These men and their careful touches.
These men who handle me like I’m a grenade and a glass figurine simultaneously.
I look back at him.
Glaring.
The expression is loaded with every ounce of defensive fury I can generate on short notice—hazel-brown eyes narrowed, jaw set, the eucalyptus frost of my scent sharpening into the territorial blade that keeps Alphas at a distance.
But his face…
His face stops the glare mid-deployment.
Because Roman Kade is looking at me with an expression I have never seen him wear.
Serious. Stern. The competitive armor stripped away entirely, leaving nothing but the man—raw, un-performative, devastatingly honest in a way that his pride should never allow. The ice-blue eyes that have glared at me across firing ranges and sparring mats and library tables for years are holding mine with something that is the exact opposite of glaring.
And god, the dissonance?—
The young adult I remember, the one who matched my daggers with daggers of his own, whose entire face was a weapon calibrated for competition—he’s gone. In his place is a man who has lived a decade without me and carries the evidence of it in every line that the years have carved and every scar that the job has added and the silver thread that I notice, for the first time, hiding at his left temple beneath the platinum dye.
He’s fighting the same war I am. The grey. The time. The body’s slow insistence on recording every year we’ve survived.
He really has aged like fine wine. And that’s a thought I’ll be burying in concrete at the earliest opportunity.
“Hazel.”
My name in his mouth. Soft. The Alpha voice—the real one, the dangerous one, the one that lives beneath every layer of posturing and bravado.
“I don’t know what the fuck was said.” The words come slowly, each one placed with the deliberate care of someone disarming a device they can’t afford to mishandle. “I don’t know what you were told, or what story they gave you, or what version of events you built in the years after. But I didn’t betray you.”
His fingers tighten fractionally on my wrist. Not restraint. Emphasis.
“I didn’t want to fucking leave.”
The sentence cracks the room open.
Splits the carefully maintained distance between past and present, between the cadets we were and the officers we’ve become, between the narrative I’d constructed to survive his absence—he left, they all leave, he chose something else, someone else, the way everyone eventually does—and the alternative that I’d never allowed myself to consider.
That he didn’t choose to go.
That Maggie’s money and the academy’s politics and the system’s institutional machinations made the choice for both of us.
That two people who were building something in the spaces between competition and combat had it dismantled by forces neither of them could fight.
We share a look.
And the silence between us is louder than any argument we’ve ever had.
I tug my wrist free.
Gently. Without the violence that our history would typically demand. Just a quiet withdrawal, my fingers sliding from his grip with the careful precision of someone removing themselves from something they’re not ready to hold.
I turn away.
“I know.”
That’s all I give him.
