowed time that the pharmaceutical companies won’t acknowledge and the medical system won’t address.
I step into the hallway.
Close the door with the careful precision of a man who is holding too many things to risk dropping any of them.
The night air hits my face. Cold. Clean. Carrying the October emptiness of a Montana town that sleeps soundly because it doesn’t know what’s rotting beneath its postcard surface.
Somewhere behind that closed door, an Omega who commands rooms and threatens departments and holds herself together with nothing but willpower and icy blue hair is lying unconscious in a bed that’s too small, in an apartment that’s too empty, in a town that doesn’t deserve her, and the only people standing between her and whatever comes next are three Alphas she didn’t ask for and wouldn’t accept if she were awake to refuse.
The suppressants are killing her.
The same way they’re killing Omegas in every city, every department, every corner of a system that would rather manage the inconvenience of Omega biology with chemicals than address the structural failures that make the chemicals necessary.
And I don’t want to dare think of the possibilities of losing Officer Hazel when we just met the firecracker of an Omega…