“Your consent is the ultimatum.”
The wordconsentlands in the space between us with the gravitational weight of a term that should be a given and has instead become, for this woman, a revelation.
She takes a breath.
Nervous. Shaking slightly at the edges.
“You guys’ Omega isn’t going to approve of this, Alaric.”
I smirk.
“Well. Good thing we don’t have one.”
She frowns.
The confusion that crosses her face is immediate and genuine—the wrinkled brow and narrowed eyes of a woman whose assumptions about the world have just been challenged by information she didn’t anticipate.
“Wait. What happened to Maggie?”
I shrug.
“You’ll have to ask Roman that. Neither Oakley nor I know a Maggie, and Roman practically seethes at every Omega who tries to go near his personal orbit. We’re not exactly lucky in that department.”
She stares at me.
“So…you guys have been Omegaless this whole time?”
“The whole time,” I confirm. “Hasn’t bit us in the ass yet, so?—”
“Oh my god.” Her eyes widen. “You’re supposed to knock on wood!”
I shrug.
“Nah. I don’t believe in that.”
“But you believe inkarma?”
“That’s more of an Oakley influence than a personal conviction, but sure.”
She groans.
The sound is exasperated and warm at the same time, the groan of a woman who is finding, against every defensive protocol she maintains, that bantering with me feels more natural than it should and more comfortable than she wants to admit.
She shakes her head.
But when she looks back at me, the groaning and the eye-rolling have settled, and what’s left is something quieter. Something that resembles the beginning of trust, viewed from a distance by a woman who hasn’t trusted anyone in a long time and is testing whether the ground will hold before she puts weight on it.
“It…seems like a reasonable arrangement,” she says, and the wordreasonableis doing the work thatsafecan’t yet. “Just temporarily. To make sure my health is good. And maybe figure out if I’m being targeted.”
She pauses.
Sighs.
And the next sentence comes out softer than anything I’ve heard from her since we met.
“And it would be nice to not feel like shit, either.”
The admission is small. Enormous. The eleven-word confession of a woman who has been feeling like shit for so long that she’d stopped registering it as a deviation from baseline and started treating it as the baseline itself. Who has been running on empty and sleeping on borrowed time and telling herself that the exhaustion and the loneliness and the nightmares and the cold showers and the silent screaming were just the operational costs of being Hazel Martinez, and was it really so bad, and didn’t everyone feel this way, and wasn’t this justlife?
