His voice enters the apartment with the exhausted authority of a man who has been running on caffeine fumes and investigative adrenaline since the small hours and has arrived at the exact point where diplomatic patience and basic motor function are competing for the same dwindling fuel reserves.
“Please tell me there’s coffee.”
“Fresh pot’s ready,” Oakley confirms, “but you’re not going to fall asleep if you drink it.”
Alaric groans—the deep, resonant, world-weary groan of a man who has been offered an imperfect solution and is going totake it anyway because perfection died somewhere around four a.m.
“Honestly? I don’t fucking care. I need something other than the station’s shit. Their coffee tastes like they brew it in a rain gutter.”
Oakley chuckles. “All stations have shitty coffee. It’s in the municipal handbook. But I’ll make you one. How do you take it?”
“Black. Bitter. Matching my current disposition.”
“So your default, then.”
“Watch it, Torres.”
Oakley’s laugh is warm enough to seep through the bathroom door like sunlight through a crack, and despite every defense mechanism I maintain, something in my chest responds to it. Not the Omega hindbrain. Not the biological wiring. Something more mundane and more dangerous.
Comfort.
The sound of people who care about each other occupying the same space, bickering the way families bicker—with volume but without venom, the verbal equivalent of elbows jostling at a table that’s set for everyone.
“How is she?”
Alaric’s voice drops to something quieter. Sincere. The investigator receding behind the man, asking a question that no professional mandate requires and no operational protocol demands.
“She’s in the shower,” Roman answers, and the territorial edge has softened, his tone modulating into something that wouldn’t qualify as gentle from most people but from Roman Kade constitutes an emotional revolution. “Fever broke a few hours ago. Color’s better. She karate-chopped me in the face, so her motor skills are intact.”
He’s reporting my condition like a field assessment.
And the karate chop is listed under “positive indicators.”
These men are unhinged.
I decide I’ve spent enough time eavesdropping through a bathroom door in my own apartment.
I open it.
“I’m done, if any of you need the washroom,” I announce, stepping into the main space with the controlled posture of a woman who is choosing to enter a room rather than being drawn into it. My voice comes out steadier than last night’s croak—closer to normal, if a bit rougher around the edges, the vocal cords still recovering from the screaming they endured into a towel.
Three heads turn.
Three different scents hit me simultaneously—frozen pine and candied blood orange and burnt vanilla colliding in the confined airspace of four hundred square feet with a combined potency that makes my sinuses sing and my defenses scramble for purchase.
And I stop.
Because the apartment that I’d left an empty, depressing, utilitarian box when I walked into the bathroom is no longer empty.
Alaric has shed the beige coat, which hangs on the hook beside my patrol jacket like it belongs there. He’s in a black crewneck, sleeves pushed to the forearms, the dark fabric making the silver at his temples more visible and the tattoo at his collarbone a contrast of ink against shadow. He looks exhausted in a way that his composure nearly conceals—the dark circles beneath his eyes matching my own, the set of his jaw carrying the particular tension of a man who has been managing a crisis since the small hours and hasn’t sat down yet.
Roman has put on a T-shirt—presumably retrieved from whatever go-bag the oversight crew keeps in their cruiser—but the fabric is doing an insufficient job of concealing the architecture beneath it. He’s leaning against the counter with his arms crossed, platinum hair still disheveled from sleep, ice-blue eyes tracking my emergence from the bathroom with the vigilant focus of a man who has been listening to a shower run for fifteen minutes and counting every second.
And Oakley is at the stove.
Actually at the stove, spatula in hand, a dish towel thrown over one shoulder with the casual competence of someone who navigates kitchens the way other people navigate tactical scenarios. His auburn hair catches the morning light from the window, copper threads glinting as he manages two pans simultaneously—eggs in one, bacon in the other—while a toaster on the counter produces golden bread at intervals he seems to be tracking without looking.
The small folding table that I’d been using as a document workspace has been cleared of case files and corkboard overflow, its surface wiped clean and set with four plates, four mugs, and utensils that I’m certain I don’t own.
