“Why didn’t you fight for me, then?”
Quiet.
Not accusatory. Not angry. The question arrives without the heat I’d expected—without the competitive edge or the righteous fury that Hazel brings to every argument. It arrives soft. Honest. The question of a woman who has let her walls down and is asking from behind them for the first time.
I pause.
My hand stills against my bruised side. The ribcage stops being the loudest thing in my awareness. Everything narrows to her face, to the amber eyes that are holding mine with avulnerability that I’ve seen exactly once before—in the training annex, eleven years ago, the night before graduation, when she’d looked at me and I’d looked at her and neither of us had said the thing that should have been said.
Why didn’t you fight for the woman you loved?
The question I’ve been asking myself for ten years.
The question that wakes me at three a.m. and sits in the dark beside my bed and asks again, and again, and again, and never accepts the answers I give it because the answers are true and insufficient at the same time.
I take a breath.
“I was being threatened.”
The words come out flat. Factual. The vocal register I use for after-action reports—the tone that strips events of their emotional charge and delivers them as data points because the emotional charge would make them undeliverable.
“After graduation. Someone—I never got a name, never got a face, just a voice on a phone and a message delivered through a channel that made it clear the threat was institutional, not personal—told me that if I went near you, you’d get hurt.”
Her expression doesn’t change.
But something behind it does. A micro-shift in the muscles around her eyes—a tightening, a focus, the investigator’s reflex engaging beneath the emotional surface as her brain begins processing the information as evidence.
“I didn’t have the resources,” I continue. “Didn’t have connections. I was a new graduate. A rookie with a badge and a gun and exactly zero institutional power. What was I going to do? Wave my service weapon at an invisible threat and hope that was enough to protect you?”
I look at her.
At the woman who was worth every sleepless night. Every unanswered question. Every year of distance that felt like swallowing broken glass.
“Your life was more important,” I say. “More important than my feelings. More important than what I wanted. If backing away meant you could live yours in peace—without conflict, without threat, without some shadow operation using you as leverage to control me or punish you—then so be it.”
The confession costs me.
I feel it leaving—the weight that I’ve been carrying for a decade lifting from a place between my shoulder blades that has ached for so long I’d stopped noticing. The truth, finally spoken, creating space where pressure used to live.
“Even if it meant I was unhappy,” I add. “Even if it meant you found another pack who could love you and protect you in ways I couldn’t.”
My jaw tightens.
“Though if I’d known they were a bunch of dicks?—”
The anger surfaces.
Not the controlled, operational anger that I manage with professional discipline. The other kind. The deep, structural, tectonic anger that has been building since her kitchen, since she sat at a table with jam on her lip and told us she’d been raped in an alley and didn’t know it counted because her pack did it.
“—I would have found you.” My voice drops low. Raw. The pretense of calm dissolving because some truths can’t be delivered calmly. “I would have gotten you out of that shit. This wouldn’t have gone this far. The suppressants. The damage. The nosebleeds. None of it. I would have?—”
I stop.
Because the sentence that follows isI would have killed them, and while the sentiment is accurate, it’s not what she needs to hear from a man sitting on her hospital bed.
“But we have time,” I say instead. “We have opportunities now. And you’re legally ours. No one is going to get away with threatening what’s mine.”
I hold her eyes.
