Chapter 9 #3
Not because I’ve chosen to. Because my body obeys the command before my mind can file an objection, the Alpha-Omega wiring doing what it’s designed to do—overriding conscious resistance in favor of biological compliance.
The breath enters my lungs like a pardon, expanding the ribs that had gone rigid, releasing the tension in my diaphragm with a shudder that I pray he doesn’t notice.
He says nothing further.
Just holds the look.
And in the silence, with his scent surrounding me and his arm against my waist and the October morning filtering weak light through blinds that need replacing, I sigh.
“I can’t check,” I admit, and the words come out quieter than I intend, sandpapered by the rawness in my throat.
“No pack means no official medical authorization. The system won’t process an Omega without a pack representative signing off.
It’s bureaucratic horseshit, but it’s the reality.
” I pause, watching the information register in his expression—the slow tightening of his jaw, the darkening of his eyes.
“Probably has something to do with my meds. The suppressants. They’ve been… acting up.”
Acting up. As if the chemicals systematically dismantling my cardiovascular system qualify as “acting up.” As if nosebleeds and blackouts and fevers are the pharmaceutical equivalent of a misbehaving child rather than a body staging its final revolt against five years of chemical suppression.
Roman frowns.
The expression deepens the lines between his brows—lines that didn’t exist at the academy, earned over a decade of command decisions and, if his three a.m. cold showers are any indication, nocturnal battles that he wages alone in the same way I wage mine.
“Why are you taking meds?”
I laugh.
The sound is short, sharp, carrying none of the humor that laughter is supposed to contain and all of the bitter pragmatism that has replaced it.
“Want me to fuck a tree every month when my heats hit?”
He frowns harder. The temple vein makes its appearance—a sign of Roman Kade processing information that his pride won’t let him accept and his logic can’t refute.
“You have a pack,” he says, and the statement is delivered as fact rather than question, the assumption of a man who cannot conceive of a world where Hazel Martinez—the most fiercely competent, devastatingly capable officer he’s ever competed against—doesn’t have Alphas tripping over themselves to claim her. “Don’t you?”
Don’t you.
The question mark at the end of the sentence catches on something inside my ribcage like a fishhook.
I move his arm away.
Gently. Not the aggressive shrug or the hostile extraction that our dynamic would typically produce. Just a quiet, deliberate relocation of his forearm from my waist to the mattress, the kind of gesture you make when you need distance but don’t want to explain why.
The vertigo has passed. The room holds its position. I take my time swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, planting bare feet on the cold hardwood, letting the solidity of the floor anchor me before I attempt anything that requires balance or dignity.
I don’t look at him.
If I look at him, I’ll get distracted. The shirtless situation alone is a hazard to my operational focus—the way the October morning light catches the ridges of muscle across his abdomen, the way the Norse runes follow the V-cut of his hips into territory that the waistband of his tactical pants is doing an inadequate job of concealing.
He’s clearly grown since the academy, and by grown I mean that whatever genetic potential had been hinted at in his twenty-two-year-old frame has been fully, aggressively realized in his thirty-five-year-old one.
Don’t catalog it. Don’t measure it. Don’t compare it to the version your muscle memory still carries from nights in academy rooms that smelled like pine and sweat and the specific chemical compound of two people who hated each other too much to stay apart.
I take a few breaths.
“I did have a pack,” I say.
The words are directed at the far wall—at the corkboard with its red strings and pinned photographs, at the investigation that waits for me with the patience of the dead. Not at him. Looking at the board is safer. The board doesn’t make my chest constrict.
“Then they betrayed me.”
A breath.
“The usual shit.”
Three sentences. Economy of language. The bare minimum required to convey a history that spans two years of shared meals and synchronized heat cycles and the gradual erosion of trust until one morning you’re cleaning out your desk and your pack is flanking someone new and the word “betrayal” doesn’t even begin to cover the specific, surgical cruelty of being replaced while you’re still warm in the chair.
I push to my feet.
Steady this time. The floor holds. My legs hold. The world doesn’t tilt.
“I didn’t betray you.”
His voice hits my back like a thrown knife—accurate, forceful, embedding itself between my shoulder blades where the raven tattoo covers the scars I don’t talk about.
I stop.
Mid-stride, three steps from the bathroom door. My bare feet on cold hardwood, Oakley’s flannel brushing my thighs, the apartment’s morning silence magnifying the four words he’s just detonated into it until they fill every corner.
I didn’t betray you.
Not your recent pack, Martinez. He’s not talking about them.
He’s talking about the academy. About the assignment. About the day they sent you to one end of the map and him to the other, and neither of you said goodbye because the words would have required acknowledging that there was something to grieve.
I look over my shoulder.
And I make sure my gaze is as cold as my heart should be when it comes to him.
Should be. The operative phrase carrying weight it shouldn’t.
Because my heart, when it comes to Roman Kade, has never been cold.
Has never achieved the subzero temperature that I maintain for the rest of the world—the frost that keeps colleagues at arm’s length and suspects off-balance and the general population of everyone who has ever tried to get close permanently outside the perimeter.
For him, the best I’ve ever managed is cool.
And even that is costing me right now.
“If it helps you snore at night,” I say, each word a controlled incision, “keep telling yourself that.”
I roll my eyes—the full, dismissive, end-of-conversation rotation that I’ve weaponized since the academy—and turn away. The bathroom is five steps ahead. Five steps to a closed door and cold water and the restoration of every defense that his presence in my bed has compromised.
I don’t make it.
His hand closes around my wrist.
Not hard. Not the restraining grip that would trigger the PTSD responses coiled in my nervous system like loaded springs.
Just…contact. His fingers circling the joint with a pressure that says stop without saying I’m making you.
The same distinction Oakley had managed last night with a palm on my shoulder.
These men and their careful touches.
These men who handle me like I’m a grenade and a glass figurine simultaneously.
I look back at him.
Glaring.
The expression is loaded with every ounce of defensive fury I can generate on short notice—hazel-brown eyes narrowed, jaw set, the eucalyptus frost of my scent sharpening into the territorial blade that keeps Alphas at a distance.
But his face…
His face stops the glare mid-deployment.
Because Roman Kade is looking at me with an expression I have never seen him wear.
Serious. Stern. The competitive armor stripped away entirely, leaving nothing but the man—raw, un-performative, devastatingly honest in a way that his pride should never allow.
The ice-blue eyes that have glared at me across firing ranges and sparring mats and library tables for years are holding mine with something that is the exact opposite of glaring.
And god, the dissonance—
The young adult I remember, the one who matched my daggers with daggers of his own, whose entire face was a weapon calibrated for competition—he’s gone.
In his place is a man who has lived a decade without me and carries the evidence of it in every line that the years have carved and every scar that the job has added and the silver thread that I notice, for the first time, hiding at his left temple beneath the platinum dye.
He’s fighting the same war I am. The grey. The time. The body’s slow insistence on recording every year we’ve survived.
He really has aged like fine wine. And that’s a thought I’ll be burying in concrete at the earliest opportunity.
“Hazel.”
My name in his mouth. Soft. The Alpha voice—the real one, the dangerous one, the one that lives beneath every layer of posturing and bravado.
“I don’t know what the fuck was said.” The words come slowly, each one placed with the deliberate care of someone disarming a device they can’t afford to mishandle.
“I don’t know what you were told, or what story they gave you, or what version of events you built in the years after. But I didn’t betray you.”
His fingers tighten fractionally on my wrist. Not restraint. Emphasis.
“I didn’t want to fucking leave.”
The sentence cracks the room open.
Splits the carefully maintained distance between past and present, between the cadets we were and the officers we’ve become, between the narrative I’d constructed to survive his absence—he left, they all leave, he chose something else, someone else, the way everyone eventually does—and the alternative that I’d never allowed myself to consider.
That he didn’t choose to go.
That Maggie’s money and the academy’s politics and the system’s institutional machinations made the choice for both of us.
That two people who were building something in the spaces between competition and combat had it dismantled by forces neither of them could fight.
We share a look.
And the silence between us is louder than any argument we’ve ever had.
I tug my wrist free.
Gently. Without the violence that our history would typically demand. Just a quiet withdrawal, my fingers sliding from his grip with the careful precision of someone removing themselves from something they’re not ready to hold.
I turn away.
“I know.”
That’s all I give him.
Two words. Spoken to the bathroom door. Delivered without looking back, without softening, without the emotional elaboration that the moment probably deserves and that I categorically cannot afford.
I know you didn’t want to leave.
I’ve always known.
That’s what made it worse.
The bathroom door closes between us.
And I press my back against its surface, feeling the wood solid and cool through Oakley’s borrowed flannel, and I stare at the floor.
The shower still sits in the corner where it witnessed my breakdown hours ago, the tiles still carrying the faint dampness of water and towel and muffled screaming.
The medicine cabinet is closed. The mirror reflects nothing because I’m below its line of sight, sitting against a door in a bathroom in a town that isn’t mine, wearing a shirt that isn’t mine, carrying a conversation in my chest that shouldn’t be mine but is.
I close my eyes.
Take a breath.
Then another.
Slow. Measured. The kind of controlled respiration that I use to tame my heart rate after tactical exercises, after confrontations, after the specific cardiac event that occurs when Roman Kade says my name in that voice and means it.
I know the truth.
I’ve carried it for a decade, tucked into the same locked compartment where I keep every other thing I’m too stubborn to process and too honest to forget.
But the truth doesn’t change what took place.
Doesn’t rewrite history. Doesn’t undo the morning I packed a box and walked out of an academy that had been my whole world.
Doesn’t erase the three hundred miles that turned into three thousand, then into years, then into the specific, calcified distance that exists between two people who never said goodbye because goodbye would have required admitting there was something worth grieving.
Doesn’t remove the immense, suffocating, bone-deep loneliness of being alone once more. Of building a career on the foundation of “I don’t need anyone” and discovering, year by year, that the foundation holds the weight of the structure but can’t fill the rooms.
It doesn’t solve anything.
So why continue beating a dead horse?