Chapter 28
One More Round
~ROMAN~
The moment my arm is around her waist, I pull the trigger.
The sound is a detonation.
Not the muted, range-filtered report of a weapon discharged through ear protection in a controlled environment.
The raw, concussive, full-frequency blast of a firearm discharged in an enclosed space where the acoustics are designed to amplify music and have just amplified something that is not music.
The sound punches through the bass line like a fist through paper—shredding the rhythm, obliterating the beat, replacing the dance floor’s sonic architecture with the singular, unmistakable frequency that every human being on the planet recognizes at a biological level.
Gunshot.
The round travels.
Twenty meters. The distance I’ve been closing for the last forty-five seconds—moving through the crowd with the precise, angle-calculating, sightline-maintaining focus of a man who has trained for this exact scenario approximately six hundred times and never once imagined it would involve a dance floor and neon lighting and the woman he loves standing in the crosshairs wearing a black cocktail dress.
The bullet hits the target.
His arm. The right arm. The one holding the weapon.
The specific, calculated point of impact that disables the threat without killing the intelligence asset, because this man has information and dead men don’t talk and I need every word that his shattered nerve endings will eventually allow him to produce.
He cries out.
The sound is guttural. Animal. The involuntary vocalization of a body that has just received a .
45 caliber round through the forearm and is communicating the fact through every available channel.
His hand opens—the grip on his weapon dissolving as the damaged muscles and severed tendons lose their ability to maintain the tension required to hold a firearm.
The gun falls. Clatters against the dance floor with the small, metallic sound of an object that was pointed at my Omega thirty seconds ago and is now a piece of evidence.
He drops.
To the ground. To his knees first, then sideways, the pain overriding whatever training he has and reducing him to the basic, bilateral symmetry of a man who has been shot and whose body’s only priority is the wound.
Screams.
The crowd detonates into chaos.
Not gradually—instantaneously. The specific, mass-psychology, fight-or-flight cascade that a gunshot triggers in a confined space full of civilians.
Bodies dropping to the floor. Bodies running for exits.
Bodies crashing into each other in the desperate, uncoordinated stampede of people whose lizard brains have seized control of their motor functions and are issuing a single, unanimous instruction: get out.
Sirens.
From outside. The wailing, approaching, overlapping frequencies of multiple emergency vehicles that were already positioned within a two-block radius because I put them there four hours ago.
The sirens cutting through the screams and the residual bass line with the specific, authoritative frequency that tells civilians help is here and tells criminals it’s over.
The doors burst.
SWAT.
The entry team floods the venue with the coordinated, rehearsed, boots-on-ground precision of a tactical unit that has been briefed on the floor plan and the target and the specific, non-negotiable priority of protecting every civilian in the building.
Black tactical gear. Helmets. The raised weapons and the shouted commands and the controlled, systematic movement that transforms a bar into an operational theater in the span of seconds.
Men in black rush the downed target.
Three of them. Converging on the man who is bleeding on the dance floor with his ruined arm cradled against his chest and his weapon three feet away and his eyes—when they find mine through the chaos—carrying the specific, devastated fury of a man who has just realized that the ambush he planned was the ambush he walked into.
They secure him.
Hands behind his back—the intact hand and the shattered one, the cuffs producing the metallic click that is, in the hierarchy of sounds that an officer hears in a career, the most satisfying.
The music is still booming.
Nobody thought to kill the sound system, or maybe nobody can reach it through the chaos, and the bass line is still pumping its rhythm into a room that has been emptied of dancers and filled with SWAT officers and the strobing neon is painting everything—the tactical gear, the blood on the floor, the scattered glasses and abandoned shoes—in shifting colors that make the scene look like the world’s worst music video.
But the only thing I’m looking at is her.
My arm is around her waist.
Where I put it the moment before I fired.
The instinct that overrode every tactical protocol—get to her first, then shoot.
My left arm securing her body against mine, my right hand extending the weapon past her, the angle of fire calculated to travel over her shoulder without proximity to her face or her ears, the trajectory passing through the gap in the crowd that I’d been tracking for forty-five seconds as I closed the distance.
She’s looking up at me.
And she’s giggling.
Giggling.
My clearly drunk Omega—five shots of tequila deep, flushed, bright-eyed, smelling like lavender and warm vanilla and agave and the specific, euphoric pheromonal signature of a woman who is intoxicated and happy and has just watched her Alpha shoot a man across a dance floor and finds this entertaining—is giggling in my arm with the delighted, sparkling energy of a woman who has never been more attracted to anyone in her entire life.
She spins.
In my arm. The motion fluid despite the tequila—rotating in the circle of my grip until she’s facing me, her body pressing against my chest, her arms finding my neck and hooking around it with the possessive, clinging certainty of a woman who has located her Alpha and does not intend to release him.
“Now look who the cat dragged i—”
I kiss her.
Before the sentence completes. Before the taunt lands.
Before she can finish being clever because I am not in a state where cleverness is something I can process—I am in a state where the woman I love was standing in the crosshairs of a man I’ve been hunting for three weeks and she didn’t move and she didn’t drop and she stood there in a black dress smirking at the barrel like it was a dare and I have approximately ten thousand emotions to express and exactly one method of expressing them.
The kiss is not gentle.
It is hungry and angry and desperate and every other adjective that applies to a man who has just discharged a weapon in defense of the woman whose mouth is on his and whose body is alive against his chest and whose heart he can feel beating through the fabric of her dress against the tactical vest he’s wearing beneath his jacket.
She kisses me back.
With equal hunger. Equal intensity. The specific, unrestrained, five-shots-of-tequila-enhanced kissing of a woman who has no inhibitions left and is directing all of the adrenaline and the defiance and the joy that she was feeling on the dance floor into the contact between our mouths.
Her fingers dig into the back of my neck.
Her body arches against mine. She makes a sound against my lips that is half moan and half laugh and entirely Hazel.
I forgot.
I forgot how needy my girl is when she’s drunk.
At the academy. The nights when we’d argue ourselves into a bar and drink ourselves past the argument and she’d transform from competitive and combative to this—this warm, demanding, hungry version of herself that kissed like she’d die if she stopped and touched like my body was the only solid thing in a spinning world.
She hasn’t changed.
Still needy. Still hungry. Still the woman who uses intoxication the way other people use darkness—as permission to want things she won’t let herself want when the lights are on.
I force the kiss to break.
It takes effort. Physical effort. The effort of a man pulling his mouth from the mouth of a woman who is actively trying to prevent the separation with the specific, focused determination that drunk Hazel applies to everything she decides she wants.
I lower my gun.
The weapon that I haven’t holstered because my left arm hasn’t released her waist and my priorities have been, in order: secure Hazel, kiss Hazel, deal with the rest of the universe at a time to be determined.
“You’re in so much fucking trouble.”
My voice comes out rough. Wrecked. Carrying the vocal damage of a man who has spent the last twelve hours on phone calls and operational briefings and has now added “kissing aggressively on a dance floor” to the list of demands on his larynx.
She grins.
From ear to ear.
The full, devastating, completely-unrepentant grin of a woman who has been told she’s in trouble and considers the information delightful.
“Why?” she says, her voice carrying the innocent, tequila-bright cadence of a woman who knows exactly why and is performing ignorance for the specific purpose of driving me insane. “I was simply dancing.”
I’m trying not to let my eye twitch.
In agitation. The specific, involuntary muscular tic that my left eye produces when I am experiencing a level of frustration that my composure cannot fully absorb.
It’s a tell. She knows it’s a tell. She has known it’s a tell since we were twenty years old and she first discovered that she could make it happen by scoring one point higher than me on a tactical assessment.
I bet money it’s twitching right now.
And she’s only more excited by my obvious anger at her endangering herself, and she fucking knows it.
She has always known it. Has always understood that Roman Kade’s fury is the clearest evidence of Roman Kade’s love, and that making me angry is her preferred method of confirming that the love is still operational.
She grins wider.