The motion is automatic—my default posture for delivering the kind of corrective assessment that has made grown Alphas reconsider their proximity choices. My elbows start to lift, my fingers start to tuck, the full-body language of a woman about to deploy a verbal missile at close range.
Alaric is already moving.
Before my arms complete the cross, he’s stepping backward—one stride, two—putting distance between us with a speed that contradicts his usual measured composure. The beige coat swings with the motion, and his expression shifts from amused to something that looks suspiciously like a man who just remembered that the animal he was poking has claws.
He reads body language like a crime scene. Saw the arms starting to cross and evacuated before the detonation.
Smart man.
I pause.
My arms hover at half-mast, the cross incomplete, the lecture chambered but not fired. Something about the speed of his retreat—the genuine, reflexive quality of it, more instinct than performance—disarms the response I’d been building. He didn’t wait for the warning. He read the precursor and adjusted. That’s not arrogance. That’s awareness.
I let out a huff and drop my arms to my sides.
Alaric exhales.
The relief in the sound is so palpable, so undisguised, that it bypasses my defenses entirely and lands somewhere in the vicinity of my chest where it has no business being.
“I think,” he says, his composure rebuilding itself brick by brick as the safe distance gives him room to breathe, “if she lectures me, I’ll fall in love.”
The statement is delivered to the parking lot at large rather than to me specifically, but his dark eyes cut to mine for just long enough to communicate that the joke isn’t entirely a joke.
Oakley groans.
The sound is theatrical, full-bodied, the groan of a man who has watched his colleague say something spectacularly inadvisable and cannot intervene quickly enough.
“Please don’t.” He pushes off the cruiser’s hood, auburn hair catching the breeze as he gestures at Alaric with the exasperatedenergy of a younger sibling who’s been managing his elder’s social missteps for too long. “You’re like a senior citizen in comparison to her. Have some dignity.”
Alaric chokes.
Not a figurative choke—an actual, physical coughing fit that racks his frame with the indignity of a man whose own saliva has betrayed him. His hand flies to his chest, the beige coat bunching under the grip as he struggles to regain respiratory control while simultaneously defending his honor.
“Fuck—I’mthirty-eight,” he manages between coughs, his voice strained with outrage that is at least forty percent genuine. “Not even fucking forty. Senior citizen—are you—” Another cough. “I am in theprimeof my?—”
“Well, I’m thirty.” Oakley shrugs with the devastating nonchalance of a man wielding his youth like a weapon he didn’t have to sharpen. His green eyes slide to mine, and the wink he delivers is so precisely timed that my hindbrain registers it before my rational mind can file a complaint. “So I probably have a better chance.”
“Neither of you,” Roman’s voice cuts through the exchange like a blade through warm butter, “are having a chance with her.”
The temperature drops.
Not figuratively. His frozen-pine scent actually intensifies, the smoked oud sharpening into something territorial that pushes against Alaric’s bourbon warmth and Oakley’s citrus brightness with the blunt force of a man drawing a line in gravel.
“We don’t do Omegas in the force,” he adds, and the words carry the particular stiffness of a policy that’s been quoted often enough to become personal doctrine. His ice-blue eyes meet mine, and what I see there is a complicated cocktail of professional conviction and something older. Something that smells like the academy library at midnight and arguments thatended with scents so tangled the librarian had to open every window on the floor.
We don’t do Omegas in the force.
We. As if I’m included in whatever policy his unit runs by.
As if I’d want to be.
I smirk.
The expression is slow, lethal, aimed directly at the vein still throbbing at his temple.
“Good,” I say, and the word is a closed door, a drawn weapon, a line in the sand that matches his and raises it. “I’m not into Alphas like you with your judgmental attitudes and even judging mindsets. So we’re on the same page.”
The hit lands exactly where I aimed it—that specific intersection of pride and attraction where Roman Kade has always been most vulnerable. His jaw tightens. The vein at his temple accelerates. His scent does something complicated—the frozen pine cracking just slightly, just enough, to let the peppermint bark undertones bleed through in a way that his training would normally prevent.
