“Well,” he says, “you’ve got two weeks of resting. So we can do whatever we want to bait our lovely stalkers.”
I arch an eyebrow.
“And what do you have in mind?”
He looks at Alaric.
Looks at Roman.
The triangle of exchanged glances that passes between the three of them contains an entire conversation compressed into approximately two seconds of eye contact. Oakley’s grin. Alaric’s raised brow. Roman’s eye roll.
Roman, still slouched in the chair with the boneless exhaustion of a man who is functioning on spite and peppermint bark, waves a hand.
“Well,” he says, and the gruffness in his voice is doing a poor job of disguising the concession beneath it, “you can take her out first. But she was mine first.”
Take her out.
As in…a date?
Did Roman Kade just give another Alpha permission to take me on a date while calling dibs on me in the same sentence? Is that what’s happening? In a hospital room? Fifteen or more hours after a car bomb?
Alaric dismisses Roman with a hand—the elegant, long-fingered gesture of a man who has been waving off Roman’s territorial commentary for years and has developed a specific motion for it.
“We’ll handle the details and paperwork,” he says, and thewecarries the implied weight ofRoman and I will manage the investigation logistics while you two do the public-facing component of the visibility strategy. He meets my eyes. “Why don’t you get some air? You’ve been in this room for eighteen hours.”
Oakley turns to me.
The grin is still there, but it’s softened at the edges—tempered by the awareness that the woman he’s grinning at has a six-month prognosis and a neurotoxin hangover and hasn’t seen sunlight since a car bomb rearranged her afternoon. The candied blood orange of his scent is close. Warm. Carrying a brightness that feels deliberate—a man whose body is chemicallyoffering the olfactory equivalent of an open window on a day that needs one.
“Ready to see your new place?”
CHAPTER 20
The Rookie
~HAZEL~
“ARANCH?!”
The words leave my mouth at a volume that makes Oakley’s shoulders shake with suppressed laughter beside me, and I don’t even care, because I am sitting in the passenger seat of a department cruiser staring through the windshield at something that my brain is refusing to categorize correctly.
Acres.
That’s the first thing I register. Not the structures or the fencing or the surveillance equipment that I’m sure exists but can’t see—thespace. Rolling Montana terrain stretching out in every direction, the October grass carrying the golden-brown palette of a landscape that knows winter is coming and has dressed accordingly. Paddocks line the eastern perimeter, their wooden fencing weathered to a silver-grey that suggests decades of exposure. A stable complex sits to the north—massive, red-roofed, the kind of structure that was built to house animalsin serious numbers and has been maintained with the kind of funding that volunteer operations don’t have.
Behind us, the heavy wooden gates are closing.
Not creaky, atmospheric, this-is-a-haunted-farmhouse closing. Smooth. Motorized. The gates swinging shut with the controlled, hydraulic precision of a security installation that has been engineered to look rustic and function like a military checkpoint. I catch the glint of something metallic along the upper rail—a sensor, maybe, or a camera housing—before the wood panels meet and the locking mechanism engages with a muted, industrial click.
Government property.
They live on government property that looks like a ranch.
Oakley is maneuvering the cruiser along a muddy access road that cuts through the property with the casual confidence of a man who has driven this terrain enough times that the ruts and the soft patches are memorized in his muscle memory. The October rain has turned the soil into the thick, clay-heavy mud that Montana produces—the kind that grabs tires and tests suspension systems and makes city-bred vehicles weep. The cruiser handles it without complaint, the all-wheel drive doing its job with the quiet competence of equipment that was selected for this specific purpose.
And beside me, Oakley has a smirk on his face.
Not the grin. Not the full-brightness, sunshine-in-human-form expression that he deploys during conversations and tactical briefings and apparently while flicking his partner’s forehead during medical emergencies. This is thesmirk—the subtler, more satisfied version, carrying the particular pride of a man who is showing someone something impressive and knows it’s impressive and is enjoying the moment of revelation with the restrained delight of a kid who built the best science fair project and is watching the judges approach.
