Five minutes. He made it in five minutes on foot.
The housing is at least a mile away.
I roll my eyes.
“Did you want to break her door while you’re at it?”
“Fuck off,” he huffs, the words arriving between breaths that are still catching up to his cardiovascular output. But the dismissal is mechanical, reflexive—the autopilot rudeness that Roman defaults to when his higher brain functions are otherwise occupied.
Because his eyes have found Hazel.
And the change that moves across Roman Kade’s face is the most honest expression I’ve seen from him in two years of partnership.
The aggression drops. The competitive armor, the professional rigidity, the carefully maintained fiction that Hazel Martinez is nothing more than an inconvenient complication from his past—all of it falls away in the space between one breath and the next, revealing what lies beneath.
Regret.
Raw, unprocessed, and so visible that it makes his ice-blue eyes look almost human.
And concern.
The real kind. The kind that makes a man run a mile in five minutes. The kind that turns a commander’s face into something vulnerable enough that I file the image away in the compartment where I keep information that people would rather I didn’t have.
Still in love with her.
The man has been carrying a torch for this woman since they were cadets, and he’s been using competition and distance and professional detachment to pretend the flame went out.
It didn’t.
Who doesn’t love drama.
“Roman.” My voice snaps him out of whatever emotional processing his face is broadcasting to the room. “Outside. Patrol duty.”
He blinks.
The regret and concern don’t vanish—they retreat, pulling back behind the ice-blue walls with the reluctant obedience of soldiers ordered to stand down.
“Wait—what?” His gaze whips from Hazel to me, the commander reasserting itself over the man. “She needs our help. All of us. We should take her to the hospital. Get her proper medical?—”
“She’s packless, Roman.”
The word lands like a verdict.
“Or at least, we can assume so while she’s here.” I keep my voice level, clinical, because one of us needs to operate on logic while the other is busy having a decade-old emotional crisis in a four-hundred-square-foot apartment. “The hospitals in towns like this don’t service packless Omegas without a pack representative to authorize treatment. You know the system. It’s bureaucratic garbage, but it’s the reality.”
The muscle in Roman’s jaw works. His scent—frozen pine, smoked oud, the black tobacco that intensifies when he’s angry—fills the apartment with a territorial sharpness that makes the already-small space feel claustrophobic.
“Stay outside,” I repeat. “Guard the perimeter. Because someone set the station on fire tonight, and we don’t know if it’s random, targeted, or the beginning of something worse. The last thing we need is this apartment going up in flames while we’re inside it.”
I let that reality settle.
“Patrol. Watch. If someone’s targeting her or targeting the station—or both—we need eyes on the exterior. Oakley has the medical background. He can handle the fever.”
“What if an intruder gets past me?” Roman argues, and I can hear the desperation beneath the tactical concern—a man grasping for any justification to stay in the room with the woman on the bed. “What if someone comes through the back while I’m covering the front?”
Oakley, who has been administering the counter-agents with quiet efficiency throughout this exchange, looks up from the bedside with an expression that can only be described as a polite version ofare you fucking serious.
“Roman.” His voice is gentle in the way that dangerous things are gentle—calm surfaces over deep water. “Who’s the black belt in this pack?”
