“We already cleared your place,” he says.
I blink again.
The words registering but not computing—the meaning arriving at the processing center and finding no corresponding expectation to dock against.
“Huh?”
Eloquent. Chief Martinez. Truly. The pinnacle of articulation.
Roman speaks up from the chair.
“We cleared out your apartment before nightfall,” he says. His tone is matter-of-fact—the delivery of a man reporting an operational detail rather than announcing a grand gesture. “The night of the explosion. Oakley handled the staging while Alaric coordinated the transport. Everything’s been moved to the house.”
I stare at them.
Rotating my gaze between the three faces with the systematic disbelief of a woman who is looking for the tell—the micro-expression, the avoided eye contact, the twitch of a mouth suppressing a smile that would indicate this is a joke.
Roman’s face is impassive.
Alaric’s is calm.
Oakley’s carries the hint of a smile, but that’s just Oakley.
They’re not joking.
They cleared my apartment.
While I was unconscious. While the smoke from my cruiser was still drifting across the parking lot. While federal agents were processing the scene and Dr. Winters was running panels on my blood and Roman was pacing the hallway like a caged Norse god. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, they found the time and the coordination to go to my apartment, pack my things, set up the decoy staging, and transport everything to their secured residence.
In hours.
While simultaneously managing a crime scene, a federal investigation, and an unconscious Omega with a neurotoxin hangover.
Who are these men.
“Was it…” I start, and the sentence that forms is so characteristically, pathologicallymethat I almost laugh at myself. “Was it a burden? How much did it cost to move everything? I can?—”
“Hazel.”
Alaric’s voice cuts the sentence with the clean, surgical precision of a man who has identified the exact point where the logic needs to be interrupted.
He pushes off the windowsill. Crosses to where I’m standing. His burnt vanilla scent wraps the space between us with the warm, grounding authority that his presence consistently produces—the olfactory equivalent of a hand on a shoulder, stabilizing without restraining.
“We did it for your wellbeing,” he says. “And your comfort. You don’t need to pay anything. And you can have peace of mind knowing that you don’t need to pay us back. Not in money. Not in favors. Not in the currency that your previous pack apparently operated in.”
The last sentence lands with a quiet weight.
Not accusatory. Not pitying. Just precise. The observation of a man who has been assembling a picture of my previous pack’s dynamics from the fragments I’ve provided and whose professional training ensures that each fragment is filed, analyzed, and understood in its full context.
I blink.
Oakley tilts his head.
The motion is slight—the curious, open-angled tilt of a man who is about to ask a question he genuinely wants the answer to rather than one designed to prove a point.
“Why do you always want to pay us back?” he asks. “Or think things are a discomfort? Every time we do something, your first response is to calculate the debt. Like there’s a ledger somewhere that you need to balance before you’re allowed to accept anything.”
The question is soft.
