My fingers find my belt.
The buckle. The practiced, one-handed unfastening that is muscle memory from fifteen years of suiting up and stripping down, the leather pulling through the metal with the specific, sliding sound that carries weight in a room this quiet and this charged.
“You’re going to be a good officer, Martinez?”
My voice is low.
Wrecked.
The vocal register that I produce when the commander has left the building and the man has taken over and the only authority operating is the kind that exists between two people in a locked room.
“You already upset Daddy today.”
She giggles.
Mischievously. The delighted, sparkling, completely-unrepentant sound of a woman who has been called to account and finds the accounting exciting.
“Well,” she says, her voice carrying the playful, negotiating cadence of a woman who is about to set terms while pinned against a door, “since you did such a good job.” Her fingers play with the hair at the nape of my neck. “And were willing to potentially kill for me.” She tilts her head. “I can accommodate.”
Accommodate.
She said accommodate.
Like she’s granting a request. Like the man who just shot someone across a dance floor and carried her through a crime scene and locked them in a back room is the one who should be grateful for the privilege.
She’s perfect.
She’s absolutely, impossibly, infuriatingly perfect.
I grin.
At her taunts. At the giggle. At the way her legs tighten around me when she saysaccommodateas if the word itself is a form of foreplay.
Then I stop.
The grin fading. Not disappearing—settling. Transitioning from the sharp, competitive edge of our banter to something that exists beneath it. Something that the competition has always been built on top of. Something that the rivalry and the insults and the antagonism were always protecting because neither of us knew how to hold it without armor.
I lean in.
And I kiss her softly.
The shift is deliberate. Conscious. The specific, chosen gentleness of a man who has the capacity for force and is selecting the opposite. My lips meeting hers with a pressure that is barely pressure at all—the lightest, most careful, most intentional contact I have ever placed on another human being.
“You’re okay, yes?”
Whispered.
Against her lips.
The question that I asked in the hospital. That I ask every time. The question that strips the commander and the competition and the bravado and leaves only the thing beneath: a man who needs to know that the woman he loves is safe.
She smiles.
Against my mouth.
Not the grin. Not the smirk. Not the competitive, one-corner lift. A smile. Soft. Real. The expression that Hazel produces when the defenses are down and the alcohol has dissolved the last of the armor and the woman behind the badge is visible in the way she’s only visible in moments like this—moments that are small and private and held between two people who have spent a decade learning each other’s language.
“Yes, Roman,” she whispers. “I’m okay. Thank you for asking.”
