But her eyes drop.
Close.
As if my permission—not my command, not my authority, just the quiet assurance that it’s okay to stop fighting for the night—is the thing her body has been waiting for. The thing that tells her exhausted, hyper-vigilant nervous system that someone else is watching the door, so the sentinel can finally stand down.
Her breathing deepens.
Steadies.
Settles into the slow, measured rhythm of genuine, unguarded sleep.
I sit back in the chair.
The creak is familiar now. The sound of my post. My chosen station for however many hours remain until morning,or until Alaric calls with an update, or until Roman gets tired of patrolling and starts lurking beneath windows again.
The apartment is quiet.
The radiator ticks. The wind whispers against the glass. The corkboard on the far wall holds its web of red strings and pinned photographs in patient silence, the investigation waiting for its investigator to wake.
And I sit beside Hazel Martinez’s bed in a borrowed chair in a town I’ve known for less than a week, watching a woman I’ve known for less than three days sleep with my shirt on her body and my kiss still warming her cheek, and I think?—
Not everyone is going to leave, Hazel.
Not everyone is going to use what they see against you.
Not everyone who stays does it because they want something from you.
The October wind shifts outside, and somewhere in the distance, Roman’s patrol carries him past the window where I can hear the measured cadence of his boots on gravel—steady, vigilant, the footsteps of a man who is guarding something he won’t admit he cares about.
All I can hope for is that we can prove to her that not everyone is a manipulative prick in this cruel world.
CHAPTER 9
Dead Horses And Living Ghosts
~HAZEL~
The pillow smells incredible.
That’s the first coherent thought my brain produces upon approaching consciousness—notwhere am Iorwhat time is itorwhy does my body feel like it lost a bar fight with gravity. No. The first neuron that fires with any meaningful clarity is dedicated entirely to the fact that whatever surface my face is currently pressed against smells so fucking good that my Omega hindbrain has apparently decided to abandon all higher function in favor of burrowing deeper into it.
I turn.
Not a conscious decision. An instinctive one—my body rotating toward the warmth source with the mindless, gravitational pull of a plant leaning toward sunlight. I snuggle further into the pillow, and the scent intensifies with proximity, wrapping around me in layers that my half-asleep brain catalogues with embarrassing enthusiasm.
Snow-covered pine.
Smoked oud.
Frozen leather and—peppermint bark. Black tobacco. The undertones of?—
The thought stalls, buffering like a video with bad signal.
Why does my pillow smell like an Alpha?
Why does my pillow smell like a specific Alpha?
Why is my pillow so warm?
