My phone buzzes on the kitchen counter. I don’t check it. Probably Jamie, sending a follow-up mantra or a crystal recommendation or a horoscope reading that she’s convinced holds the key to my cosmic restoration.
Bless her delusional heart.
Instead, I stand in my living room—my office, my war room, my evidence of a life shrunk to four hundred square feet and a corkboard conspiracy—and I drink my coffee. Black and bitter and exactly as uncompromising as the woman holding it.
The board stares back.
The new Omega smiles her untouchable smile.
The missing persons files wait with the patience of the dead.
And Sweetwater Falls continues its performance of pastoral perfection outside my window, a town so clean it sparkles, so quiet you could hear a pin drop—or a body.
I take another sip. Let the burn travel down my throat, settle in my chest where it mingles with something colder. More permanent.
Determination.
Not the fragile kind that breaks at the first setback. Not the performative kind that looks good in a speech but dissolves under sustained pressure. The kind that lives in the marrow. The kind that was forged in cigarette burns and academy hazing and eleven years of proving that an Omega without a pack can reshape an entire department through sheer, stubborn, unyielding will.
My eyes lock on the photograph at the center of my board.
“I see you,” I whisper, and the words carry the weight of a loaded gun.
I don’t know who’s behind this yet. Don’t know whether the conspiracy begins and ends with the new Omega or whether she’s simply the visible surface of something much deeper, much darker, rooted in the suspiciously clean soil of this suspiciously perfect town.
But I’m going to find out.
Because Hazel Martinez has three weeks, a corkboard, a coffee addiction, and the kind of righteous fury that doesn’t sleep—even when the suppressants are failing, the nosebleeds are worsening, and her body is staging a revolt that she can’t outrun forever.
I’m going to solve this mystery.
At least before my dying breath.
CHAPTER 2
The Scent Of Something New
~HAZEL~
The Sweetwater Falls Sheriff’s Department smells like stale coffee, gun oil, and institutional mediocrity.
I’ve catalogued the scent profile of this building the way I catalogue every environment I enter—automatically, instinctively, the detective’s brain running diagnostics before the rest of me has finished crossing the threshold. Two-day-old Folgers burning on a hot plate that nobody’s cleaned since Clinton was in office. The metallic tang of a weapons locker that’s been opened and closed without proper maintenance. Cheap pine-scented cleaning solution that does more to advertise its existence than to actually disinfect anything. And beneath it all, the sour, unmistakable undertone of a department running on fumes and excuses.
Home sweet fucking home.
My boots hit the linoleum with the measured cadence of someone who learned long ago that how you enter a room determines how the room receives you. Chin up. Shoulders squared. Patrol jacket zipped to the sternum, badge catching theoverhead fluorescent in a way that’s entirely intentional. My icy blue hair is pulled into a tight regulation bun at the base of my skull, not a strand out of place, because control starts with the details.
The main bullpen opens before me—six desks arranged in two rows, a dispatch station against the far wall, a whiteboard that hasn’t been updated since before I arrived, and a break room visible through a half-open door that I’m choosing to pretend doesn’t exist based on the smell alone. Three officers are present, which is generous given that the shift roster lists seven. One is leaning back in his chair scrolling his phone. Another appears to be engaged in some deeply committed staring contest with his computer screensaver. The third?—
Is that a Rubik’s cube?
I file that observation away for later detonation and approach the front desk where Deputy Briggs—the rookie, twenty-three, sandy-haired, with the nervous energy of a golden retriever being asked to do calculus—is shuffling through a stack of manila folders with an expression that tells me everything before he opens his mouth.
“The files from the Henderson case,” I say, keeping my tone conversational, deceptively casual. “Are they on my desk?”
Briggs swallows. The motion is visible enough to track from across the room, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a fishing lure in a current.
“Chief, I—” He clears his throat, eyes darting to the folder stack like they might spontaneously produce the documents through sheer willpower. “I tried to locate them, ma’am. Went through the archive room, checked the digital system, even asked Linda in records. But they’re…not there, I’m sorry.”
