My hand rises to my cheek.
To the spot where his kiss landed. Where the warmth is still present, still perceptible, a residual heat that has nothing to dowith fever and everything to do with the specific, devastating kindness of a man who asked permission to touch me.
He asked.
He asked if he could kiss my cheek.
And when I said yes, he did it gently. And when he pulled away, he told me why.
Someone deserving of love who may have forgotten they’re worthy of it.
My hand stays on my cheek.
And maybe?—
Standing in a kitchen that smells like breakfast and burnt vanilla and candied blood orange and frozen pine, with a cheek that’s warm and a chest that’s cracking and a mind that is slowly, painfully, plate-by-tectonic-plate restructuring its understanding of what happened to her in that alley and the alleys before it and the locked rooms and the mornings after?—
Maybe the nightmares aren’t overreactions.
Maybe the cold showers aren’t dramatic.
Maybe the screaming into towels at two a.m.—the muffled, desperate, full-body screaming of a woman who could never articulate why she needed to scream—isn’t a weakness. Isn’t a failure of emotional regulation. Isn’t the melodramatic response of an Omega who can’t handle what every other Omega is supposed to handle.
Maybe the word Roman used was the right one.
Maybethat’s just lifewas never an explanation.
It was a lie I told myself so I could keep walking.
And maybe—in this kitchen, on this morning, in this town that wasn’t supposed to be anything but a holding pattern before my real life resumed?—
It dawns on me that maybe my PTSD is valid.
CHAPTER 12
Walls Down
~ALARIC~
“Roman’s not gonna do something stupid, right?”
Hazel asks the question from behind crossed arms, her body angled against the counter near the sink with the posture of a woman who is physically holding herself together while her mind tries to assemble a puzzle it doesn’t have the box art for. The charcoal henley makes her look smaller than the uniform does—without the badge, the tactical belt, the regulation posture that adds two inches to her frame through sheer institutional authority, she’s a five-ten Omega with damp blue hair and bare feet and dark circles beneath hazel-brown eyes that are currently performing a visible, real-time struggle to comprehend why a man just slammed her door hard enough to rattle its hinges.
“I mean…oh.”
The syllable arrives mid-thought, punctuating a realization that is clearly still under construction.
“Okay…maybe…I’ve been downplaying this?”
She doesn’t sound sure.
The statement lifts at the end like a question, the inflection of someone testing a hypothesis they’ve never considered against evidence they can’t dismiss. She looks like a woman standing at the edge of a conclusion she isn’t ready to reach, one foot over the line, the other still planted firmly in the version of reality she’s maintained for years because the maintained version, however wrong, was survivable.
My heart aches.
The sensation is specific—not the metaphorical kind, not the literary shorthand for sadness. An actual, physical contraction behind my sternum that pulses with the particular pain of watching someone you care about struggle to recognize their own wound because the people who inflicted it convinced them it was normal.
She really doesn’t grasp it.
