Warmer.
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. NoI’m fineorit’s not a big dealor 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.
