Someone went grocery shopping.
Someone—multiple someones, based on the voices—acquired food, transported it to my apartment, and is currently preparing a meal in a kitchen that has not produced anything more complex than black coffee and microwaved regret since the day I moved in.
The realization hits with a disorientation that has nothing to do with residual fever and everything to do with the fact that Hazel Martinez’s apartment does not contain food.
This is not an oversight. It’s a system.
My fridge holds a half-empty bottle of water, three packets of soy sauce from a takeout order I barely remember, and a container of creamer that expired six days ago. The pantry—if you can call a single shelf above the microwave a pantry—contains coffee filters, a box of protein bars I bought during my first week and have been rationing like emergency rations ever since, and a bag of sugar that exists exclusively to service the coffee maker.
Not because I wouldn’t love to cook.
The thought surfaces with the quiet, bruised quality of something I don’t allow myself to examine often. The truth is that somewhere beneath the badge and the regulation bun and the eleven years of eighteen-hour shifts, there exists a version of Hazel Martinez who fantasizes about kitchens. Not the institutional kind with industrial appliances and biohazard waste bins. Real ones. The kind with herb gardens on the windowsill and cast-iron skillets seasoned by decades of use and the particular warmth that fills a house when someone has spent hours creating something from scratch for the sole purpose of sharing it with people they love.
Hours in the kitchen. A counter dusted with flour. Music playing from a speaker someone left on the shelf. The slow, meditative process of turning raw ingredients into something that says “I made this for you” without requiring the words.
Romanticized bullshit, Martinez. You know better.
Because the reality is that I’m always working. Always at the station, always on a case, always running operational hours that begin before the sun rises and don’t conclude until the moon has given up waiting for me to notice it. By the time I get home—if I get home, if the shift doesn’t bleed into another shift that bleeds into a third—it’s three in the morning, and the kitchen is dark, and the fridge is empty, and the fantasy of slow-cooked meals shared with loved ones is about as realistic as the fantasy of being loved at all.
No one has time for that shit.
Especially not you.
Roman’s voice answers Oakley’s question through the door, pulling me back from the self-pity spiral I refuse to call a self-pity spiral.
“It was hot as fuck,” he says, and his tone carries the defensive edge of a man who has been caught in a situation that requires justification and resents the need for it. “And Haze was shivering like a fucking leaf. The heater in this dump wasn’t going to crank up fast enough before she cracked a tooth with the clattering. So I figured body heat could help.”
Haze.
He called me Haze.
The nickname he used at the academy. The one that only ever appeared during moments when the rivalry dimmed enough for something else to surface—late nights in the library, the aftermath of sparring sessions that ended with us breathing the same air, the single time he’d pressed his mouth to my temple and whispered it against my skin before catching himself and pulling away like the contact had burned him.
He used it like it was still his to use.
File that. Deal with it never.
Oakley sighs.
“I had changed her clothes earlier,” he says, and the information lands against my memory like a key turning a lock—right, the flannel, Oakley changed me out of the wet clothes, that’s why I woke up in his shirt—“but maybe I should havegiven her a warm sponge bath first if it would have made the fever more manageable.”
Roman growls.
An actual, vocalized, Alpha-register growl that I feel through the bathroom door’s thin wood like a vibration in a tuning fork. The sound is territorial in a way that his professional demeanor would normally filter out—raw, instinctive, the pheromone-laced warning of a man whose hindbrain has just processed the image of another Alpha touching an Omega he has, apparently, never stopped considering his.
“Youchanged her?”
Oakley groans.
“If you’re going to have some overprotective fit shit, go outside. I don’t have time for your tantrums without some fucking coffee.” A pause. The sound of a spatula hitting a pan with pointed authority. “Also, need Alaric present for this, or there’s going to be damaged furniture like the last time we fought and youlost.”
“I didn’t fuckinglose?—”
The front door creaks open.
“You totally lost and had a broken arm, so let’s not fight at eight in the morning when I haven’t had a wink of sleep, thanks.”
Alaric.
