The irritation built as she crossed the parking lot, her strides long and deliberate. She was fine. She handled her calls, kept her team safe, and did the job exactly the way she was supposed to do it. The fact her heart hammered after a weapons call didn’t mean anything except that adrenaline took time to metabolize. And the fact that she sometimes saw flashes of things that weren’t quite present didn’t mean she couldn’t compartmentalize when it mattered.
She was fine. Everyone just needed to leave her alone and let her do her job.
But underneath the irritation—buried so deep she could almost pretend it wasn’t there—Jade’s words circled back around.“You can’t run on adrenaline and stubbornness forever.”As if Jade knew anything about what Maddox could and couldn’t do. As if eight years of managing just fine meant nothing in the face of one tough month.
Maddox shoved the thought down even further and kept walking.
The K-9 building looked exactly as she’d left it less than an hour ago, but somehow the space felt different now. Smaller, maybe, or just heavier with the weight of everything she was trying to not think about.
Zeus heard her footsteps before she reached his kennel, and she could see him already on his feet, ears alert, those dark eyes tracking her movement through the chainlink. He knew her walk and could probably identify it from three rooms away based on rhythm alone.
She unlatched the kennel door and stepped inside. Zeus pressed against her legs immediately, his seventy-five pounds of solid warmth anchoring her to something real and present. She crouched down on the concrete floor without bothering to think about it, and he leaned his full weight into her side.
“Hey, boy,” she murmured, her voice harsher than she meant it to be.
He didn’t respond—of course he didn’t, he was a dog—but his tail swept once across the concrete and his eyes stayed fixed on her face with that unnerving awareness he’d always had. Maddox ran her hands through his coat, her fingers finding the familiar paths through his thick fur. The repetitive motion settled something in her chest that had been pulled too tight since she’d walked into Diana’s office. Zeus didn’t judge, didn’t ask questions she didn’t want to answer, didn’t think she needed fixing.
He just stayed.
“We’ve got mandatory therapy now,” she told him, the words coming easier and gentler with only Zeus to hear them. “Once a week on Tuesday afternoons with Jade Kessler. She’s the trauma counselor. Ex-Army medic.”
Zeus’s ears twitched at the sound of her voice, listening in whatever way dogs listened. His expression didn’t change, and he kept watching her.
“She thinks I can’t handle the job,” Maddox continued, and hearing it out loud made the irritation spike again, sharp and immediate. “Diana thinks I’m burning out, and everyone apparently thinks I’m one bad call away from completely falling apart.”
The rain drummed steadily on the metal roof above them, a rhythm that filled the spaces between her words. Zeus shifted slightly, resettling his weight against her side, and the pressure of him grounded her in a way nothing else really could.
“We’re fine,” she said, more to herself than Zeus. “We handle it. We’ve always handled it.”
Zeus licked her hand once, and the warmth of his tongue against her skin pulled her back from wherever her mind had started to drift. She sat there longer than she should’ve, longer than what was probably professional or necessary, but she couldn’t quite make herself stand up and leave yet. Going home felt heavier tonight than it usually did. Home was just her and Zeus in a small house on the outskirts of Phoenix Ridge that had decent land for him to run and privacy from neighbors who might have opinions about how she lived her life.
It was exactly what she wanted: solitude, quiet, and no one asking questions or expecting things she couldn’t—and didn’t want to—give.
So why did the thought of going there tonight make her chest feel tight?
“Come on,” she finally said, pushing herself to her feet. Her knees protested slightly from crouching so long on cold concrete, but she ignored the bite. “Let’s go home.”
Zeus followed her out of the kennel without hesitation, staying close at her left side as they walked back through the K-9 building to the parking lot. The rain had settled into a steady rhythm, not quite heavy enough to be a downpour but constant and soaking. Maddox opened the passenger door for Zeus, made sure he was secured, then climbed into the driver’s seat.
The engine turned over with its familiar rumble. She let it idle for a moment, hands resting on the steering wheel while rain streaked down the windshield and blurred everything beyond the glass into shapes without definition.
Six sessions. She could do this. All she had to do was show up, sit through an hour of whatever therapeutic techniques Jade thought would help, and prove to Diana and everyone else that she was fine and didn’t need this drastic intervention.
Check the box, move on, do her job.
Maddox put her truck in gear and pulled out of the parking lot. The drive home took twenty minutes on a good day, longer when traffic backed up on the coastal road. Tonight, the streets were mostly empty, just the occasional car passing in the opposite direction with headlights cutting through the rain and dark. She navigated the familiar route without thinking about it—left out of the station lot, straight through downtown Phoenix Ridge with its closed shops and dimly lit cafes, right onto the coastal highway that wound along the cliff overlooking the ocean.
The water was barely visible through the rain and dusk, just a dark expanse stretching out to meet an even darker sky. Maddox kept her eyes trained on the road and tried not to think about Jade Kessler assessing her or the way her chest had felt too tight in Diana’s office and how her first instinct had been to bolt from the room rather than sit there and accept what was being mandated.
She tried to not think about any of it.
Beside her, Zeus shifted in his chair, a small sound of movement that she felt more than heard. His presence was a weight she could sense, steady and constant and the only thing today that hadn’t asked her to be anything other than exactly what and who she was.
The house appeared around the bend through the sheet of rain—small, single story, set back from the road with enough land around it that her nearest neighbor was half a mile away. It gave her exactly what she’d wanted when she’d bought it five years ago: privacy, breathing room, and space for Zeus.
Maddox pulled into the gravel driveway and cut the engine. The sudden silence felt loud in her ears, broken only by the rain on the roof and Zeus’s quiet breathing beside her. She sat therefor a moment, her hands still gripping the wheel as she stared at the dark silhouette of her house through the rain-streaked glass.
One session. She’d go to one session on Tuesday, sit through whatever Jade thought needed to happen, and prove to everyone how unnecessary all this was. She’d prove she was fine and could keep doing this work without whatever support the department thought she needed.
