I blink.
Several times, waiting for the vertigo to stabilize, for the room to remember where its walls belong. When my vision clears enough to process individual features rather than the blurred impression of a very large, very shirtless, very close man, I look back at Roman.
He’s not annoyed anymore.
The forehead-related outrage has evaporated entirely, replaced by something that makes my throat constrict. His ice-blue eyes are locked onto mine with an intensity that has nothing to do with competition, nothing to do with the academy, nothing to do with the decade of distance that has separated our lives into parallel lines that were never supposed to intersect again.
He’s serious.
Completely, genuinely serious in a way that I have seen from Roman Kade exactly twice in our shared history—once during the final tactical exam, when the simulation placed a hostage at risk and his face had gone blank with the focus of a man who understood that the stakes were no longer academic. And once in the hallway after graduation, when he’d caught my armand opened his mouth to say something and Maggie Tots had appeared at the end of the corridor and his mouth had closed and the moment had died with the quiet, bloodless efficiency of something murdered in broad daylight.
“What’s wrong with you?”
The question is direct. Stripped of the verbal sparring and competitive deflection that has defined every interaction we’ve had since the parking lot. His voice carries the weight of a man who has decided, in this moment, that honesty is more important than history.
“Health-wise,” he adds, and the specification feels deliberate—a narrowing of scope that acknowledges there are other things wrong, many other things, an entire catalogue of things that are wrong between us and around us and inside us, but right now he is asking about my body because my body is the thing that nearly hit the floor.
I stare at him.
I want to argue. The impulse is so deeply embedded in our dynamic that it fires before I can suppress it—the reflex to counter, to deflect, to meet his directness with the sharp, competitive resistance that we’ve been trading since the first morning of cadet school. It’s muscle memory. The conversational equivalent of a trained fighter’s defensive stance, adopted before the conscious mind even identifies the threat.
But things are different now.
Aren’t they.
We’re not cadets jockeying for a ranking. Not rivals measuring ourselves against each other’s achievements. Not twenty-two-year-olds who can afford to convert everything into a contest because youth provides enough margin for error that even the losses feel survivable.
I’m a thirty-two-year-old Omega whose body is failing. Whose career has been gutted. Whose assumed pack betrayedher and whose apartment is the size of a closet and whose medicine cabinet contains enough chemical warfare to qualify as a hazard. And none of that—none of it—is his business.
My life isn’t his business.
Hasn’t been for a decade.
And yet he’s here.
In my bed. His arm still warm against my waist. His scent—frozen pine, smoked oud, the peppermint bark and black tobacco that I can taste in the back of my throat—filling the apartment with the same territorial intensity that used to fill the academy library during our midnight arguments.
He’s here because he’s worried about me.
And I don’t know what to do with that.
“I don’t know,” I answer.
And I don’t look away.
The honesty costs me something. I can feel the payment extracted from somewhere behind my sternum—a withdrawal from reserves I don’t have the balance to cover, a vulnerability offered to a man who has historically been the person I reveal the least to because he’s the person whose opinion I care about the most.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
I don’t know what the suppressants are doing to my body.
I don’t know if the nosebleeds are going to become something worse, or if the fever was a one-time event, or if I’m slowly becoming a statistic in the same files that Alaric’s special unit processes when they find Omegas on bathroom floors.
I don’t know, and the not knowing is the thing that frightens me more than anything because Hazel Martinez has built her entire existence on knowing—on data, on evidence, on the strategic certainty that comes from never entering a room without having already mapped its exits.
We share a look.
And the intensity of it makes me forget how to breathe.
