Chapter 17 The Countdown #3
The smoked oud, which I associate with his deeper emotional states.
The note that emerges when the competition recedes and the man surfaces.
The scent that had been present in the training annex the night we almost kissed, that had been present in the hallway after graduation when he’d caught my arm and opened his mouth and Maggie had appeared and the moment had died.
He walks to the bed.
Neither of us speaks.
The silence is different from every silence we’ve shared before—not competitive, not charged with the mutual antagonism that fueled our academy dynamic, not loaded with the things we’re both thinking and neither will say.
This silence is exhausted. Honest. The silence of two people who have been through too much in too short a time to maintain the pretenses that normally govern their interactions.
He reaches out.
His hand finds my face.
Fingers sliding through the icy blue strands that have fallen across my forehead—matted with dust from the blast, tangled from hours of unconscious rest against a hospital pillow.
He moves them. Gently. Tucking them behind my ear with the same gesture Alaric had used in the kitchen yesterday morning, but carrying an entirely different weight.
Alaric’s touch had been strategic. Caring.
The gesture of a man who sees what needs adjusting and adjusts it.
Roman’s touch is hungry.
Not the aggressive hunger of an Alpha claiming territory.
The quiet, starving hunger of a man who has not allowed himself to touch this woman in over a decade and whose hands are trembling with the effort of being gentle when every impulse in his body wants to pull her against his chest and not let go until the world stops trying to take her from him.
I lift my eyes to his.
And what I see there—behind the red rims, behind the bruised jaw, behind the wrecked hair and the torn jacket and the facade of annoyance that he wears like a uniform—is everything he’s been hiding.
Worry.
Real, uncurated, laid-bare worry of the kind that Roman Kade has never shown me during any of the years we’ve known each other.
Not during the academy, when his concern manifested as competition—if I push her harder, she’ll be better, and if she’s better, she’s safer.
Not during graduation, when his concern manifested as a caught arm and an unfinished sentence.
Not even in the parking lot, when his concern manifested as an arm around my waist and a body positioned between me and a blast wave.
This is the worry stripped of all its costumes.
Raw. Visible. Sitting in his ice-blue eyes like a confession he can’t retract.
“Are you okay?”
The question is quiet.
Impossibly quiet, from a man whose default volume is a level that inspires noise complaints.
Two words that cost him something I can see in the tension of his jaw, in the way his fingers have stilled against my temple, in the way his breathing has shallowed as if the answer to this question will determine whether he continues inhaling.
I bite my lip.
The gesture that keeps surfacing in his presence—the nervous, un-Hazel-like habit that my body produces when the defenses have been lowered past the point where they can prevent honesty.
“No,” I whisper.
No deflection. No competitive counter. No I’m fine or it’s not a big deal or any of the other phrases I’ve been using as load-bearing walls in a structure that Dr. Winters just condemned.
Just no.
Why lie about it when I truly feel like shit?
I’m sitting in a hospital bed with six months tattooed on my remaining time and a car bomb in my recent memory and a man who almost died protecting me standing at my bedside looking like the world ended and he survived it out of spite. Why would I lie?
What is the lie protecting at this point? What fortress is left to defend?
He nods.
Slowly. The acknowledgment of a man who asked a question he already knew the answer to and needed to hear it confirmed—not for information but for the permission that honest answers provide. The permission to respond honestly in return.
His hand moves from my temple to my cheek.
The palm settles against the curve of it—warm, rough, calloused from years of firearms and tactical equipment and the specific physical demands of a career spent gripping things that were designed to be held by hands exactly like his.
His thumb rests at the crest of my cheekbone, just below the shadow of my lower lashes.
I close my eyes.
And I allow myself to feel it.
Not the analytical cataloguing of contact that my officer’s brain performs by default—pressure, temperature, location, duration, threat assessment: none.
The actual feeling. The warmth of his skin against mine.
The way his palm cradles my face like it was built for this exact purpose, the ergonomic precision of two surfaces that have been separated for a decade and still fit.
The way his scent softens at this distance.
The frozen pine losing its defensive edge, the smoked oud coming forward, the peppermint bark settling into something that doesn’t bite but soothes.
Close enough that the scent becomes a taste—a flavor in the back of my throat, dark and warm and carrying the specific, devastating familiarity of something I’d forgotten I craved.
I open my eyes.
He’s closer.
Inches. The distance between his face and mine has collapsed while my eyes were closed, his body moving with the gravitational certainty of a man who is done maintaining distance and is operating on the only truth his biology has ever reliably provided.
We share a look.
The kind that contains an entire relationship in its frame.
Every tied score and midnight argument and stolen glance across a firing range.
Every library session that lasted too long because neither of us could leave without the other leaving first. Every night that the competition dissolved into something that smelled like pine and tasted like hunger and left both of us pretending the next morning that it hadn’t happened.
Every year of distance that didn’t diminish a single thing.
His eyes lower.
To my lips.
The movement is visible—a deliberate, conscious shift of focus from my eyes to my mouth, the universal telegraph of intent that his body is broadcasting without his pride’s permission.
“You already know I’m not good at the romantic shit,” he says.
His voice comes out rough. Frayed. The vocal equivalent of the torn jacket—damaged by the blast and the sleeplessness and the hours of screaming through a phone and the specific, interior violence of watching a car explode fifteen yards from the woman he loves.
He huffs.
The sound is so characteristically Roman—the frustrated exhale of a man who considers emotional articulation a design flaw in the human operating system—that something in my chest cracks.
Not breaks. Cracks. The way a wall cracks when the pressure on one side becomes too great for the structure to hold, the first fissure in a surface that has been bearing weight it was never designed to support.
His thumb strokes my cheek.
One slow, devastating pass of callused skin against the soft tissue beneath my eye.
“So…can I kiss you instead?”
He’s asking.
He’s asking.
Roman Kade—who takes, who competes, who claims space and rank and the last word in every argument—is asking permission to put his mouth on mine.
Because Oakley asked before he kissed my cheek. And Alaric asked before he hugged me. And somewhere between the alley and the hospital bed, these three men decided that asking is the standard and anything less is unacceptable.
They’re rewriting the rules.
One question at a time.
I huff.
The sound mirrors his—the same frustrated, incredulous exhale, the same inability to articulate what’s happening in the space between two people who have spent a decade expressing affection through mutual antagonism.
But the corner of my lip lifts. Just slightly.
The ghost of a smirk that my face produces when it’s feeling something it doesn’t have the vocabulary for and defaults to the expression that has always lived closest to the truth.
“Of course you can, stupi—”
He doesn’t let me finish.
His mouth meets mine before the insult completes, swallowing the final syllable with a kiss that is not gentle and is not tentative and is not the careful, permission-seeking contact of a man testing the waters.
It’s firm.
Both of his hands are on my face now—the second having found my other cheek during the fraction of a second between my consent and his action, framing my jaw with a grip that communicates everything his words couldn’t.
His lips press against mine with the absolute, committed pressure of a man who has been wanting to do this for years and has decided that the time for hesitation expired approximately when a car bomb nearly killed the person he was hesitating over.
And something inside me—
Something ancient. Something that has been locked in a room since the academy, kept behind a door marked DO NOT OPEN BECAUSE YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE WHAT’S INSIDE—
Detonates.
Not the violence of the car bomb. Not the destructive, shrapnel-throwing force of an explosion designed to end things.
The opposite. The force of something expanding—rushing outward through every corridor I’d sealed, every room I’d locked, every chamber of my chest that I’d emptied and boarded up and declared permanently uninhabitable.
I kiss him back.
My hand finds his wrist—the one attached to the hand on my right cheek—and grips it.
Not pulling him away. Holding him there.
Anchoring the contact with the same desperation that his arms had shown during the blast—don’t let go, don’t you dare let go—my fingers digging into the skin above the Norse runes as if releasing his wrist would allow the moment to escape.
And the kiss ignites.