Breathing through her teeth in sharp, controlled bursts that I could hear from twenty feet away. Her hands were shaking—I could see the tremor in her fingers, the adrenaline aftermath that the body produces when the fight is over but the nervous system hasn’t received the memo.
Then she straightened.
Slowly. Vertebra by vertebra. The way she always straightened—with the kind of deliberate, agonizing composure that costs more than most people will ever understand. She pulled her torn uniform closed. Pushed her hair back from her face. Lifted her chin until it was level, until her posture saidcommandeven though her body saidpain.
And she walked away.
Not toward the infirmary. Not toward the security office. Not toward any of the institutional resources that existed specifically to prevent what had clearly just happened to her.
She walked toward the barracks.
Back to her bunk.
To sleep—or try to—so she could be at morning drills seven hours later as if nothing had occurred.
And she was.
Five a.m. roll call. Hazel Martinez, present, in a fresh uniform with her hair in regulation compliance and concealer covering the bruise on her jaw and foundation masking the split lip and her posture straight as a blade despite the factthat every step she took had to be excruciating. She ran the drills. Completed the qualifications. Scored within two points of my own marks despite operating on what had to be a body in agonizing pain.
She didn’t report it.
Didn’t tell anyone.
Didn’t ask for help, accommodation, sympathy, or the kind of institutional intervention that any reasonable person would demand after being assaulted by their own peers.
She just…kept going.
Grit her teeth and walked through it, the way she walks through everything—alone, upright, refusing to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing her break.
I’d stood in the shadows of that alley for a long time after she’d disappeared.
Long enough for the cold to seep through my jacket. Long enough to memorize the dent she’d made in the trash can. Long enough to feel something shift inside my chest with the slow, irreversible permanence of continental plates realigning—a tectonic event that I wouldn’t have the vocabulary to name for years, that I’d bury under competition and rivalry and the carefully maintained fiction that Hazel Martinez was nothing more than the obstacle between me and the top of the class.
The Montana road stretches ahead, empty and indifferent.
Alaric’s cigarette smoke trails out the cracked window.
Oakley is silent in the backseat, lost in whatever thoughts a thirty-year-old Alpha has when confronted with the reality that the woman he’d winked at an hour ago is carrying the kind of weight that most people would collapse under.
And I drive.
Hands on the wheel, jaw clenched, eyes fixed on the road, scent locked down tight enough to asphyxiate because if either of them catches the shift in my pheromones right now—the way thefrozen pine has softened at the edges, the way the peppermint bark undertones are surfacing like something thawing after a long winter—they’ll know.
They’ll know that the memory didn’t just resurface.
It never left.
It’s been sitting in the locked chamber of my chest since a February night over a decade ago, preserved with the same forensic precision I apply to crime scenes, because some evidence is too important to file away and too dangerous to examine in the light.
That was the first time I realized what was happening.
Not the competition. Not the rivalry. Not the professional benchmarking or the tied scores or the mutual antagonism that the academy had mistaken for animosity.
Standing in the dark of that alley, watching her walk away with bruises she’d never report and strength she’d never ask anyone to acknowledge, feeling something crack open inside me that no amount of competitive posturing would ever fully seal again.
Maybe that was the first time I realized…I was falling for this Omega.
CHAPTER 6
