How long?
The question surfaces uninvited, cold and clinical as an autopsy report.
How long before the suppressants stop being a shield and start being a coffin?
How long before the nosebleeds become seizures, the insomnia becomes something irreversible, or the heat cycles I’ve been chemically strangling, fight their way through the barricade with enough force to level me?
How long before I’m the next Omega they find on a bathroom floor?
I open my eyes.
The blood has slowed to a trickle, red fading to pink as water from the tap dilutes the evidence. I straighten, wipe my nose with mechanical efficiency, wash my hands until the water runs clear, and my skin smells like cheap soap instead of iron. My reflection in the window glass stares back at me—hazel-brown eyes that are nearly black in this light, the dark circles beneath them deepening with each sleepless night, the set of my jaw carrying enough tension to fracture stone.
You’re fine.
You’re always fine.
Fine is the only option available.
I clean the sink until it’s spotless—because a crime scene should always be processed, even when the victim and the perpetrator are the same person—and then I pour a fresh cup ofcoffee. Black. Scorching. Bitter enough to qualify as a personality trait.
The mug is warm against my palms as I carry it into the living room.
Living roomis generous. The space serves as a bedroom, office, evidence processing center, and psychological torture chamber, depending on the hour. The mattress is pushed against one wall, sheets twisted from another night of three-hour sleep punctuated by dreams I refuse to catalogue. My patrol jacket hangs beside the front door. A single lamp occupies the corner, its light yellowed and insufficient.
And dominating the far wall—consuming it entirely, from baseboard to just below the ceiling—is the board.
Myboard.
I’d built it on the second night, after the radiator woke me at three a.m. and sleep refused to return. Cork panels purchased from the hardware store where the owner had asked too many questions. Red string acquired from the general store where the cashier had noted, with suspicious casualness, that “most folks use that for craft projects.” Photographs printed at the town’s single copy shop, where the teenager behind the counter had stared at the images with wide eyes before I’d silenced his curiosity with a look that could curdle milk at thirty paces.
The board is not a craft project.
It’s an investigation.
Pins hold photographs in clusters—faces, locations, timelines. Red string connects them in patterns that my detective’s brain has been mapping obsessively since I first sat down with the case files Callahan shipped to my apartment in an unmarked package. Blue pins for confirmed facts. Yellow for working theories. Black for dead ends.
And there are a lot of dead ends in Sweetwater Falls.
The crime statistics alone had set off every alarm in my training. A town this size should have a baseline of incidents—domestic disturbances, petty theft, the occasional DUI, the inevitable property disputes that come with rural living. Instead, the records show a community so clean it gleams. Missing persons reports that were filed and closed within forty-eight hours with minimal documentation. Assault cases that vanished from the docket without explanation. A domestic violence report from six months ago that lists the complainant as “withdrawn” with no follow-up, no victim interview, no indication that anyone investigated whether the withdrawal was voluntary.
Clean towns aren’t clean. They’re cleaned.
And someone in this picturesque little paradise is holding the mop.
I sip my coffee and let my gaze travel the board’s web of connections, each red string a hypothesis, each pin a breadcrumb in a trail that someone has gone to extraordinary lengths to sweep away.
The missing persons cases bother me most. Three in the last eighteen months—all Omegas, all under forty, all reported by neighbors or employers rather than pack members. Each case was opened, assigned a cursory investigation, and closed within days. Resolution:Subject voluntarily relocated. No evidence of foul play.The same language, the same timeline, the same conspicuous absence of the kind of thorough documentation that any competent investigator would demand.
Who closes a missing persons case in forty-eight hours without interviewing the missing person?
Who accepts “voluntarily relocated” without a forwarding address, a phone call, a single piece of confirmation that the subject is actually alive?
The same people who filed those cases, Martinez. The same department you’re now running.
My eyes narrow as they reach the center of the board.
She’s there. Right in the middle, where all the red strings converge like arteries feeding a heart.
