He answers like this is how we’ve always been.
“I’ve been learning on Rosetta fucking Stone for six months.” His voice is rough with sleep, deeper than its waking register, the words scraping through a throat that clearly hadn’t prepared for conversation—let alone conversation at this velocity. His hand cups his forehead, pressing against the impact site. “Fucking hell, Hazel! Mynose!”
This fucker must still be used to my bullshit after all these years.
That, or sleep-deprivation has made him pliable.
Either way, the immediate acceptance of my violence as a normal conversational opener is doing things to my emotional architecture that I refuse to examine.
I blink.
Trying to reconstruct the previous twelve hours through the fog of whatever happened to my memory. The gaps are infuriating—I can feel the edges of events, like running my fingers along the rim of a hole, but the center is missing. Maybe I had a one-night stand. Maybe I got wasted. Alcohol would explain the memory loss, and if there’s one thing Roman Kade and I share beyond competitive fury and mutual inability to back down, it’s a dangerously competitive relationship with liquor.
Academy days. The drinking games that the instructors pretended not to know about. Shots matched one-for-one because neither of us could stomach the other winning at anything, including intoxication. And when the alcohol dissolved the line between “I hate your fucking guts” and “I’ll fuck your fucking guts”—
Yeah. That happened. More than once. In locations that the academy’s security cameras definitely covered and the administration definitely chose to ignore.
So technically, waking up in bed with Roman Kade has historical precedent.
That doesn’t make it acceptable.
“I didn’t hit your nose,” I say flatly, choosing practicality over memory reconstruction. “I hit your forehead.”
“My nose,” he says through his palm, ice-blue eyes glaring at me over his fingers with the specific wounded fury of a man whose vanity has been targeted, “connectsto my fucking forehead. The vibration—the impact—Jesus, woman, I didn’t evendoanything to you.”
I shrug.
“How would I know? I can’t remember shit.”
The admission is delivered with deliberate casualness, but something about voicing it—I can’t remember—triggers the fragments to rearrange. Not into a complete picture, but into enough of a sequence that the gaps start filling with context rather than conjecture.
The door. Alaric’s voice. The nosebleed.
The floor tilting sideways before?—
Blackout.
Not alcohol. The suppressants. The fever.
I passed out in front of Alaric Venezuela and apparently woke up in bed with Roman Kade wearing Oakley Torres’s shirt.
This is fine. Everything about this is fine.
I sit up.
The world tilts.
Immediately, violently, with the nauseating lurch of a ship hitting a wave broadside. The room swings to the right—the corkboard, the window, the coffee maker on the counter—and my body follows, my center of gravity shifting before my muscles can compensate, the whole precarious system of upright human existence collapsing sideways like a building with a compromised foundation.
An arm catches me.
Before I can stop it, before I can redirect or resist or produce any of the defensive responses that my body has spent a lifetime perfecting, Roman’s arm is around my waist. Not grabbing. Not restraining. Just…there. Solid. Warm. The forearm I’d been studying minutes ago—Norse runes, wolf iconography, the dense muscle of a man who maintains his body like a weapon—pressed against the fabric of a shirt that isn’t mine, preventing the fall with a precision that suggests he’d been ready for it.
He was already waiting to catch me.
Before I tilted. Before I fell. He was already positioned.
How long has he been lying here, awake, monitoring the tilt of my equilibrium while I slept?
