I hold her gaze.
“So I don’t want to hear you being a selfless prick.”
She blinks.
The expression on her face cycles through approximately four emotions in two seconds—shock, confusion, offense, and the ghost of something that might be amusement—before settling on a pout.
A genuine, full-lipped, Hazel-Martinez-doesn’t-like-what-you-just-said pout.
“Selfless prick?” she repeats.
“Yes.” I don’t flinch. “Selfless prick. You’re always trying to save the fucking world. Trying to make everyone’s life easier. Taking the burdens of every person in every room you walk into just so you can collect the little‘thank yous’and the‘we believe in yous’from colleagues who are simply happy they get to go home and live their lives.”
The words come out with the velocity of something that’s been building pressure for years.
“Go to bars. Concerts. Make friends and travel the world while you’re the one at the office at three in the fucking morning solving cases and doing the shit they should have been doing. Picking up their slack. Covering their gaps. Filing their reports because they left early and someone has to and you’d rather do it yourself than let it go undone because justice is more important to you than sleep.”
I lean closer.
“You’ve never been selfish, Hazel. Never once in your damn life. I bet the most selfish thing you’ve done is actually fucking me.”
Her eyes roll.
The gesture is so classically Hazel—the dramatic, full-rotation eye roll that she deploys when she’s pretending to be annoyed and is actually anything but—that something in my chest loosens. Because if she can still roll her eyes at me, she’s still in there. Still the woman who insults me as a formof affection and competes with me as a form of intimacy and punches me in the stomach as a form of gratitude.
But I see it.
The hint of amusement that she can’t fully suppress. The corners of her mouth lifting just slightly—two or three millimeters of involuntary upward motion that her composure isn’t fast enough to intercept. The micro-expression that tells me the prick comment landed where I intended: not in her pride, but in the place behind it, the place where Hazel keeps the things she finds funny but refuses to admit.
She sighs.
Looks away.
The motion is a retreat—her gaze sliding from mine to the window, to the October light, to anything that isn’t the face of a man who just called her out with a precision that suggests he’s been composing the speech for a decade.
“Why aren’t you…”
She mutters it.
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 aquestion 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.
