But I’m awake.
I’m standing in a three-story bookshop in a cottage town on a lake holding a reverse-harem romance novel in a cream knitted dress that a man bought me because I wanted it, and I am awake.
I open the book.
Flip through it. The pages have that particular, tactile richness of a quality print run—smooth, substantial, the kind of paper that holds ink without bleeding and produces the specific, whispering sound when you turn pages that is one of the top five sensory experiences available to humans.
My mind wanders as I skim.
The conversation with the two women in the ground-floor entrance flickering through my thoughts—the gossip, the station overhaul, Callahan running the investigation. The relief of knowing that he’s not compromised. The implications of the new Omega at my old station being engaged to an entirely different pack, which means she wasn’t a replacement for me in any romantic sense but potentially a replacement in an operational one.
But Alaric told me not to think about that.
Alaric kissed me in an elevator to stop me from thinking about that.
And the kiss worked.
Because my body has been in a state of generalized, low-grade contentment that I can attribute directly to the events of the past few days. Specifically: the events involving OakleyTorres and a locked bedroom and an afternoon that had started with horseback riding and ended with the kind of physical experience that I had forgotten my body was capable of having.
Since I fucked Oakley.
There. The honest language. The unedited, un-euphemized fact that sits in my recent memory like a warm stone in a pocket—smooth, present, carried everywhere.
And I wonder if the others have noticed the difference.
Because there is a difference. My body is carrying itself differently—looser, more settled, the persistent, low-grade tension that I’d assumed was a permanent feature of my operating system having been addressed by the specific, thorough, devastating attention of a man who was not, as it turns out, a rookie in any department.
The touches have changed too. Or maybe I’ve changed. The pack’s affection—the kisses, the hugs, the hand-holding, the small, simple things that I’d been receiving with the cautious, braced-for-impact wariness of a woman who doesn’t trust kindness—has become easier to accept. Easier to lean into. Easier to want.
Roman.
I haven’t been able to see him as much as I’d like.
It seems like everyone and their aunty needs the commander—the station recovery, the federal liaison work, the investigation coordination that his rank requires. I can tell it’s pissing him off. The frozen pine of his scent carries the volatile, peppermint-sharp edge of a man who is being kept from where he wants to be by obligations he can’t refuse. But I’ve noticed the last few days—the things he does when the obligations finally release him.
He comes to kiss me when I’m in bed.
Late. After the house is quiet. The door opening with the careful, controlled silence of a man who doesn’t want to wake me but needs the contact more than he needs to be considerate.His lips on my forehead. My temple. The corner of my mouth if I turn toward him in the dark.
He scoops me off the couch.
Without warning. Without negotiation. Walks into the living room where I’m reading, slides one arm under my knees and the other behind my back, and lifts me like I weigh nothing and carries me to bed like it’s the most natural thing in the world and the idea of letting me walk there myself hasn’t occurred to him and wouldn’t be entertained if it did.
Roman Kade’s love language is logistics. He can’t say the words, so he carries you instead.
And today—furniture shopping with Alaric. Clothes. Candles. Nest materials.
Nest materials.
The phrase still feels foreign. Like a term from a language I’m learning as an adult rather than one I grew up speaking. But the act of choosing them—the soft blankets, the scented pillows, the specific textures and fabrics that my Omega physiology responded to with a full-bodyyeswhen I touched them in the store—had been revelatory. My body knows what it needs. It has always known. It just wasn’t allowed to ask.
I’ve never been so pampered.
And the news about the station—the old station crumbling, the pack replaced, Callahan safe and running the operation—brings a relief that settles somewhere beneath my sternum like a warm weight. The world I left is being dismantled. The structures that enabled the abuse, that closed the cases too quickly, that turned missing Omegas into administrative footnotes—they’re falling.
Not because of me.
But not without me.
