I step back into the elevator.
The doors close.
And I pull out my phone.
The call connects on the third ring.
“What?”
Roman’s voice. Flat. Clipped. The single-syllable greeting of a man who considers phone etiquette an unnecessary social convention and answers calls the way he answers doors: with the minimum viable communication.
I smirk.
“Hello to you too. Stop being a prick.”
He huffs.
The sound is audible through the phone—the frustrated, grudging exhale that Roman produces when he’s been called out and can’t argue because the callout is accurate. But I can hear the smile beneath it. The specific, barely-there warmth that Roman buries under six layers of gruffness and only surfaces when he’s talking to the people he trusts enough to stop performing.
“I’ve got news.”
CHAPTER 26
Page Forty-Three
~HAZEL~
Fifteen books.
I have fifteen books in the wire shopping cart that I parked at the end of the aisle approximately twenty minutes ago, and I am now standing on my toes reaching for number sixteen with the focused, single-minded determination of a woman who has discovered that three floors of fiction is not a bookshop but a religious experience and she intends to tithe generously.
The book is on the top shelf.
Because of course it is. The one title I’d spotted trending on TikTok—which is something I now apparently have time to scroll through, because my life has undergone a structural renovation that replaced fifteen billion nightly reports with the revolutionary concept of “free time”—is positioned at the exact height that requires someone of my stature to stretch, elongate, and perform a minor act of vertical ambition.
My fingers close on the spine.
I bring it down.
The cover is lush. Deep burgundy with gold foil lettering, the kind of design that announcesthis is a book about desire and you should not be embarrassed about wanting it. The illustration features a woman—dark-haired, strong-jawed, wearing an expression that sits somewhere between defiance and hunger—surrounded by three figures. Three men. The composition making it unmistakably, unapologetically clear what kind of story this is.
One girl. Multiple guys.
Like my life, I guess.
The thought arrives with a wry, internal amusement that the Hazel of three weeks ago would not have been capable of producing. The Hazel of three weeks ago did not have a life that resembled a romance novel. The Hazel of three weeks ago had a corkboard and a microwave and a single pillow and a suppressant regime that was systematically converting her organs into a countdown.
Now I have three Alphas, a room with four pillows, a reading chair, and a knitted dress from my Pinterest board.
Today has been…
Effortless.
That’s the word. The one that keeps surfacing and that my brain keeps examining with the suspicious, investigative scrutiny of a woman who does not trust ease because ease has historically been the precursor to ambush. But the scrutiny finds nothing. No hidden cost. No approaching invoice. Just a day that unfolded the way days unfold in the novels I read—slowly, warmly, with coffee on patios and hand-holding through boutiques and a man who bought me a lamp because my eyes lingered on it for thirty seconds.
I feel like I’m on cloud nine.
And I don’t know how to feel about feeling like I’m on cloud nine, because the elevation is unfamiliar and the air is thin andsome part of me—the part that survived the alley and the pack and the years of chemical self-destruction—is waiting for the alarm. For the moment when I snap awake and realize that the knitted dress and the bookshop and the man in the elevator were all just the architecture of a dream that my brain constructed because reality didn’t have the budget for it.
