Palm up, fingers extended, the gesture carrying none of the performative chivalry that some Alphas deploy to signal dominance through courtesy. This is simpler. More honest. The hand of a man who wants to help me down from a vehicle and is offering the option rather than assuming the authority.
I look at the hand.
I look at him.
And I smile.
Not the smirk. Not the competitive, one-corner lift that I use as armor and punctuation and the only emotional expression my face has felt safe producing for the last several years. An actual smile. Small, still guarded at the edges, still carrying the residual architecture of a woman who doesn’t do this often and isn’t sure she remembers how. But present. Visible. Directed at a man who slid across a cruiser hood to open my door because he wanted to and because he could and because the joy of doing it was reason enough.
I take his hand.
His fingers close around mine.
Warm. The callused grip of a man whose hands have held horses’ reins and tactical equipment and my shoulders during a fever and a cheek during a kiss and now my hand during a step down from a cruiser parked in a barn on a government-owned ranch in a small town where someone wants me dead.
I accept his help down.
The gravel meets my boots with a satisfying crunch, and the barn air is cool against my arms—the crop top providing significantly less thermal coverage than a uniform jacket, a fact that my body is noting with the precise discomfort of a system accustomed to regulation layers.
I stand.
He doesn’t let go of my hand.
And I don’t pull it away.
Note that. File it. The fact that you are voluntarily holding a man’s hand and not experiencing the immediate need to reclaim the extremity suggests that the walls are doing something they have never done before.
They’re opening doors.
“Is he…” I start, and the question that forms is the one that I’ve been carrying since the hospital—the one that I always carry, the persistent, self-auditing inquiry that I can’t stop running because the data set that produced it was built on years of evidence that saysyou are not what people want. “Are you even fine with having an older Omega?”
Oakley tilts his head.
The motion is characteristically his—the curious, open-angled tilt that makes him look like a man genuinely processing the question rather than preparing a dismissive response.
“You’re making it seem like you’re an elder,” he says. “Like I should be helping you across the street and asking about your grandchildren.”
I huff.
“Most people think that when there’s an age difference,” I say, and the words come out with the practiced flatness of a woman who has heard the commentary enough times to recite it. “That the Omega past thirty is…I don’t know. Declining. Less valuable. Operating on a timeline that the younger Alphas don’twant to share. I just wanted to make sure you’re reminded. And okay with it.”
He stops walking.
Turns.
The motion is fluid—a pivot that brings him from walking beside me to facing me, his body positioned so that the barn’s overhead light catches the auburn of his hair and the hazel of his eyes and the particular, focused expression that has replaced the grin.
He leans in.
Not a lot. Just enough. The distance between us narrowing from conversational to something else—something that my Omega physiology recognizes at a cellular level and my professional brain is frantically attempting to categorize and failing because the category doesn’t exist in any operational manual I’ve read.
“Does me being young botheryou?” he asks.
His voice has dropped.
Not to the Alpha register. Not to the commanding, biological frequency that Roman uses when he needs my body to comply. To something else. Something lower and warmer and more deliberate—the specific, intentional modulation of a man who is choosing this proximity and this tone because he knows exactly what it does and is doing it anyway.
And I have to stop myself.
