“Evacuate the building. Full shutdown. No one enters or exits until I authorize it. Set a perimeter at fifty meters from the blast site. Anyone experiencing respiratory symptoms gets flagged and checked.Move.”
The orders scatter the officers like a hand through smoke—each one finding their direction with the sudden, startled efficiency of people who have been given clear commands for the first time in this department’s recent memory.
The lot empties.
The fire hisses under the extinguisher foam, the cruiser’s frame reduced to a blackened skeleton wreathed in chemicalwhite. Smoke rises into the October sky. The sirens continue their electronic wailing from the building’s interior, a sound that will persist until someone reaches the panel and kills it.
And I’m in the bushes.
Against the wall. Hazel unconscious against my chest, her pulse steady under my fingers, her scent—the eucalyptus frost dissolved, the dark cocoa and smoked clove pouring off her skin unguarded—blending with the smoke and the chemical tang and my own frozen pine in a cocktail that my lungs are processing along with whatever the aerosol deposited.
I look at her face.
Dust on her cheeks. A small cut along her hairline where debris made contact—superficial, already clotting, the blood mixing with the dirt and the icy blue strands that have escaped her bun and fallen across her closed eyes. Her glasses—the rectangular frames from the nightstand, the ones Oakley had placed on her face while she was feverish—are gone. Lost in the blast. Somewhere in the debris field, crushed under shrapnel that should have been her.
Sixty seconds.
If I’d been sixty seconds later returning from the registry. If I’d taken one more wrong turn in city traffic. If I’d stopped for the gas I’d considered stopping for and decided against because something—instinct, impatience, the particular urgency that has been running through my blood since I heard what her pack did to her—told me to keep driving.
Sixty seconds and she would be in that car.
Sixty seconds and the woman who karate-chopped me awake this morning and called me Commander with a smirk that rearranged my cardiovascular system would be a body in a gravel lot and I would be standing over it instead of holding her.
I can’t do this.
Not the holding. Not the protecting. Not the tactical assessment that my training continues to run on autopilot while the rest of me fractures along lines I’d spent a decade reinforcing.
I can’t do thisalone.
The admission is so foreign to my internal vocabulary that it takes a moment to recognize as mine. Roman Kade does not ask for help. Roman Kade does not acknowledge operational limitations. Roman Kade competes, commands, and occasionally concedes when Oakley’s black belt makes the argument more persuasively than his pride can counter. But he does not—has never—admitted that a situation has exceeded his capacity.
This situation has exceeded my capacity.
Someone has tried to kill Hazel twice in twenty-four hours. The fire was a probe. The bomb was the execution. And whoever is behind it has resources—access to the station, knowledge of her routine, the ability to acquire accelerant and explosive materials in a rural town where the hardware store closes at five and everyone knows everyone’s name.
This isn’t local.
This is organized. Funded. Connected to whatever operation Hazel’s investigation is threatening to expose—the missing Omegas, the shell companies, the property acquisitions, the new Omega who arrived at her old station with the precision of a replacement part being installed in a machine.
I need resources I don’t have.
I need authority that my rank in a rural oversight assignment doesn’t provide.
I need someone who operates above the jurisdictional ceiling that is currently preventing me from treating this situation with the response it demands.
I bite my lip.
The contact is grounding—the small, sharp pain anchoring me in the present, in the bushes, in the reality of Hazel’s weight against my chest and the smoke in the air and the distant sound of Oakley’s pursuit carrying across the paddock.
My phone is still in my hand.
I pull up the contact.
The name stares back at me from the screen with the specific, charged weight of a number I have not dialed since the day I accepted this assignment. A number that was given to me with the explicit instruction that it be used only when the situation warranted escalation beyond my operational mandate. A number attached to a man who operates in the space between institutional authority and the kind of power that doesn’t appear in organizational charts.
CALLAHAN
I stare at it.
