Chapter 18 Checkmate #2
Quiet enough that someone with less acute hearing might miss it. But I’m an Alpha with a pacing problem and six hours of sleepless adrenaline in my bloodstream, and my auditory processing is currently tuned to receive every sound this woman makes, including the ones she doesn’t intend me to hear.
“…just abandoning me?”
I frown.
The expression is deep. Structural. The kind of frown that doesn’t just engage the corrugator muscles but the entire infrastructure of a face that has just heard something it finds fundamentally offensive.
I stare at her.
Long enough that the silence becomes its own statement. Long enough that the monitoring equipment chirps through three full cardiac cycles. Long enough that my stare becomes a question in itself—did you seriously just say that to me—and the weight of it pulls her attention back from the window.
She looks at me.
“Why don’t you just…dump me?” she says, and the words are steadier this time but no less devastating. “I’m wasted goods, Roman. An old Omega, at that, if you haven’t forgotten. I’ve got an expiration date now, so why don’t you just…ditch me.”
Wasted goods.
Old Omega.
Expiration date.
She’s cataloguing herself in the language of the people who damaged her.
Pricing herself with the currency of a pack that treated her like inventory—use it, depreciate it, replace it when the newer model arrives.
She’s giving me exit ramps because that’s what she was trained to expect.
That when things get hard—when the Omega becomes inconvenient, expensive, medically complicated—the pack leaves.
Because that’s what her last pack taught her people do.
I huff.
The exhale is sharp. Loaded. Carrying approximately fifteen years of suppressed frustration about the way this world treats Omegas in general and this Omega in particular.
“We all have fucking expiration dates,” I say.
“Just because we don’t have a label stamped on our foreheads saying we’re dying tomorrow doesn’t mean shit.
Every single person in this building could walk outside and get hit by a truck.
Alaric could eat bad shrimp. Oakley could fall off a horse.
I could finally piss off someone with a better left hook than mine. ”
I move my hand.
And I flick her forehead.
A sharp, precise, index-finger-to-skull contact that produces the exact thwack I intended and the exact reaction I predicted.
“Ow!”
Her hand flies to the impact site, her eyes widening with the outraged disbelief of a hospitalized woman who has just been flicked by the man who kissed her three minutes ago.
“Don’t you ever say that stupid shit ever again.
” My voice drops. Not to the Alpha register that would make it a command—I don’t use that with her unless she’s in physical danger—but to the lower, more personal frequency that I reserve for things that are non-negotiable at the human level rather than the biological one.
“You’re not wasted goods. And you’re not a geriatric Omega. Are you ninety years old?”
She frowns.
The expression is beautiful.
Not because it’s pretty—though it is, because Hazel’s frown has always done something to me that I’ve never been able to explain and have stopped trying to—but because it’s indignant.
Annoyed. The frown of a woman who has been confronted with a question she finds stupid and whose pride won’t allow her to not answer it.
“No,” she says.
“Then I don’t want to hear shit.”
I sit on the edge of the bed.
The mattress adjusts under my weight, the hospital-grade surface protesting the addition of a six-foot-two Alpha who weighs more than the frame’s design specifications intended.
I don’t care. I need to be at her level for what I’m about to say because it’s not the kind of thing that gets delivered from above.
“You’re our Omega,” I say.
The words are simple.
The architecture behind them is not.
“It’s legally binding. It’s registered. It’s public record. If the world needs us to prove it, we most certainly can and will, but for now—”
I take her hand.
The one without the IV. Her fingers are cold.
The circulatory compromise that Dr. Winters probably documented in her chart manifesting as reduced peripheral temperature, the extremities losing heat because the heart is allocating resources to survival rather than comfort.
I hold them. Warm them. Let my body temperature do what her body temperature can’t.
“No more putting the world first.”
She opens her mouth.
“No.” I cut her off before the objection forms. “I know that face. That’s your but the cases face.
Your but the missing Omegas face. Your but someone needs to face.
And the answer is no. Not because the cases don’t matter—they do.
Not because the missing Omegas don’t deserve justice—they do.
But because the woman investigating those cases needs to be alive to solve them, and she can’t be alive if she’s running her body into the ground like it’s a department vehicle with unlimited mileage. ”
Her mouth closes.
The pout returns.
Good.
“You’re going to focus on your damn self,” I continue.
“You’re going to take the medication. Eat the meals.
Drink the water. Do whatever the hell Dr. Winters tells you to do, and when you inevitably decide you know better than your doctor because you’re Hazel and you always think you know better, Oakley is going to be there with his medic training and his disappointed face to remind you that compliance isn’t optional. ”
I squeeze her hand.
“We’re going to help you every step of the way.
And then—when you’re healthy and hormonally balanced and eating three meals a day like a human being instead of running on protein shakes and stolen donuts—you’re going to be a thriving Omega, with a thriving pack, and we’re going to clear your name from those bastards who are trying to run it through the mud for whatever vendetta they have against you. ”
I hold her gaze.
Let her see the conviction.
Not the anger—though the anger is there, simmering beneath the surface like lava under a crust that looks solid but isn’t. The conviction. The settled, immovable certainty of a man who has made a decision that nothing short of his own death will reverse.
“And then,” I say, “we’re going to say fuck this place and go somewhere else.”
She arches an eyebrow.
The expression is subtle—the micro-movement of a woman whose skepticism operates at the muscular level, the single raised brow that communicates I’m listening but I haven’t decided if you’re serious yet with more eloquence than most people achieve in a paragraph.
“We are?”
“Fuck yeah.”
I let the corner of my mouth lift. Just barely. The closest thing to a smile that my current emotional state can produce—an almost-smirk that I know she can read because she’s been reading my face since we were twenty.
“Remember when you said that if we didn’t get into the academy, we were going to Paris? Just go to Paris and do art shit?”
The reaction is immediate.
A snicker.
Not a laugh—not yet—but the involuntary, nasal precursor to one.
The sound that Hazel makes when something catches her off guard and her composure loses the race against her amusement.
Her hands fly to her mouth, the motion reflexive, the universal gesture of a woman trying to physically prevent the laughter that’s already building behind her palms.
It doesn’t work.
The snicker becomes a laugh.
A real laugh. Full. Bright. The sound filling the sage-green room with a frequency that I have not heard from this woman in over ten years—the genuine, unguarded, joy-adjacent laugh that Hazel Martinez produces when she’s not performing composure and the amusement is strong enough to bypass every defense she’s built.
“Shit,” she manages between breaths, her hands still over her mouth, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “You fucking remember that nonsense?”
I feel the blush.
It arrives without authorization—a warmth spreading across the bridge of my nose and the crests of my cheeks that I cannot prevent and would not admit to under interrogation.
Roman Kade does not blush. Roman Kade maintains thermoregulatory control over his own facial capillaries through sheer force of will and refuses to acknowledge any evidence to the contrary.
“Why would I forget?” I mutter, and the words come out with the defensive gruffness of a man who has been caught remembering something tender and is compensating with vocal texture. “Jeez. You were obsessed with Paris.”
She laughs harder.
The sound escalating from contained amusement to the full, body-engaging laughter that makes her shoulders shake and her eyes water and the monitoring equipment adjust its cardiac readout to accommodate the physiological effects of genuine joy.
The IV tubing sways with the motion of her torso.
The pillow shifts behind her back. And the amber of her eyes—the dark, guarded amber that I’ve watched carry fear and anger and pain and everything except this—is bright.
“Okay,” she concedes, gasping slightly, “okay, I was obsessed for, like, two weeks. Until I realized Paris is expensive as fuck.”
“Paris is only expensive to get to.”
The sentence comes out before my tactical brain can vet it, which means my actual brain—the one that doesn’t filter things through strategic assessment and operational necessity—is running the conversation now. Dangerous territory. But I’m already here.
“Living there isn’t bad when you have a pack of officers with good pension and early retirement qualifications.
” I shrug, the motion performing a casualness that the content of my words completely undermines.
“Besides. You wouldn’t need to pay a thing.
And if you want to paint all day, or do whatever those cozy girls do in those romantic books you used to read—bake bread, buy flowers at markets, sit in cafes with a notebook—then you can do exactly that. ”