The table beside the corkboard—previously serving as a secondary surface for overflow and coffee rings—has been converted into a proper case display. Files arranged chronologically. Evidence grouped by category: financial records here, property transactions there, missing persons profiles in a separate stack with red tabs marking the pages I’d flagged. Everything mapped to correspond with the pin board’s red strings, the physical documents mirroring the visual display with a parallel structure that makes the investigation navigable at a glance.
I stare.
“How the hell did you do that so fast?”
Alaric is leaning against the windowsill, arms crossed, iced coffee in hand, looking approximately as smug as a man who carries a pager and wears a beige trench coat can look—which, it turns out, is significantly.
He chuckles.
The sound is low, warm, and carries the specific satisfaction of a man who has just demonstrated a skill he considers fundamental and is enjoying the surprise it generates.
“Well,” he says, tilting his coffee toward me in a gesture that is both toast and challenge, “I have been in the force a tad longer than you.”
He winks.
Alaric Venezuela just winked at me.
The man who processes emotional stimuli like tax returns and considers his pager a cutting-edge communication device just winked at me over an iced coffee in my office like he’s a normal human being capable of playful interaction.
I don’t know what to do with this information.
“Which pastry do you want?” he asks, gesturing to the bag that sits on the desk’s now-pristine surface like a trophy.
I point.
Immediately. Without deliberation, without the polite hesitation that social convention requires when someone offers you a selection, without the performative “oh, I don’t mind, you choose” dance that I’ve been conditioned to perform in group food situations. My finger extends toward the cream custard pastry with the decisive urgency of a woman who has learned, over the course of one morning, that hesitating over food is a luxury her body can no longer afford.
Then I catch myself.
“Oh…wait. You can choose first.”
The correction is automatic. Reflexive. The deeply embedded protocol of a woman whose pack taught her that Omegas eat last, choose last, take what’s left after the Alphas have had their fill—the behavioral residue of a dynamic that disguised hierarchy as courtesy and called it tradition.
Alaric arches an eyebrow.
The motion is slow, deliberate, and communicates more than a paragraph of text. It says:I heard what you just did, and I know why you did it, and we are not going to do it that way.
“Omegas first,” he says, his voice carrying the gentle, absolute authority that I’m beginning to understand is not negotiable. “Particularly our chief, who is rather hungry.”
Our chief.
Our.
The possessive pronoun detonates quietly behind my sternum.
I blush.
Just slightly. The heat rising to my cheeks in a wave that I mask by reaching for the cream custard with the focused attention of a woman who is absolutely, categorically not affected by a thirty-eight-year-old Alpha calling her “ours” over pastry in a government office.
“My last pack,” I say, and the words come out before the filter catches them, carried on the momentum of lowered walls and cream custard and the particular safety this man creates by simply being present in a room, “I was normally last. Which usually meant the pastries were gone.”
Alaric’s frown is immediate.
The expression condenses every reaction—the anger, the sadness, the investigator’s cataloguing of another data point in the growing case file of Hazel Martinez’s former pack—into a single, controlled contraction of facial muscles that communicates displeasure without burdening me with its weight.
“That would never happen with us.”
Six words. Delivered like a sworn statement. The kind of sentence that in Alaric Venezuela’s vocabulary constitutes a binding commitment.
