Chapter 26
Page Forty-Three
~HAZEL~
Fifteen books.
I have fifteen books in the wire shopping cart that I parked at the end of the aisle approximately twenty minutes ago, and I am now standing on my toes reaching for number sixteen with the focused, single-minded determination of a woman who has discovered that three floors of fiction is not a bookshop but a religious experience and she intends to tithe generously.
The book is on the top shelf.
Because of course it is. The one title I’d spotted trending on TikTok—which is something I now apparently have time to scroll through, because my life has undergone a structural renovation that replaced fifteen billion nightly reports with the revolutionary concept of “free time”—is positioned at the exact height that requires someone of my stature to stretch, elongate, and perform a minor act of vertical ambition.
My fingers close on the spine.
I bring it down.
The cover is lush. Deep burgundy with gold foil lettering, the kind of design that announces this is a book about desire and you should not be embarrassed about wanting it.
The illustration features a woman—dark-haired, strong-jawed, wearing an expression that sits somewhere between defiance and hunger—surrounded by three figures.
Three men. The composition making it unmistakably, unapologetically clear what kind of story this is.
One girl. Multiple guys.
Like my life, I guess.
The thought arrives with a wry, internal amusement that the Hazel of three weeks ago would not have been capable of producing.
The Hazel of three weeks ago did not have a life that resembled a romance novel.
The Hazel of three weeks ago had a corkboard and a microwave and a single pillow and a suppressant regime that was systematically converting her organs into a countdown.
Now I have three Alphas, a room with four pillows, a reading chair, and a knitted dress from my Pinterest board.
Today has been…
Effortless.
That’s the word. The one that keeps surfacing and that my brain keeps examining with the suspicious, investigative scrutiny of a woman who does not trust ease because ease has historically been the precursor to ambush.
But the scrutiny finds nothing. No hidden cost. No approaching invoice.
Just a day that unfolded the way days unfold in the novels I read—slowly, warmly, with coffee on patios and hand-holding through boutiques and a man who bought me a lamp because my eyes lingered on it for thirty seconds.
I feel like I’m on cloud nine.
And I don’t know how to feel about feeling like I’m on cloud nine, because the elevation is unfamiliar and the air is thin and some part of me—the part that survived the alley and the pack and the years of chemical self-destruction—is waiting for the alarm.
For the moment when I snap awake and realize that the knitted dress and the bookshop and the man in the elevator were all just the architecture of a dream that my brain constructed because reality didn’t have the budget for it.
But I’m awake.
I’m standing in a three-story bookshop in a cottage town on a lake holding a reverse-harem romance novel in a cream knitted dress that a man bought me because I wanted it, and I am awake.
I open the book.
Flip through it. The pages have that particular, tactile richness of a quality print run—smooth, substantial, the kind of paper that holds ink without bleeding and produces the specific, whispering sound when you turn pages that is one of the top five sensory experiences available to humans.
My mind wanders as I skim.
The conversation with the two women in the ground-floor entrance flickering through my thoughts—the gossip, the station overhaul, Callahan running the investigation.
The relief of knowing that he’s not compromised.
The implications of the new Omega at my old station being engaged to an entirely different pack, which means she wasn’t a replacement for me in any romantic sense but potentially a replacement in an operational one.
But Alaric told me not to think about that.
Alaric kissed me in an elevator to stop me from thinking about that.
And the kiss worked.
Because my body has been in a state of generalized, low-grade contentment that I can attribute directly to the events of the past few days.
Specifically: the events involving Oakley Torres and a locked bedroom and an afternoon that had started with horseback riding and ended with the kind of physical experience that I had forgotten my body was capable of having.
Since I fucked Oakley.
There. The honest language. The unedited, un-euphemized fact that sits in my recent memory like a warm stone in a pocket—smooth, present, carried everywhere.
And I wonder if the others have noticed the difference.
Because there is a difference. My body is carrying itself differently—looser, more settled, the persistent, low-grade tension that I’d assumed was a permanent feature of my operating system having been addressed by the specific, thorough, devastating attention of a man who was not, as it turns out, a rookie in any department.
The touches have changed too. Or maybe I’ve changed.
The pack’s affection—the kisses, the hugs, the hand-holding, the small, simple things that I’d been receiving with the cautious, braced-for-impact wariness of a woman who doesn’t trust kindness—has become easier to accept. Easier to lean into. Easier to want.
Roman.
I haven’t been able to see him as much as I’d like.
It seems like everyone and their aunty needs the commander—the station recovery, the federal liaison work, the investigation coordination that his rank requires.
I can tell it’s pissing him off. The frozen pine of his scent carries the volatile, peppermint-sharp edge of a man who is being kept from where he wants to be by obligations he can’t refuse.
But I’ve noticed the last few days—the things he does when the obligations finally release him.
He comes to kiss me when I’m in bed.
Late. After the house is quiet. The door opening with the careful, controlled silence of a man who doesn’t want to wake me but needs the contact more than he needs to be considerate. His lips on my forehead. My temple. The corner of my mouth if I turn toward him in the dark.
He scoops me off the couch.
Without warning. Without negotiation. Walks into the living room where I’m reading, slides one arm under my knees and the other behind my back, and lifts me like I weigh nothing and carries me to bed like it’s the most natural thing in the world and the idea of letting me walk there myself hasn’t occurred to him and wouldn’t be entertained if it did.
Roman Kade’s love language is logistics. He can’t say the words, so he carries you instead.
And today—furniture shopping with Alaric. Clothes. Candles. Nest materials.
Nest materials.
The phrase still feels foreign. Like a term from a language I’m learning as an adult rather than one I grew up speaking.
But the act of choosing them—the soft blankets, the scented pillows, the specific textures and fabrics that my Omega physiology responded to with a full-body yes when I touched them in the store—had been revelatory.
My body knows what it needs. It has always known. It just wasn’t allowed to ask.
I’ve never been so pampered.
And the news about the station—the old station crumbling, the pack replaced, Callahan safe and running the operation—brings a relief that settles somewhere beneath my sternum like a warm weight.
The world I left is being dismantled. The structures that enabled the abuse, that closed the cases too quickly, that turned missing Omegas into administrative footnotes—they’re falling.
Not because of me.
But not without me.
Because the work I did mattered. The cases I flagged. The patterns I identified. Someone took those threads and pulled, and the fabric is coming apart.
I turn another page.
And catch movement.
At the end of the aisle.
The detection is peripheral—a shift in the visual field that my officer’s training registers before my conscious mind labels it.
A shadow relocating. A shape present and then absent, withdrawing from the aisle’s sightline with the specific, measured retreat of someone who was watching and realized they were about to be seen.
I look over.
No one there.
The aisle ends at a junction with the next row of shelves. Empty. The warm wood and the colored spines and the afternoon light from the dormer windows presenting a scene that is, to any casual observer, unremarkable.
I frown.
Paranoia?
Maybe. You’re a woman who has survived two assassination attempts in the same week and has a six-month prognosis and a stalker with institutional resources. Paranoia isn’t a diagnosis—it’s situational awareness with a justified threat matrix.
But maybe it’s nothing.
Maybe it was another customer. A browser. Someone who walked to the end of the aisle and turned back because the section wasn’t what they were looking for.
Except browsers don’t withdraw. Browsers turn corners.
Browsers walk with the unhurried pace of people who are here for the same reason you are—to look at books.
That shape retreated. Pulled back. The motion carrying the specific, deliberate quality of someone who was maintaining a sightline and broke it because the target started to turn.
I open the book.
To a random page.
Pretend to read.
The investigator’s reflex engaging automatically—the practiced, I’m-not-looking-at-you performance that every officer learns during surveillance training.
Look relaxed. Look absorbed. Let the target believe they’re undetected, because an undetected watcher gets comfortable and a comfortable watcher makes mistakes.
My eyes are on the page.
My attention is on the aisle’s end.
And there it is again.