Not figuratively. Not the romantic-novel approximation where the heroine’s breath catches at the sight of the hero’s jawline. My lungs actually stop cycling—the diaphragm pausing mid-motion, the autonomic system temporarily hijacked by whatever is happening in the space between his ice-blue eyes and my hazel-brown ones. The look is a conversation conducted in a language that predates words, that lives in the primitive wiring between Alpha and Omega, that neither of us consented to speaking but both of us are fluent in.
He notices.
Because of course he does. Roman Kade has been reading my body since we were twenty, cataloguing every tell, every micro-expression, every involuntary scent shift the way he catalogs tactical data—compulsively, competitively, with the obsessive thoroughness of a man who refuses to be caught off-guard by the only person who’s ever consistently surprised him.
“Breathe, Hazel.”
The whisper is quiet.
So quiet that if the apartment were any larger, the words would dissolve before reaching me. But we’re close—too close, his arm still against my waist, my body still tilted into the support he’d provided—and the whisper lands against my skin like a physical thing.
Fuck.
His voice.
That specific register. The one that lives beneath the childish bickering and the competitive snarling and the default annoyance that he wears like a uniform. The Alpha voice. Not the barking-orders version that he deploys in the field, not the commanding-a-room version that his rank requires. The other one. The one that’s soft and deep simultaneously, the impossiblecontradiction of gentleness carried in a bass frequency that vibrates through my bones.
The one that could make me beg.
The one that has made me beg, in rooms I’ve locked the memory of, on nights when competition dissolved into something that neither of us could compete our way out of.
I breathe.
Not because I’ve chosen to. Because my body obeys the command before my mind can file an objection, the Alpha-Omega wiring doing what it’s designed to do—overriding conscious resistance in favor of biological compliance. The breath enters my lungs like a pardon, expanding the ribs that had gone rigid, releasing the tension in my diaphragm with a shudder that I pray he doesn’t notice.
He says nothing further.
Just holds the look.
And in the silence, with his scent surrounding me and his arm against my waist and the October morning filtering weak light through blinds that need replacing, I sigh.
“I can’t check,” I admit, and the words come out quieter than I intend, sandpapered by the rawness in my throat. “No pack means no official medical authorization. The system won’t process an Omega without a pack representative signing off. It’s bureaucratic horseshit, but it’s the reality.” I pause, watching the information register in his expression—the slow tightening of his jaw, the darkening of his eyes. “Probably has something to do with my meds. The suppressants. They’ve been…acting up.”
Acting up. As if the chemicals systematically dismantling my cardiovascular system qualify as “acting up.” As if nosebleeds and blackouts and fevers are the pharmaceutical equivalent of a misbehaving child rather than a body staging its final revolt against five years of chemical suppression.
Roman frowns.
The expression deepens the lines between his brows—lines that didn’t exist at the academy, earned over a decade of command decisions and, if his three a.m. cold showers are any indication, nocturnal battles that he wages alone in the same way I wage mine.
“Why are you taking meds?”
I laugh.
The sound is short, sharp, carrying none of the humor that laughter is supposed to contain and all of the bitter pragmatism that has replaced it.
“Want me to fuck a tree every month when my heats hit?”
He frowns harder. The temple vein makes its appearance—a sign of Roman Kade processing information that his pride won’t let him accept and his logic can’t refute.
“You have a pack,” he says, and the statement is delivered as fact rather than question, the assumption of a man who cannot conceive of a world where Hazel Martinez—the most fiercely competent, devastatingly capable officer he’s ever competed against—doesn’t have Alphas tripping over themselves to claim her. “Don’t you?”
Don’t you.
The question mark at the end of the sentence catches on something inside my ribcage like a fishhook.
I move his arm away.
Gently. Not the aggressive shrug or the hostile extraction that our dynamic would typically produce. Just a quiet, deliberate relocation of his forearm from my waist to the mattress, the kind of gesture you make when you need distance but don’t want to explain why.
