The vertigo has passed. The room holds its position. I take my time swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, planting bare feet on the cold hardwood, letting the solidity of the floor anchor me before I attempt anything that requires balance or dignity.
I don’t look at him.
If I look at him, I’ll get distracted. The shirtless situation alone is a hazard to my operational focus—the way the October morning light catches the ridges of muscle across his abdomen, the way the Norse runes follow the V-cut of his hips into territory that the waistband of his tactical pants is doing an inadequate job of concealing. He’s clearlygrownsince the academy, and by grown I mean that whatever genetic potential had been hinted at in his twenty-two-year-old frame has been fully, aggressively realized in his thirty-five-year-old one.
Don’t catalog it. Don’t measure it. Don’t compare it to the version your muscle memory still carries from nights in academy rooms that smelled like pine and sweat and the specific chemical compound of two people who hated each other too much to stay apart.
I take a few breaths.
“I did have a pack,” I say.
The words are directed at the far wall—at the corkboard with its red strings and pinned photographs, at the investigation that waits for me with the patience of the dead. Not at him. Looking at the board is safer. The board doesn’t make my chest constrict.
“Then they betrayed me.”
A breath.
“The usual shit.”
Three sentences. Economy of language. The bare minimum required to convey a history that spans two years of shared meals and synchronized heat cycles and the gradual erosion of trust until one morning you’re cleaning out your desk and your pack is flanking someone new and the word “betrayal” doesn’t even begin to cover the specific, surgical cruelty of being replaced while you’re still warm in the chair.
I push to my feet.
Steady this time. The floor holds. My legs hold. The world doesn’t tilt.
“I didn’t betray you.”
His voice hits my back like a thrown knife—accurate, forceful, embedding itself between my shoulder blades where the raven tattoo covers the scars I don’t talk about.
I stop.
Mid-stride, three steps from the bathroom door. My bare feet on cold hardwood, Oakley’s flannel brushing my thighs, the apartment’s morning silence magnifying the four words he’s just detonated into it until they fill every corner.
I didn’t betray you.
Not your recent pack, Martinez. He’s not talking about them.
He’s talking about the academy. About the assignment. About the day they sent you to one end of the map and him to the other, and neither of you said goodbye because the words would have required acknowledging that there was something to grieve.
I look over my shoulder.
And I make sure my gaze is as cold as my heart should be when it comes to him.
Should be. The operative phrase carrying weight it shouldn’t. Because my heart, when it comes to Roman Kade, has never been cold. Has never achieved the subzero temperature that I maintain for the rest of the world—the frost that keeps colleagues at arm’s length and suspects off-balance and the general population of everyone who has ever tried to get close permanently outside the perimeter.
For him, the best I’ve ever managed is cool.
And even that is costing me right now.
“If it helps you snore at night,” I say, each word a controlled incision, “keep telling yourself that.”
I roll my eyes—the full, dismissive, end-of-conversation rotation that I’ve weaponized since the academy—and turn away. The bathroom is five steps ahead. Five steps to a closed door and cold water and the restoration of every defense that his presence in my bed has compromised.
I don’t make it.
His hand closes around my wrist.
Not hard. Not the restraining grip that would trigger the PTSD responses coiled in my nervous system like loaded springs. Just…contact. His fingers circling the joint with a pressure that saysstopwithout sayingI’m making you. The same distinction Oakley had managed last night with a palm on my shoulder.
