One moment, she was in the locker room, knees on the concrete floor and staring at the metal grating of her locker, and the next, she was in her K-9 patrol vehicle with Zeus in the back, the engine running, and the parking lot sliding past her windows.
Driving.
Where? Doesn’t matter. Just moving.
Her hands gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles white. The radio crackled with dispatch calls: routine traffic stops, welfare check on Oak Street, someone’s cat stuck in a tree. All normal Friday things, the world continuing to spin on its axis like nothing had changed. Yet everything had changed.
Three options. Choose one. You have until Monday.
Zeus whined from his compartment, a soft worried sound that carried to Maddox’s ears. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw him pressed against the partition, his dark eyes locked on her.
“I’m okay,” she lied, even though she knew that he knew it was a lie.
The streets blurred past, residential neighborhoods giving way to commercial districts, then back to residential areas. She wasn’t patrolling, wasn’t really going anywhere specific, just driving because sitting still meant thinking and thinking meant?—
Her chest was too tight. When had her kevlar vest gotten so tight? She tugged at the collar of her uniform shift, but it didn’thelp. The air in the vehicle felt thick, too thick to pull into her lungs.
Breathe, Maddox. You know how to breathe.
But her body wasn’t listening. It was doing what it always did when a threat homed in on her: preparing for combat, flooding her veins with adrenaline, spiking her heart rate. Fight or flight, except there was nothing to fight and nowhere to flee.
Zeus’s whine escalated to a bark, sharp and insistent, designed to bring her back to the present.
“I know,” Maddox said. “I know, buddy. I’m?—”
What? Fine? She’d already tried that lie.
She pulled into an empty parking lot, some closed-down grocery store with plywood over the windows and weeds cracking through the asphalt. She shoved the vehicle into park and sat there, her hands still frozen on the wheel.
Think. She needed to think.
But thinking required air, and her lungs weren’t cooperating. The vest was too tight. Everything was too tight, including her skin.
Her phone buzzed once, twice, a third time in rapid succession.
She knew without looking that it was Jade. The Phoenix Ridge PD grapevine moved fast, and no doubt someone had already told her. Maybe Riley, maybe one of the admin staff who’d seen Maddox leave Diana’s office looking gut-shot.
The phone kept buzzing, demanding attention she couldn’t give. Maddox pulled it out with shaking hands anyway.
Jade:“I heard. Are you okay?”
Jade:“Maddox, please answer me.”
Jade:“We need to talk about this. Where are you?”
Her thumb hovered over the keyboard, but no words came. What could she possibly say?
She set the phone face-down on the passenger seat. Behind her, Zeus whined, low and worried. Not his alert bark or his threat warning, the sound he made when Maddox woke up choking from nightmares, when the world went sideways and he was the only thing tethering herself to the world.
“I’m here,” she said, but her voice sounded hollow. “I’m right here.”
But she wasn’t. Not really.
She was back in Afghanistan, sand and grit in her teeth, Titan’s blood hot on her hands and his weight going slack in her arms.
She blinked hard, and the parking lot came back into focus. Her phone buzzed again.
Jade:“I’m coming to find you.”
