Chapter 4
The Ghost Of Graduation Past
~HAZEL~
Roman Kade.
My arc nemesis.
If a person gets one true villain in their lifetime—one real, breathing, infuriatingly persistent antagonist who exists for the sole purpose of making your blood pressure a medical event—then this is him.
Standing in the flesh in my already sadistic excuse for a life, six-foot-four of platinum-blonde arrogance and frozen-pine pheromones, staring at me across a gravel parking lot like the last decade was a held breath and he’s been waiting to exhale.
Roman. Fucking. Kade.
I’ve known this man since the first morning of police kadet school.
Orientation day. Five a.m. roll call in a gymnasium that smelled like bleach and broken ambitions, sixty-two cadets lined up in alphabetical order, every one of them vibrating with the desperate energy of people who have something to prove.
I’d been assigned the spot between a Beta named Kowalski who dropped out by week three and an Alpha named Kade whose ice-blue eyes had locked onto mine during the commanding officer’s welcome speech and hadn’t unlocked since.
Rivals.
From the very first second.
Not the casual, collegiate kind of rivalry where you push each other to improve and shake hands at the finish line.
The visceral, marrow-deep, I will beat you or die trying kind that makes instructors either salivate at the results or file incident reports depending on the day.
We chased perfection in every metric the academy measured—marksmanship, tactical simulations, academic scores, physical endurance, leadership evaluations—and we chased it with the singular, unhinged devotion of two people who had built their entire identities on being the best and suddenly discovered that “best” was a title neither could claim without the other’s shadow contaminating it.
The ties were almost diabolical.
Identical scores on firearms qualifications.
Identical times on the obstacle course, down to the hundredth of a second, twice in the same week.
Identical rankings on written exams that the instructors started administering in separate rooms because they were convinced we were cheating—only to discover that no, Kade and Martinez were simply two obsessive, sleep-deprived lunatics who happened to study the same material with the same intensity and arrive at the same conclusions independently.
And fuck, did they hate us for it.
The trainers, the teachers, the commanding officers who ran the program—every single one of them looked at us with the specific brand of exhausted exasperation reserved for problems they couldn’t solve by throwing more discipline at.
We wouldn’t stop competing. Couldn’t. The rivalry had taken on a life of its own, a beast that fed on every tied score and mutual glare and shared podium until it was bigger than both of us, running our schedules, dictating our choices, consuming every waking hour with the question: What is Kade doing right now, and how do I do it better?
How we managed to graduate without one of us murdering the other is a mystery that deserves its own investigation.
Some combination of institutional oversight and mutual grudging respect for each other’s survival instincts, probably.
The kind of truce that exists between predators who share the same territory—not peace, exactly, but the pragmatic understanding that killing the competition wastes energy better spent on the hunt.
And then we’d separated.
I went to the city. He went…somewhere else.
Some department in some town on the complete opposite end of the jurisdictional map, as if the universe—or more accurately, the academy’s placement committee—had looked at the two of us and decided that the country’s law enforcement infrastructure could not structurally withstand Kade and Martinez in the same zip code.
How long ago was that?
I try to calculate, and the math blurs in a way that shouldn’t bother me but does.
Five years? Maybe seven. Could be ten, for all I care.
Time has a way of becoming irrelevant when you’re building a career that consumes every scrap of energy you possess, when the days stack into months stack into years and the only milestones that register are promotions and closed cases and the slowly escalating rank on your uniform.
We were young.
Foolish.
Driven to prove to the academy, to the system, to the entire fucking world that we could be part of the force.
Be the representation that the profession needed.
Show every Alpha who sneered at an Omega cadet and every board member who questioned whether competition between designations was “productive” that merit doesn’t give a shit about biology.
And then reality comes whipping you in the face, and hopefully you’re dodging the bullet aimed at your head rather than catching it between the eyes.
My gaze drags over him with the detached professionalism of an officer assessing a scene and the thoroughly unprofessional awareness of a woman who remembers exactly what this man looked like at twenty-two.
He’s matured.
Nicely.
To my profound, personal dislike.
The academy version of Roman Kade had been imposing in the way of young Alphas who haven’t fully grown into their frames—broad but unfinished, powerful but raw, the blueprint of dominance without the architecture to support it.
That version is gone. Replaced by a man whose body has been refined by a decade of tactical training, field work, and what I suspect is an unhealthy relationship with whatever gym facility his station provides.
The breadth of his shoulders is no longer a promise—it’s a statement, dense with the kind of muscle that comes from operational necessity rather than aesthetic pursuit.
His torso tapers into a waist that his dark tactical gear fits like a second skin, the utility belt and retention holster sitting on hips that—
Don’t.
The platinum-blonde hair is brighter than I remember, or maybe it’s just the October sun catching the bleach at angles that the academy’s fluorescent lighting never managed.
The jawline is sharper. The ice-blue eyes are colder.
The tattoo sleeve I’d only seen in fragments during physical training is fully visible where his sleeves are rolled, Norse runes and wolf iconography wrapping his forearm with a density that speaks of years of additions, each design a chapter in a story I was never invited to read.
He looks like someone took the most competitive, infuriating, relentless man I’ve ever met and handed him to a sculptor who specializes in making women question their life choices.
Still a fucking asshole, though. Bet that hasn’t changed.
But packed in all the right departments.
Bet his cock is still as thick as—
I roll my eyes at my own thoughts so hard it’s a miracle they don’t complete a full rotation.
Absolutely not, Martinez. We are not revisiting that particular file. That file is sealed, redacted, and buried in a vault that doesn’t have a key.
Because that was the other thing about Roman Kade.
The rivalry had never been clean.
It couldn’t be. Not when every tied score meant standing shoulder to shoulder at the podium, close enough that his frozen-pine scent infiltrated every inhale.
Not when every sparring match ended with us pinned against the mat, breathing hard, his ice-blue eyes inches from mine with an intensity that had nothing to do with combat technique.
Not when every late-night study session in the academy library devolved into arguments that generated enough heat to fog the windows, our scents tangling in the air between us until the librarian evacuated the floor.
Enemies to lovers. The textbook definition.
Except we never reached the lovers part.
Because of Maggie Tots.
Margaret Thomson. Daughter of the Thomson banking empire, academy donor’s granddaughter, an Omega with a trust fund the size of a small nation’s GDP and a crush on Roman Kade that was approximately as subtle as a nuclear detonation.
She’d arrived at the academy dripping with wealth and entitlement, her presence on the roster less about career ambition and more about proximity to the Alpha she’d decided was hers.
And she’d had the money to get what she wanted.
Maggie Tots hadn’t just pursued Roman—she’d waged a campaign.
Fundraising galas where she positioned herself at his arm.
Departmental events where her family’s donations ensured preferential treatment.
And when my existence proved inconvenient—when the rivalry between Roman and me generated a tension that even Maggie’s inherited confidence couldn’t ignore—she’d turned that considerable fortune toward making my life a living hell.
Complaints filed about my conduct that mysteriously gained traction despite lack of evidence.
Training opportunities redirected to her preferred candidates.
Whisper campaigns about my designation, my background, my fitness for the program—all delivered through proxies and intermediaries with enough plausible deniability to survive institutional scrutiny.
She nearly cost me my position. Nearly ended my career before it started, all because a rich girl wanted a man and I had the audacity to exist in the same competitive orbit.
As if I wasn’t from a filthy rich family myself.
The irony was almost poetic. The Martinez name carried its own weight—old money, deep roots, the kind of generational wealth that opens doors before you knock.
But I hadn’t wanted those doors. Hadn’t wanted anything to do with the dark corners of my father’s empire, the underground channels that funded the lifestyle I’d been born into, the morally bankrupt machinery that turned dirty money into clean influence.