I swallow.
“Because no one,” I whisper, and my voice is small in a way I will not forgive it for later, “wants anything to do with me.”
The admission fills the inches between us like smoke.
Alaric holds the position. Holds my gaze. Holds the space with the patient, immovable presence of a man who has heard the lie I tell myself and is not going to validate it.
“Well, we do.” His voice is quiet and absolute. “And now the public will have to get used to that.”
My teeth find my bottom lip.
The bite is involuntary—the specific, nervous habit of a woman who is experiencing an emotion she doesn’t have a filingsystem for and is using physical sensation to ground herself while her brain scrambles to process the fact that three Alpha men have just officially, publicly, institutionally committed themselves to her protection.
A knock on the door.
We both turn.
One of the Beta rookies stands in the doorway—early twenties, ponytail, the slightly panicked expression of a junior officer who has just walked into something that her training didn’t cover.
“Uhh.” Her eyes bounce between Alaric’s proximity to my chair and the general atmospheric tension that is probably visible from the hallway. “Am I interrupting something?”
“Yeah,” Alaric says, not moving from his position, his voice carrying the flat, unadorned authority of a man who does not appreciate unscheduled interruptions during moments of emotional significance. “A meeting. What do you need?”
The rookie straightens.
Perceptibly. The kind of postural adjustment that occurs when a junior officer encounters an Alpha whose tone carries institutional weight and realizes that the casual energy of the previous chief’s administration has been replaced by something with considerably more teeth.
Impressed.
I’m impressed by how affirmative he is. The tone alone adjusted her posture by two inches. I should be taking notes.
“I need the key to the storage room,” she says, her voice notably more professional than it had been thirty seconds ago. “The inspectors need to check whether the smoke damage reached the lower level.”
“Oh.” I push back from the desk, the chair rolling against the linoleum with a squeak that undermines the gravitas of the preceding moment. “It’s in my cruiser. I’ll grab it.”
I stand. Alaric straightens from his lean, the proximity dissolving into professional distance with the practiced ease of two people who understand the optics of a workplace.
“I’ll come,” he says.
“No, it’ll be quick.” I wave him off, already moving toward the door. “Two minutes. Stay and eat your pastry before Oakley raids the bag.”
The corridor is quieter than the morning—the contractors have finished their assessment, the monitoring equipment beeps in an empty hallway, and the October afternoon filters through the windows with the low, amber light that makes even institutional architecture look temporarily beautiful.
I push through the side exit.
The gravel parking lot opens before me, the cruiser sitting in its designated spot fifteen yards from the building. The October air is sharp—colder than the morning, carrying the metallic promise of a temperature drop that will make tonight uncomfortable in an apartment with failing window seals and a radiator that treats thermoregulation as a suggestion.
And Roman.
Walking toward me from the lot’s entrance, his stride carrying the heavy, slightly uneven cadence of a man who has been driving for hours and is operating on the specific combination of exhaustion and caffeine withdrawal that makes every step feel like a personal grievance against the ground. His platinum hair catches the amber light, the ice-blue eyes squinting against the sun’s low angle, and mid-approach, he yawns.
Full. Unfiltered. The jaw-cracking, eye-watering yawn of someone whose body is filing a formal complaint against his brain’s decision-making.
“Alaric brought coffee and donuts,” I say, because practical information is the safest currency between us.
“Thank fuck.” The words arrive between the residual tremors of the yawn, raw with the particular gratitude of a man who has endured something unpleasant and is being told it’s over. “City traffic while hungry is a fucking human rights violation. Never again.”
City traffic.
