“Okay,” she says, and her voice is quiet in a way that isn’t weak. It’s the quiet of a door being unlocked from the inside. “We can…talk.”
I nod.
“Roman won’t do anything stupid,” I begin, because the practical question deserves an answer before the difficult ones demand attention. “As long as Oakley gets to him in time.” A beat. “Whether that happens or not, we’ll leave to fate.”
Hazel groans.
“I don’tgetit, though.” The frustration is genuine—not the controlled, professional variety she wields like a scalpel, but the raw, confused kind that surfaces when the world behaves in ways her operational framework can’t explain. “Why is he mad? This doesn’t affect him.”
Doesn’t affect him.
She thinks Roman Kade’s reaction to learning that the woman he’s been carrying a torch for since the academy was sexually assaulted by her own pack is…unrelated to him.
The denial isn’t even defensive. It’s structural. It’s built into the foundation of how she understands her own place in other people’s emotional architecture: she doesn’t occupy space there. She doesn’t affect people. She doesn’t matter enough to generate this kind of rage in a man she hasn’t seen in a decade.
I give her a look.
Sympathetic. Not pitying—Hazel Martinez would eat pity alive and spit out the bones. But sympathetic in the way that one professional extends to another when the truth they’re about to deliver is going to restructure the recipient’s understanding of their own situation.
“That man,” I whisper, “clearly still loves the shit out of you, and you’re just in denial, huh.”
She blinks.
The rapid flutter of someone whose brain has encountered a syntax error and is attempting to reboot.
“Huh?” The sound is so unfiltered, so completely stripped of the command-presence sophistication that defines her professional persona, that it nearly makes me smile. “He can’t love me. Like—sure. We had an on-and-off random fling thing when we were in the academy. But we hated each other’s guts. Likedespisedone another.”
She uncrosses one arm to gesture, the motion carrying the emphatic energy of someone presenting evidence they consider airtight.
“Sure, I was the only one who could despise him. And no one could mess with me when he was around.” A pause, fractional, as if her own sentence has caught something her consciousness wasn’t ready to examine. “But we hated each other.”
She just answered her own question and doesn’t know it.
“You just said one thing,” I respond quietly, “that matters more than anything else you said. No one could mess with you when he was around.”
She frowns.
“So?”
“So,” I say, choosing each word with the precision of someone building a bridge that needs to hold weight, “that’s the problem. For him. He was your protection, Hazel—whether either of you named it that way or not. He was the wall between you and the people who wanted to tear you down. And then the academy separated you. And then life separated you further. And he went on and built his career knowing, somewhere in the back of his mind, that you were out there doing the same,and as long as you were succeeding, maybe the separation was justified.”
I hold her gaze.
“And then he walked into this apartment and heard that the people who replaced him didn’t protect you. They were the threat. He feels like you getting raped by those men is his fault.”
She blinks.
The wordrapedlands differently this time. Not with the explosive force of Roman’s delivery, but with the quiet, irreversible weight of a stone dropping into still water. It sinks. Settles. Creates ripples that she can’t stop.
“Well…it’s not his fault.” Her voice is smaller now, the certainty eroding at the edges. “We parted ways because…well. Maggie. Whatever. She got in the way. And then we got different placements. And it’s not like we were official or anything, but…”
The sentence trails into nothing.
I shake my head.
She looks up at me, and the height difference feels more pronounced than it should—not physically, but emotionally. She’s looking up at me with the expression of someone who is standing at the base of something tall and trying to decide whether to climb.
“He feels like he failed you,” I explain, “because chances are, he accepted that placement knowing that in order to get power in this field, you have to move up from the ground. And let’s be real.” I let the pause do its work—the investigator’s instinct for timing, deployed not for confession extraction but for clarity. “If you two were rivals, you can’t both be in one place and reach the top spot. Because what happens?”
