Chapter 13 Hope Is A Luxury #2
Is his curiosity from last night? From seeing me drenched and unconscious, from sleeping beside a woman whose body shivered through terrors she wouldn’t narrate?
Or is he asking because he recognizes it—the way you recognize your own handwriting on someone else’s document, familiar and unsettling in equal measure?
“You mean the whole PTSD thing?” I ask, keeping my voice level, testing whether the clinical terminology will create enough distance to make the answer survivable.
He nods.
Slowly. Carefully. With the visible effort of a man choosing not to put words in his own mouth, not to assume or project or fill the gaps with his own experience. Just waiting. Giving me the space to answer or not.
Alaric asks questions like an investigator. Oakley asks like a medic. Roman asks like someone who already knows the answer and needs to hear it from you anyway.
I shrug.
“It happens every night.”
The admission is flatter than I intend—the emotional equivalent of a shrug translated into sound, the practiced nonchalance of a woman who has been downplaying her own suffering for so long that the downplaying has become her native register.
“To a lesser degree, usually. Panic attacks are regular. Nightmares, same. They’re just…there. Part of the operating system at this point. Like the insomnia. Like the four a.m. alarm that doesn’t need to be set because my body’s been trained to wake up before it goes off.”
I pause.
“The nosebleed phase—the passing out, the fever shit—that’s new. That’s only been happening recently. So.”
The so hangs in the air like a sentence that can’t find its period.
“It’s not a big—”
I stop.
Not because I’ve chosen to. Because his expression stops me. The look on his face—the stern, unflinching, ice-blue severity of a man who has heard me begin this particular sentence enough times to know exactly where it’s going and has decided, silently, absolutely, that it is not going there again.
He doesn’t say a word.
Doesn’t need to.
The look does the talking. It says: finish that sentence and see what happens.
I correct myself.
Quietly.
“It is a big deal,” I say, and the words feel strange in my mouth—foreign, like a phrase in a language I’m learning for the first time despite having all the vocabulary. “And I’m…scheduled for an appointment. By the end of the week. To see an Omega specialist. To check things out.”
He nods.
Slowly. The approval in the gesture is quiet but present—not the patronizing kind, not the good girl, you’re doing the right thing variety that would earn him a second karate chop to the forehead.
Just the acknowledgment of a man who heard a problem, asked about the plan, and is accepting the answer without trying to improve upon it.
“Is there anything that makes it better?”
I think about it.
Actually think, the way I’d thought when Oakley asked about kissing my cheek and when Alaric asked about talking with walls down—with the genuine, searching effort of someone excavating an answer from terrain they haven’t explored because exploring it felt like admitting the terrain existed.
“Uh.” The sound is inelegant, the verbal equivalent of rummaging through a drawer for something you’re not sure is there. “I’m not sure. Not really?”
A pause. My brain offers fragments.
“I mean…I probably need to invest in a humidifier or something. It gets stuffy in the apartment at night—the radiator runs like it’s trying to cook the place, and the windows don’t seal properly, so it’s this weird cycle of too hot and too cold.
I wake up in cold sweats regardless, so the air quality isn’t helping. ”
I pick at a thread on my sleeve—the charcoal henley, the one I’d put on this morning after a shower that was warm instead of punitive, after a night that ended in an apartment that smelled like three Alphas and scrambled eggs instead of mildew and isolation.
“That, or maybe my sheets. The ones that came with the apartment are thin as paper and they hold moisture like a sponge when the sweats hit. I’ll figure it out.”
I look at him.
“Why?”
He doesn’t answer.
The silence sits between us with the specific weight of a man who has asked a question, received an answer, and is now processing the information through whatever internal system Roman Kade uses to convert data into action.
His jaw works—the subtle, rhythmic motion of a man clenching and releasing, the physical manifestation of thoughts being compressed into something too dense for words.
I pout.
The expression is involuntary—the same unguarded facial response that had surfaced in the kitchen when Alaric asked if we could talk. The pout of a woman who is accustomed to being in possession of all relevant information and does not appreciate encountering gaps in the briefing.
“You were never this intrigued with my life when we were young, jeez.”
The words carry more truth than I intend.
At the academy, Roman’s interest in me had been exclusively competitive—scores, rankings, the tactical one-upmanship that defined every interaction from morning drills to midnight study sessions.
He’d known my capabilities. My weaknesses on the obstacle course.
The way I held a firearm and the micro-adjustment I made to my stance that he’d copied without admitting it.
But the personal inventory—the sleeping patterns, the health concerns, the question of what makes the nightmares better—that was territory he’d never entered.
Or territory he’d entered and I hadn’t noticed.
Or territory he’d wanted to enter and Maggie Tots had built a wall across the threshold.
Or territory he’s entering now because the woman he competed against at twenty is falling apart at thirty-two and the competition doesn’t matter anymore when the competitor is bleeding.
I don’t wait for his answer.
I open the door.
The October air hits my face with the bracing clarity of a Montana morning that doesn’t care about emotional complications.
Cold, clean, carrying the distant scent of horse and the closer scent of smoke residue from the station’s damaged wall.
I swing my legs out, my boots connecting with the gravel, and the physical act of exiting the vehicle feels like a transition—from the warm, pine-scented cocoon of Roman’s proximity to the cold, public reality of a chief who has a department to manage and an arson to investigate and a body that may or may not be systematically failing.
“Make sure you check in once you finish whatever errands you have to do, Officer Kade,” I say over my shoulder, deploying his title with the deliberate formality of a woman reestablishing professional distance because the personal distance has been compromised beyond regulation and someone needs to reinstall the perimeter.
He corrects me instantly.
“Commander.”
The word carries the competitive edge that has defined every interaction we’ve had since the first morning of cadet school—the reflexive insistence on rank, on position, on the hierarchical specificity that Alpha males treat as the verbal equivalent of territorial marking.
I smirk.
Over my shoulder. Just the corner of my mouth lifting, the micro-expression that I know he can read from twenty feet away because he’s been studying my face since we were twenty and has catalogued every variation of every expression I’ve ever produced.
“Well, it’s Chief if you need a reminder.”
I brush him off with my hand—a casual, dismissive wave aimed backward without looking, the gestural equivalent of you’re dismissed delivered with the confidence of a woman who outranks him in this jurisdiction and enjoys the fact more than professional decorum allows.
Then I walk.
Toward the side entrance of the station, the one that leads through the administrative corridor rather than the bullpen—a route I’d mapped on my first day for exactly this kind of situation, where arriving without fanfare is preferable to arriving with an audience.
My boots crunch on gravel. My posture straightens with each step, the physical transformation that occurs when Officer Hazel Martinez replaces the woman who ate three plates of eggs and asked for hugs and let a man tuck her hair behind her ear.
I feel his eyes.
On my back. On the line of my shoulders beneath the charcoal henley.
On the icy blue hair that I’d pulled into a low bun at the apartment—not the tight regulation compliance of my professional standard, but something looser, softer, because the elastic I’d found in the bathroom drawer was the wrong type and I’d been running late and three Alphas had been watching me from various positions in a kitchen that smelled like coffee and the collective musk of men who had not left my side for twelve hours.
His gaze follows me like a scope.
Precise. Unbroken. The particular, weighted attention of a man who is watching a woman walk away and cataloguing every detail of the departure the way he’d catalogue a crime scene—thoroughly, obsessively, with the understanding that something important is being recorded and he can’t afford to miss the evidence.
What’s running through your head, Roman Kade?
What calculation is happening behind those ice-blue eyes while you watch me cross a parking lot in a town neither of us chose?
Are you thinking about the errand—the one you won’t name, the one that made you go silent when I asked, the one that has something to do with the information I gave you about humidifiers and sheets and cold sweats?
Are you thinking about last night—about catching me when I tilted, about lying shirtless in a bed that barely fits one person while a woman you haven’t touched in a decade curled against your chest like her body remembered what her brain had archived?
Are you thinking about the alley?
About the word you used—rape—the one that detonated in my kitchen and sent you through a door so hard the hinges shook?