Good.
“You’re going to focus on your damn self,” I continue. “You’re going to take the medication. Eat the meals. Drink the water. Do whatever the hell Dr. Winters tells you to do, and when you inevitably decide you know better than your doctor because you’re Hazel and you always think you know better, Oakley is going to be there with his medic training and his disappointed face to remind you that compliance isn’t optional.”
I squeeze her hand.
“We’re going to help you every step of the way. And then—when you’re healthy and hormonally balanced and eating three meals a day like a human being instead of running on protein shakes and stolen donuts—you’re going to be a thriving Omega, with a thriving pack, and we’re going to clear your name fromthose bastards who are trying to run it through the mud for whatever vendetta they have against you.”
I hold her gaze.
Let her see the conviction.
Not the anger—though the anger is there, simmering beneath the surface like lava under a crust that looks solid but isn’t. The conviction. The settled, immovable certainty of a man who has made a decision that nothing short of his own death will reverse.
“And then,” I say, “we’re going to say fuck this place and go somewhere else.”
She arches an eyebrow.
The expression is subtle—the micro-movement of a woman whose skepticism operates at the muscular level, the single raised brow that communicatesI’m listening but I haven’t decided if you’re serious yetwith more eloquence than most people achieve in a paragraph.
“We are?”
“Fuck yeah.”
I let the corner of my mouth lift. Just barely. The closest thing to a smile that my current emotional state can produce—an almost-smirk that I know she can read because she’s been reading my face since we were twenty.
“Remember when you said that if we didn’t get into the academy, we were going to Paris? Just go to Paris and do art shit?”
The reaction is immediate.
A snicker.
Not a laugh—not yet—but the involuntary, nasal precursor to one. The sound that Hazel makes when something catches her off guard and her composure loses the race against her amusement. Her hands fly to her mouth, the motion reflexive, the universal gesture of a woman trying to physically prevent the laughter that’s already building behind her palms.
It doesn’t work.
The snicker becomes a laugh.
A real laugh. Full. Bright. The sound filling the sage-green room with a frequency that I have not heard from this woman in over ten years—the genuine, unguarded, joy-adjacent laugh that Hazel Martinez produces when she’s not performing composure and the amusement is strong enough to bypass every defense she’s built.
“Shit,” she manages between breaths, her hands still over her mouth, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “You fuckingrememberthat nonsense?”
I feel the blush.
It arrives without authorization—a warmth spreading across the bridge of my nose and the crests of my cheeks that I cannot prevent and would not admit to under interrogation. Roman Kade does not blush. Roman Kade maintains thermoregulatory control over his own facial capillaries through sheer force of will and refuses to acknowledge any evidence to the contrary.
“Why would I forget?” I mutter, and the words come out with the defensive gruffness of a man who has been caught remembering something tender and is compensating with vocal texture. “Jeez. You wereobsessedwith Paris.”
She laughs harder.
The sound escalating from contained amusement to the full, body-engaging laughter that makes her shoulders shake and her eyes water and the monitoring equipment adjust its cardiac readout to accommodate the physiological effects of genuine joy. The IV tubing sways with the motion of her torso. The pillow shifts behind her back. And the amber of her eyes—the dark, guarded amber that I’ve watched carry fear and anger and pain and everything except this—is bright.
“Okay,” she concedes, gasping slightly, “okay, I was obsessed for, like, two weeks. Until I realized Paris is expensive as fuck.”
“Paris is only expensive to get to.”
The sentence comes out before my tactical brain can vet it, which means my actual brain—the one that doesn’t filter things through strategic assessment and operational necessity—is running the conversation now. Dangerous territory. But I’m already here.
“Living there isn’t bad when you have a pack of officers with good pension and early retirement qualifications.” I shrug, the motion performing a casualness that the content of my words completely undermines. “Besides. You wouldn’t need to pay a thing. And if you want to paint all day, or do whatever those cozy girls do in those romantic books you used to read—bake bread, buy flowers at markets, sit in cafes with a notebook—then you can do exactly that.”
