Chapter 9
Dead Horses And Living Ghosts
~HAZEL~
The pillow smells incredible.
That’s the first coherent thought my brain produces upon approaching consciousness—not where am I or what time is it or why does my body feel like it lost a bar fight with gravity.
No. The first neuron that fires with any meaningful clarity is dedicated entirely to the fact that whatever surface my face is currently pressed against smells so fucking good that my Omega hindbrain has apparently decided to abandon all higher function in favor of burrowing deeper into it.
I turn.
Not a conscious decision. An instinctive one—my body rotating toward the warmth source with the mindless, gravitational pull of a plant leaning toward sunlight.
I snuggle further into the pillow, and the scent intensifies with proximity, wrapping around me in layers that my half-asleep brain catalogues with embarrassing enthusiasm.
Snow-covered pine.
Smoked oud.
Frozen leather and—peppermint bark. Black tobacco. The undertones of—
The thought stalls, buffering like a video with bad signal.
Why does my pillow smell like an Alpha?
Why does my pillow smell like a specific Alpha?
Why is my pillow so warm?
The warmth is the part that’s derailing me.
Absurdly, dangerously good warmth—not the electric-blanket variety, not the radiator’s mechanical approximation, but the deep, organic heat that only a living body produces.
The kind that radiates from skin and muscle and the furnace-like metabolism that Alpha biology runs on, turning them into personal heating systems that Omegas are biologically wired to seek out like moths chasing something they know will eventually burn them.
This pillow feels like it was pulled from a toaster oven.
This pillow is breathing.
My mind is taking its sweet time to play catch-up.
The gears are grinding, rust-stuck, processing information at a speed that would earn a failing grade in any tactical assessment.
I feel mentally drained despite having just woken up—the bone-deep cognitive exhaustion of a brain that ran too hot for too long and is now operating at minimum capacity while it rebuilds whatever the fever scorched.
Something happened last night.
I know this the way you know you’ve been in a car accident before you open your eyes—the body remembering what the mind hasn’t reconstructed yet.
There are pieces. Fragments. The taste of iron in the back of my throat.
The ghost-sensation of cold water against skin.
A door opening. A voice—deep, measured, carrying the scent of burnt vanilla—saying something about a fire. And then…
Nothing.
A gap where memory should be, black and smooth as a lake surface at midnight.
When I stir, my body responds with a full-body protest that starts at my skull and cascades downward through every muscle group like a chain of dominoes collapsing.
My neck aches. My shoulders feel like they’ve been carrying sandbags in my sleep.
My thighs burn with the hypersensitivity that I associate with the constellation tattoos being aggravated—
The scratching. Last night. Before the shower.
Right.
I groan.
The sound is involuntary and deeply unattractive, the auditory equivalent of a woman who has been assembled from spare parts and insufficient sleep.
I force my eyes open, knowing that the day isn’t going to wait for me to achieve full cognitive restoration before demanding my participation.
I normally wake at four a.m.—a habit carved into my circadian rhythm by over a decade of shifts that start before sunrise—so at least I’m probably not behind schedule.
What time did I even go to bed?
What time is it now?
Why can’t I remember anything after opening my front door?
My eyes open further.
And immediately find a chest.
A moving chest. Rising and falling with the deep, rhythmic cadence of someone in genuine, unguarded sleep.
The kind of breathing that suggests total relaxation, complete trust in the surrounding environment, and the cardiovascular efficiency of a man whose resting respiratory rate runs lower than most people’s active one.
A shirtless chest.
Shirtless.
My brain stalls again, harder this time, the cognitive engine grinding to a halt like a car hitting a wall at speed.
Because the chest I’m pressed against—the chest I’ve been snuggling like a goddamn body pillow with emotional attachment issues—is bare.
Skin. Muscle. The kind of dense, tactical physique that doesn’t come from gym vanity but from years of operational conditioning that has turned a human torso into something that could be studied in an anatomy course titled Why Evolution Favored the Predator.
And there are tattoos.
Familiar tattoos.
Norse runes tracing the ridgeline of a collarbone I have not seen in years.
Wolf iconography wrapping a bicep that is significantly larger than the last time it existed in my field of vision, the ink denser, the designs more intricate, additions layered over a foundation I’d only ever glimpsed in academy locker rooms and the one sparring session where he’d fought shirtless because the Montana summer had turned the gym into an approximation of hell.
I know these tattoos.
I know this chest.
I know this scent.
My eyes trail upward.
Slowly. With the morbid, inevitable pace of someone ascending a staircase they already know leads to a conclusion they’re not prepared for.
Past the throat—thick, corded, the tendons visible even in sleep.
Past the jaw—sharp enough to qualify as a weapon, clean-shaven, the bone structure of a man assembled by genetics that understood intimidation as an art form. Past the mouth—
Don’t look at his mouth.
Don’t you dare look at his—
Past the mouth. To the face.
Roman Kade.
Asleep.
In my bed.
With my body wrapped around his like a vine that found the only warm surface in winter and committed to a hostile takeover.
Five seconds.
I give my brain five full seconds to present a reasonable explanation for this scenario.
A logical, professional, entirely justifiable reason that my academy rival, my first crush, the man whose competitive fury defined the most formative years of my career, is lying shirtless in my four-hundred-square-foot apartment while I’m wearing—
I glance down.
Whose shirt is this?
Navy flannel. Soft. Three sizes too large, the collar gaping at my shoulder, the hem reaching mid-thigh. Definitely not mine. Definitely not his—the fabric carries the faintest ghost of a scent that isn’t frozen pine but something brighter, citrus-adjacent, warm—
Oakley’s.
I’m wearing Oakley Torres’s shirt in bed with Roman Kade.
The five seconds are up and my brain has produced exactly zero acceptable explanations.
I lift my hand.
And karate-chop his forehead.
The strike is reflexive, precise, and delivered with the specific biomechanical efficiency of a woman who has maintained her combatives certification every year since the academy.
The edge of my hand connects with the broad plane of his forehead with a crack that reverberates through the mattress springs and produces an immediate, spectacular result.
Roman’s eyes snap open.
And he begins cursing in what I count as four distinct languages.
English arrives first—a sharp, guttural “Fuck!” that ricochets off the apartment’s thin walls.
Then French—something rapid and nasal that involves the word merde repeated with escalating intensity.
Italian follows, a string of syllables I can’t fully translate but whose tone communicates universal outrage. And then—
I pause.
My hand still raised, my eyebrows lifting with the involuntary curiosity of a woman who has just encountered unexpected data mid-assault.
Was that Japanese?
Since when does this man speak Japanese?
I know Roman Kade’s linguistic capabilities. Or I knew them, a decade ago, when his repertoire extended to English, French from his mother’s side, and the Italian profanity he’d picked up from an academy roommate. Japanese was absolutely not in the catalogue.
“When did you learn Japanese?” I ask.
It is, objectively, the most random question to ask a man you’ve just karate-chopped out of sleep in your own bed.
The appropriate inquiry would involve how he got here, why he’s shirtless, what happened last night, and whether I need to file an incident report.
But my brain, in its fever-damaged, sleep-deprived, scent-saturated state, has apparently decided that linguistic acquisition takes priority over all other concerns.
And the thing is—the thing that makes something ancient and complicated twist in my chest—he answers.
Not with confusion. Not with “what the hell are you talking about.” Not with any of the reasonable responses that a normal person would produce upon being physically assaulted awake by a woman who hasn’t seen them in a decade.
He answers like this is how we’ve always been.
“I’ve been learning on Rosetta fucking Stone for six months.
” His voice is rough with sleep, deeper than its waking register, the words scraping through a throat that clearly hadn’t prepared for conversation—let alone conversation at this velocity.
His hand cups his forehead, pressing against the impact site. “Fucking hell, Hazel! My nose!”
This fucker must still be used to my bullshit after all these years.
That, or sleep-deprivation has made him pliable.
Either way, the immediate acceptance of my violence as a normal conversational opener is doing things to my emotional architecture that I refuse to examine.
I blink.