The question is small. Genuine. Stripped of every defense I maintain because the defenses don’t apply here—I’m not being attacked, I’m not being challenged, I’m just…lost. Standing in my own kitchen in a charcoal henley with damp blue hair and bare feet, unable to understand why a man would slam a door after hearing something that I’ve been carrying like a coat I forgot to take off.
Alaric and Oakley share a look.
It’s briefer than the ones before—faster, more urgent, the nonverbal equivalent of a triage decision being made in real time. Alaric’s dark eyes communicate something that Oakley’s green ones receive and process in the space of a heartbeat.
“Go stop him,” Alaric says quietly, “before he does something that generates paperwork.”
Oakley nods.
But he doesn’t leave.
Not yet.
Instead, he rises from his chair and crosses the apartment with the same quiet purpose he brings to everything—no urgency, no drama, just the controlled, deliberate motion of a man who understands that the woman standing at the counter needs something before he can go.
His hands find my shoulders.
Palms settling against the henley’s fabric with a weight that is present without being heavy—the touch of someone who hasbeen trained to read bodies and knows that this particular body requires contact that communicates stability, not possession.
I look up at him.
The confusion hasn’t left my face. It’s still there, sitting in my expression like a child who’s been told the rules have changed and doesn’t understand the new ones yet.
“I don’t get why he’s mad,” I repeat, and I hate how small my voice sounds. Hate it the way I hate every moment of vulnerability that this town has extracted from me since I arrived. “I mean…it’s not a big?—”
“It’s a big deal, Hazel.”
Oakley’s voice cuts through the sentence with a gentleness that shouldn’t be capable of interrupting anything, and yet stops my words as effectively as a wall stops motion.
“This isnotokay.”
Four words.
Delivered without anger, without accusation, without the confrontational force that Roman had deployed. Just quiet, absolute clarity. The voice of a man who is looking into the eyes of a woman who has been telling herself a story for years and is offering, with the careful precision of someone defusing a device, a different version.
Not okay.
He said it’s not okay.
But it?—
They were my pack. It was my heat. The system is designed for?—
He said it’s not okay.
“But let me go stop the fucker before he drives to the city and burns the whole place down,” Oakley adds, and the shift from devastating sincerity to pragmatic crisis management is so seamless that I almost miss the moisture gathering at the edgesof his green eyes. “Don’t need our reputable soon-to-be chief getting arrested for arson.”
I nod.
Slowly. The motion of someone who is agreeing to the logistics of a situation she doesn’t fully comprehend but recognizes it requires compliance.
Oakley doesn’t let go of my shoulders.
Not yet.
He sighs—a soft exhale that carries something he’s trying to manage, something that the easy charm and the winks and the performative confidence are working overtime to contain. Then he leans in.
Close enough that his candied blood-orange scent fills the space between us like sunlight filling a room.
