The bathroom is clean. Private. A single-occupancy space with a lock and a mirror and the merciful silence of a room that the bass line can’t fully reach.
I do my business.
And then I look in the mirror.
The woman staring back at me is drunk.
Let’s be specific. She is nottipsyanymore. She has crossed the threshold from warm-and-loosened to fully, gloriously, unapologetically intoxicated. Her cheeks are flushed. Her eyes are bright—the amber irises catching the bathroom’s overhead light with a warmth that looks almost golden. The icy blue hair, which started the evening in a sleek arrangement, has devolved into the tousled, wind-touched chaos that several hours of dancing and kissing and being crowded between two men produces.
And she looks alive.
That’s the thing.
That’s the thing that I notice before anything else and that stops me in front of the mirror with the sudden, breath-catching recognition of encountering someone you thought was gone. She looksalive. Not the functional, baseline alive of a body performing its biological requirements. The other kind. The incandescent, lit-from-the-inside,this is what it looks like when a human being is having the experience of being alive and is aware of it and is grateful for itkind.
One of the girls mentioned it earlier. Before they’d gone off to party. Leaned in with the conspiratorial warmth of a womansharing a secret and said, “You look different, Hazel. You look happy.”
Happy.
Is that what this is?
I smirk at my reflection.
Then pout.
Because Roman isn’t here.
Roman, who would be standing at the bar with his arms crossed and his ice-blue eyes tracking every Alpha who looked at me for longer than three seconds. Roman, who would have danced with me by not dancing—by standing still while I moved around him, his body the fixed point that my orbit circled. Roman, who would have hated every second of the social obligation and loved every second of being near me and expressed both of those things through the same gruff, territorial, I’d-rather-be-anywhere-else-but-I’m-not-leaving silence.
I pull out my phone.
Open the camera.
The selfie is devastating.
I know it because I took it and I am, despite my general disinterest in vanity, capable of recognizing when a photograph captures something true. The flush on my cheeks. The brightness in my eyes. The smirk that sits on my lips like a challenge addressed to a specific recipient. The black dress doing exactly what Alaric selected it to do.
I send it to Roman.
With a message:You’re stuck at the desk while I get to be hot and sexy without you. Tough luck.
He calls in three seconds flat.
I watch the screen light up with his name—ROMAN KADE—the contact pulsing with the urgent, immediate energy of a manwhose phone has just delivered a photograph that has physically compelled him to respond.
I smirk.
And ignore the call.
Slip the phone back into my pocket.
Let him stew.
I used to love driving him mad.
At the academy. When we were rookies and the world was smaller and simpler and the competition between us was the most important thing in either of our lives. I’d leave notes in his locker. Walk past him in the cafeteria wearing something that made him forget his sentence. Score one point higher on an assessment and watch his jaw tighten from across the room.
The art of making Roman Kade lose his composure was my greatest extracurricular achievement.
