I take a bite of the cream custard.
It’s extraordinary. The pastry shell flakes against my teeth with the delicate, buttery shatter of something baked by someone who cares about the craft, and the custard inside is cool, sweet, smooth enough to make my eyes close involuntarily.
“Did you get the others some too?” I ask between bites, because the officer in me manages logistics even while the woman in me is having a religious experience with pastry.
He nods. “Oakley’s currently stuffing his face. The kid has the stomach of an adolescent teen.” A pause. “Saved Roman’s for when he gets back.”
I frown.
“He’s still not back?” The cream custard lowers in my hand, the professional concern overriding the culinary pleasure. “Where the hell did he go? He left hours ago. What kind of errand takes?—”
Alaric leans onto the table beside the case display, crossing his arms with the posture of a man settling in to deliver information he’s been timing. He takes a sip of his iced coffee.
“He didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“He went to the registry.”
I stare at him.
The cream custard hovers in suspended animation between the desk and my mouth, forgotten.
“Registry of what?”
“The pack registry,” Alaric says, and his tone is even, measured, the calibrated delivery of a man who is aware that the information he’s providing is about to restructure the emotional architecture of the woman receiving it. “He went to officially register our pack. Temporary status. With you as the designated Omega.”
My eyes widen.
“Wait.” The word comes out higher than my voice normally permits. “He has to go to theofficialregistry for that? But—doesn’t that make it, like…realreal?”
The distinction between “real” and “real real” is one that my brain considers critically important, even if my vocabulary can’t articulate why. A verbal agreement in a kitchen is one thing. An official registration with a government body—paperwork, signatures, public record—is something else entirely. Something with institutional weight. Something that exists outside the walls of my apartment and beyond the scope of “what happens here stays here.”
“Like,publicknowledge,” I continue, the implications cascading through my brain with the accelerating urgency of a woman who is realizing, in real time, that three men have just attached their professional reputations to hers in a document that anyone can access. “Why would you guys do that? You don’t want to be associated with me.”
The statement exits my mouth as fact.
Not as self-pity. Not as a fishing expedition for reassurance. As the simple, empirical conclusion of a woman who has compiled thirty-two years of evidence supporting the thesis that association with Hazel Martinez is a liability.
Alaric arches an eyebrow.
“Why not?”
The question is so direct, so unembellished, so completely devoid of the qualifications and reassurances that a more diplomatically inclined man would attach to it, that it stops my brain mid-spiral.
He pushes from the table.
And walks to the desk.
Not around it—to it. Closing the distance between the table and my chair with the unhurried precision of a man who is about to make a point and wants the proximity to carry it. He leans in.His hands find the desk’s surface on either side of my space, his arms bracketing me without caging, his face inches from mine.
Close enough that his burnt vanilla scent floods my senses like a tide coming in. Close enough that the silver at his temples is detailed, individual strands catching the fluorescent light. Close enough that I can see the specific shade of dark brown his eyes are—not black, not the flat void I’d assumed from a distance, but a deep, layered brown with amber flecks that surface only at this proximity.
“Why,” he repeats, his voice dropping into the register that vibrates through my sternum, “would you think we want nothing to do with you?”
The words get stuck in my throat.
Physically. Lodged somewhere between the impulse to answer and the defense mechanism that intercepts honesty before it can reach the air. The tension between us spikes—not the professional tension of two officers in close quarters, not the analytical tension of an investigator pressing a subject, but something else. Something that has been building since a parking lot introduction and a beige coat and a cigarette trailing smoke into the October night.
