And I have a very high suspicion that whoever is behind this doesn’t want that case to wrap up with her still breathing.
I force my eyes open.
The operational brain takes over—the commander displacing the man, the tactical training suppressing the adrenaline with the mechanical efficiency of a system designed to function in exactly these conditions. Smoke. Sirens. An unconscious civilian—Omega, my Omega, stop—in my arms. A compromised perimeter. Unknown hostiles.
Through the lattice of broken branches and the debris scattered across the gravel, I can see the station’s side entrance. Officers are pouring out—the Beta rookies, the few remaining veterans who haven’t been reassigned or fired, all of them in various states of alarm that range from shocked immobility to panicked running. The car burns. The smoke column rises. Fire extinguishers have materialized from somewhere—the station’s emergency equipment, finally being used for an actual emergency rather than gathering dust in a cabinet that hadn’t been opened since the previous chief’s administration.
Alaric emerges.
He comes through the side entrance like a man who has been expecting this exact scenario and is executing a response plan he assembled in the time it took to hear the blast and reach the door. The beige coat billows behind him, his dark eyes scanning the lot with the rapid, systematic assessment of a former metro chief who has managed more active scenes than this station has processed in its entire operational history. He’s barking orders before his feet hit the gravel—commands that carry the institutional authority of a man whose voice was built for crisis.
Oakley is half a step behind.
The easy charm is gone. In its place is the focused, athletic efficiency of a man whose black-belt training has activated—his body moving with a controlled speed that is distinct from the officers’ panicked sprinting, his green eyes locked on the scene with the predatory focus of someone who has been trained to identify threats in real time.
“Hazel!”
Oakley’s voice cuts through the sirens and the shouting, the name carrying a desperation that makes my chest constrict. He’s scanning the lot—the blast zone, the debris field, the burning wreckage—looking for the woman who should have been walking toward that car and isn’t visible because she’s in the bushes against the wall, unconscious in the arms of a man who is currently hidden by vegetation and twisted metal shrapnel that the explosion scattered across the lot’s western perimeter.
I need to make the call.
Not to Oakley. Not by shouting from the bushes and giving away our position to anyone who might still be watching, who might still be present, who might have a secondary plan for the eventuality that the primary detonation didn’t finish the job.
Because someoneiswatching.
My eyes—trained by a decade of surveillance operations, sharpened by competitive instincts that apply as readily to threat detection as they do to academic rankings—catch the anomaly in the perimeter.
Eastern edge of the lot.
Beyond the fire department’s response radius. Beyond the cluster of officers and emergency personnel who are converging on the burning cruiser with the tunnel-visioned focus that crisis generates in untrained responders.
A figure.
All black. Head to foot—black jacket, black pants, black boots, black mask covering the lower face and obscuring anyidentifying features beneath a hood that throws the upper half into shadow. The silhouette is deliberate. Curated. The outfit of someone who planned to be present at this scene and planned not to be identified while present.
They’re standing at the lot’s eastern boundary, partially obscured by the wooden fence that separates the station’s property from the adjacent horse paddock. Their body is angled toward the blast site, the posture of someone who is observing an outcome they orchestrated.
And they’re taking photos.
A phone. Raised to eye level. The distinctive pose of someone documenting a scene—not with the frantic, reactive energy of a bystander capturing chaos, but with the slow, methodical deliberation of someone collecting evidence of their own work. A progress report. A confirmation image. Proof of execution sent to whoever commissioned this.
There you are.
My right hand moves.
Slowly. The motion controlled by the same tactical discipline that keeps my breathing steady and my position concealed. I reach into my jacket pocket—careful not to shift Hazel’s weight, careful not to disturb the branches that are providing our cover—and extract my phone.
The camera activates with a tap.
I photograph them.
Not once. Not twice. Multiple frames in rapid succession—the shutter capturing the figure from the angle the bushes provide, each image documenting the black outfit, the phone raised to their face, the stance, the location relative to the station, the fence line, the direction they’re facing. The resolution won’t be forensic-grade at this distance, but it’ll be enough. Enough to establish presence. Enough to prove thatsomeone was at this scene who wasn’t emergency personnel, wasn’t a bystander, wasn’t an officer.
Was watching.
Was documenting.
Was walking away.
