Chapter 9 #2
Trying to reconstruct the previous twelve hours through the fog of whatever happened to my memory.
The gaps are infuriating—I can feel the edges of events, like running my fingers along the rim of a hole, but the center is missing.
Maybe I had a one-night stand. Maybe I got wasted.
Alcohol would explain the memory loss, and if there’s one thing Roman Kade and I share beyond competitive fury and mutual inability to back down, it’s a dangerously competitive relationship with liquor.
Academy days. The drinking games that the instructors pretended not to know about.
Shots matched one-for-one because neither of us could stomach the other winning at anything, including intoxication.
And when the alcohol dissolved the line between “I hate your fucking guts” and “I’ll fuck your fucking guts”—
Yeah. That happened. More than once. In locations that the academy’s security cameras definitely covered and the administration definitely chose to ignore.
So technically, waking up in bed with Roman Kade has historical precedent.
That doesn’t make it acceptable.
“I didn’t hit your nose,” I say flatly, choosing practicality over memory reconstruction. “I hit your forehead.”
“My nose,” he says through his palm, ice-blue eyes glaring at me over his fingers with the specific wounded fury of a man whose vanity has been targeted, “connects to my fucking forehead. The vibration—the impact—Jesus, woman, I didn’t even do anything to you.”
I shrug.
“How would I know? I can’t remember shit.”
The admission is delivered with deliberate casualness, but something about voicing it—I can’t remember—triggers the fragments to rearrange. Not into a complete picture, but into enough of a sequence that the gaps start filling with context rather than conjecture.
The door. Alaric’s voice. The nosebleed.
The floor tilting sideways before—
Blackout.
Not alcohol. The suppressants. The fever.
I passed out in front of Alaric Venezuela and apparently woke up in bed with Roman Kade wearing Oakley Torres’s shirt.
This is fine. Everything about this is fine.
I sit up.
The world tilts.
Immediately, violently, with the nauseating lurch of a ship hitting a wave broadside.
The room swings to the right—the corkboard, the window, the coffee maker on the counter—and my body follows, my center of gravity shifting before my muscles can compensate, the whole precarious system of upright human existence collapsing sideways like a building with a compromised foundation.
An arm catches me.
Before I can stop it, before I can redirect or resist or produce any of the defensive responses that my body has spent a lifetime perfecting, Roman’s arm is around my waist. Not grabbing.
Not restraining. Just…there. Solid. Warm.
The forearm I’d been studying minutes ago—Norse runes, wolf iconography, the dense muscle of a man who maintains his body like a weapon—pressed against the fabric of a shirt that isn’t mine, preventing the fall with a precision that suggests he’d been ready for it.
He was already waiting to catch me.
Before I tilted. Before I fell. He was already positioned.
How long has he been lying here, awake, monitoring the tilt of my equilibrium while I slept?
I blink.
Several times, waiting for the vertigo to stabilize, for the room to remember where its walls belong. When my vision clears enough to process individual features rather than the blurred impression of a very large, very shirtless, very close man, I look back at Roman.
He’s not annoyed anymore.
The forehead-related outrage has evaporated entirely, replaced by something that makes my throat constrict.
His ice-blue eyes are locked onto mine with an intensity that has nothing to do with competition, nothing to do with the academy, nothing to do with the decade of distance that has separated our lives into parallel lines that were never supposed to intersect again.
He’s serious.
Completely, genuinely serious in a way that I have seen from Roman Kade exactly twice in our shared history—once during the final tactical exam, when the simulation placed a hostage at risk and his face had gone blank with the focus of a man who understood that the stakes were no longer academic.
And once in the hallway after graduation, when he’d caught my arm and opened his mouth to say something and Maggie Tots had appeared at the end of the corridor and his mouth had closed and the moment had died with the quiet, bloodless efficiency of something murdered in broad daylight.
“What’s wrong with you?”
The question is direct. Stripped of the verbal sparring and competitive deflection that has defined every interaction we’ve had since the parking lot. His voice carries the weight of a man who has decided, in this moment, that honesty is more important than history.
“Health-wise,” he adds, and the specification feels deliberate—a narrowing of scope that acknowledges there are other things wrong, many other things, an entire catalogue of things that are wrong between us and around us and inside us, but right now he is asking about my body because my body is the thing that nearly hit the floor.
I stare at him.
I want to argue. The impulse is so deeply embedded in our dynamic that it fires before I can suppress it—the reflex to counter, to deflect, to meet his directness with the sharp, competitive resistance that we’ve been trading since the first morning of cadet school.
It’s muscle memory. The conversational equivalent of a trained fighter’s defensive stance, adopted before the conscious mind even identifies the threat.
But things are different now.
Aren’t they.
We’re not cadets jockeying for a ranking. Not rivals measuring ourselves against each other’s achievements. Not twenty-two-year-olds who can afford to convert everything into a contest because youth provides enough margin for error that even the losses feel survivable.
I’m a thirty-two-year-old Omega whose body is failing. Whose career has been gutted. Whose assumed pack betrayed her and whose apartment is the size of a closet and whose medicine cabinet contains enough chemical warfare to qualify as a hazard. And none of that—none of it—is his business.
My life isn’t his business.
Hasn’t been for a decade.
And yet he’s here.
In my bed. His arm still warm against my waist. His scent—frozen pine, smoked oud, the peppermint bark and black tobacco that I can taste in the back of my throat—filling the apartment with the same territorial intensity that used to fill the academy library during our midnight arguments.
He’s here because he’s worried about me.
And I don’t know what to do with that.
“I don’t know,” I answer.
And I don’t look away.
The honesty costs me something. I can feel the payment extracted from somewhere behind my sternum—a withdrawal from reserves I don’t have the balance to cover, a vulnerability offered to a man who has historically been the person I reveal the least to because he’s the person whose opinion I care about the most.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
I don’t know what the suppressants are doing to my body.
I don’t know if the nosebleeds are going to become something worse, or if the fever was a one-time event, or if I’m slowly becoming a statistic in the same files that Alaric’s special unit processes when they find Omegas on bathroom floors.
I don’t know, and the not knowing is the thing that frightens me more than anything because Hazel Martinez has built her entire existence on knowing—on data, on evidence, on the strategic certainty that comes from never entering a room without having already mapped its exits.
We share a look.
And the intensity of it makes me forget how to breathe.
Not figuratively. Not the romantic-novel approximation where the heroine’s breath catches at the sight of the hero’s jawline.
My lungs actually stop cycling—the diaphragm pausing mid-motion, the autonomic system temporarily hijacked by whatever is happening in the space between his ice-blue eyes and my hazel-brown ones.
The look is a conversation conducted in a language that predates words, that lives in the primitive wiring between Alpha and Omega, that neither of us consented to speaking but both of us are fluent in.
He notices.
Because of course he does. Roman Kade has been reading my body since we were twenty, cataloguing every tell, every micro-expression, every involuntary scent shift the way he catalogs tactical data—compulsively, competitively, with the obsessive thoroughness of a man who refuses to be caught off-guard by the only person who’s ever consistently surprised him.
“Breathe, Hazel.”
The whisper is quiet.
So quiet that if the apartment were any larger, the words would dissolve before reaching me. But we’re close—too close, his arm still against my waist, my body still tilted into the support he’d provided—and the whisper lands against my skin like a physical thing.
Fuck.
His voice.
That specific register. The one that lives beneath the childish bickering and the competitive snarling and the default annoyance that he wears like a uniform.
The Alpha voice. Not the barking-orders version that he deploys in the field, not the commanding-a-room version that his rank requires.
The other one. The one that’s soft and deep simultaneously, the impossible contradiction of gentleness carried in a bass frequency that vibrates through my bones.
The one that could make me beg.
The one that has made me beg, in rooms I’ve locked the memory of, on nights when competition dissolved into something that neither of us could compete our way out of.
I breathe.