Chapter 10 A Table Set For Four
A Table Set For Four
~HAZEL~
“Now why are you shirtless?”
Oakley’s voice filters through the bathroom door with the exasperated clarity of a man who has already been managing situations this morning and has just encountered one more.
I’m standing at the sink, toothbrush in hand, my reflection staring back at me through the medicine cabinet mirror with the hollow-eyed assessment of a woman cataloguing the damage.
The dark circles have deepened overnight—bruise-purple now, the kind that concealer can cover but can’t cure.
My skin has regained some of its olive warmth, the alarming pallor of last night retreating enough to suggest that whatever Oakley administered is doing its job, but the overall effect is still a woman running on insufficient fuel.
The icy blue hair is damp from the shower I’d taken—warm this time, therapeutic rather than punitive—falling around my face in waves that I haven’t yet wrestled into regulation compliance.
I’m wearing my own clothes for the first time in whatever disorienting hours have elapsed since my blackout.
A charcoal henley, long-sleeved, soft enough that the fabric doesn’t aggravate the tender skin where I’d scratched during last night’s episode.
Dark joggers. No shoes, because this is my apartment and the only territory I’m claiming this morning is the twelve inches between my bare feet and the bathroom tile.
Oakley’s flannel is folded on the counter behind me.
I’ll return it. After it’s laundered. After his scent has been washed out of the fabric so I can hand it back without carrying the memory of how it smelled when I woke up in it—candied blood orange and cinnamon bark, warm as a fireplace, safe in a way that clothing has no business being.
But the thing that’s pulling me out of my own head and toward the closed door is not the bickering.
It’s the smell.
Eggs. Butter sizzling in a pan. The deep, smoky aroma of bacon rendering its fat against a heated surface.
Toast—actual toast, the kind that comes from bread placed in a functioning toaster rather than the sad, room-temperature variety that passes for breakfast at gas stations.
And beneath it all, threading through the food scents like a bass note beneath a melody—coffee.
Fresh. Rich. The unmistakable fragrance of beans that were ground recently enough to still carry their oils.
Someone is cooking in my kitchen.
Someone went grocery shopping.
Someone—multiple someones, based on the voices—acquired food, transported it to my apartment, and is currently preparing a meal in a kitchen that has not produced anything more complex than black coffee and microwaved regret since the day I moved in.
The realization hits with a disorientation that has nothing to do with residual fever and everything to do with the fact that Hazel Martinez’s apartment does not contain food.
This is not an oversight. It’s a system.
My fridge holds a half-empty bottle of water, three packets of soy sauce from a takeout order I barely remember, and a container of creamer that expired six days ago.
The pantry—if you can call a single shelf above the microwave a pantry—contains coffee filters, a box of protein bars I bought during my first week and have been rationing like emergency rations ever since, and a bag of sugar that exists exclusively to service the coffee maker.
Not because I wouldn’t love to cook.
The thought surfaces with the quiet, bruised quality of something I don’t allow myself to examine often.
The truth is that somewhere beneath the badge and the regulation bun and the eleven years of eighteen-hour shifts, there exists a version of Hazel Martinez who fantasizes about kitchens.
Not the institutional kind with industrial appliances and biohazard waste bins.
Real ones. The kind with herb gardens on the windowsill and cast-iron skillets seasoned by decades of use and the particular warmth that fills a house when someone has spent hours creating something from scratch for the sole purpose of sharing it with people they love.
Hours in the kitchen. A counter dusted with flour. Music playing from a speaker someone left on the shelf. The slow, meditative process of turning raw ingredients into something that says “I made this for you” without requiring the words.
Romanticized bullshit, Martinez. You know better.
Because the reality is that I’m always working.
Always at the station, always on a case, always running operational hours that begin before the sun rises and don’t conclude until the moon has given up waiting for me to notice it.
By the time I get home—if I get home, if the shift doesn’t bleed into another shift that bleeds into a third—it’s three in the morning, and the kitchen is dark, and the fridge is empty, and the fantasy of slow-cooked meals shared with loved ones is about as realistic as the fantasy of being loved at all.
No one has time for that shit.
Especially not you.
Roman’s voice answers Oakley’s question through the door, pulling me back from the self-pity spiral I refuse to call a self-pity spiral.
“It was hot as fuck,” he says, and his tone carries the defensive edge of a man who has been caught in a situation that requires justification and resents the need for it.
“And Haze was shivering like a fucking leaf. The heater in this dump wasn’t going to crank up fast enough before she cracked a tooth with the clattering. So I figured body heat could help.”
Haze.
He called me Haze.
The nickname he used at the academy. The one that only ever appeared during moments when the rivalry dimmed enough for something else to surface—late nights in the library, the aftermath of sparring sessions that ended with us breathing the same air, the single time he’d pressed his mouth to my temple and whispered it against my skin before catching himself and pulling away like the contact had burned him.
He used it like it was still his to use.
File that. Deal with it never.
Oakley sighs.
“I had changed her clothes earlier,” he says, and the information lands against my memory like a key turning a lock—right, the flannel, Oakley changed me out of the wet clothes, that’s why I woke up in his shirt—“but maybe I should have given her a warm sponge bath first if it would have made the fever more manageable.”
Roman growls.
An actual, vocalized, Alpha-register growl that I feel through the bathroom door’s thin wood like a vibration in a tuning fork.
The sound is territorial in a way that his professional demeanor would normally filter out—raw, instinctive, the pheromone-laced warning of a man whose hindbrain has just processed the image of another Alpha touching an Omega he has, apparently, never stopped considering his.
“You changed her?”
Oakley groans.
“If you’re going to have some overprotective fit shit, go outside.
I don’t have time for your tantrums without some fucking coffee.
” A pause. The sound of a spatula hitting a pan with pointed authority.
“Also, need Alaric present for this, or there’s going to be damaged furniture like the last time we fought and you lost.”
“I didn’t fucking lose—”
The front door creaks open.
“You totally lost and had a broken arm, so let’s not fight at eight in the morning when I haven’t had a wink of sleep, thanks.”
Alaric.
His voice enters the apartment with the exhausted authority of a man who has been running on caffeine fumes and investigative adrenaline since the small hours and has arrived at the exact point where diplomatic patience and basic motor function are competing for the same dwindling fuel reserves.
“Please tell me there’s coffee.”
“Fresh pot’s ready,” Oakley confirms, “but you’re not going to fall asleep if you drink it.”
Alaric groans—the deep, resonant, world-weary groan of a man who has been offered an imperfect solution and is going to take it anyway because perfection died somewhere around four a.m.
“Honestly? I don’t fucking care. I need something other than the station’s shit. Their coffee tastes like they brew it in a rain gutter.”
Oakley chuckles. “All stations have shitty coffee. It’s in the municipal handbook. But I’ll make you one. How do you take it?”
“Black. Bitter. Matching my current disposition.”
“So your default, then.”
“Watch it, Torres.”
Oakley’s laugh is warm enough to seep through the bathroom door like sunlight through a crack, and despite every defense mechanism I maintain, something in my chest responds to it. Not the Omega hindbrain. Not the biological wiring. Something more mundane and more dangerous.
Comfort.
The sound of people who care about each other occupying the same space, bickering the way families bicker—with volume but without venom, the verbal equivalent of elbows jostling at a table that’s set for everyone.
“How is she?”
Alaric’s voice drops to something quieter. Sincere. The investigator receding behind the man, asking a question that no professional mandate requires and no operational protocol demands.
“She’s in the shower,” Roman answers, and the territorial edge has softened, his tone modulating into something that wouldn’t qualify as gentle from most people but from Roman Kade constitutes an emotional revolution.
“Fever broke a few hours ago. Color’s better.
She karate-chopped me in the face, so her motor skills are intact. ”
He’s reporting my condition like a field assessment.
And the karate chop is listed under “positive indicators.”
These men are unhinged.
I decide I’ve spent enough time eavesdropping through a bathroom door in my own apartment.
I open it.