The photograph takes up most of the space above the fold: the burnt, skeletal remains of my department cruiser, still smoking, surrounded by yellow crime scene tape and the silhouettes of federal agents. The headline, printed in the bold, oversized font that small-town papers reserve for events that exceed their normal operational parameters, reads:
SWEETWATER FALLS STATION ROCKED BY TARGETED VEHICLE EXPLOSION — NEWLY APPOINTED CHIEF SURVIVES ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT
I cringe.
“Okay,” I say. “Maybe I’m delusional.”
“You’re not delusional,” Oakley says, his tone softening from tactical to something warmer. “You’re optimistic. Which is a nice quality in a person and a terrible quality in a target.”
I uncross my arms.
Cross them again.
The fidgeting of a woman who has accepted the premise and is now grappling with the logistics.
“Well…how am I going to get my stuff?”
The question comes out quieter than I intend.
Because even as I ask it, the answer is already assembling itself in my mind—the inventory of Hazel Martinez’s possessions organizing itself with the brutal efficiency of a woman who has trained herself to travel light because traveling light means leaving fast and leaving fast means survival.
“I don’t have much, I guess,” I add. “Not like I had much. Just a suitcase of clothes. Probably take me half an hour to pack, at best.”
The room is quiet for a moment.
And in the quiet, the truth of it settles over me with a weight that the logistics don’t carry.
I don’t have much.
I’m thirty-two years old. I’ve held two department chief positions. I’ve been decorated for service, commended for leadership, recognized at three separate jurisdictional levels for case clearance rates that exceeded every benchmark the system could produce.
And everything I own fits in a suitcase.
Because the things that mattered—the things that a person accumulates over a life, the objects that transform a space from a location into a home—are in a storage unit outside the city. Locked away. Hidden. Protected from the pack that I was so certain would try to take them that I drove four hours to ensure they couldn’t.
My grandmother’s cast-iron skillet. The set of ceramic bowls I bought at a market in Santa Fe the one weekend I took a vacation. The books. God, the books. The romance novels with broken spines and dog-eared pages and highlighted passages about women who moved to small towns and found kitchens with good light and people who stayed.
The framed photo of my mother that I’d wrapped in three layers of bubble wrap because I couldn’t bear the thought of the glass cracking. The quilt my abuela made that still smells like her kitchen even after all these years—cinnamon and corn masa and the particular warmth of a home where someone actually cooked for the people they loved. The small ceramic cat that I found at a thrift store during the academy and kept on my nightstand because it looked like it was smiling and some nights that was the only smile in the room.
All of it in a ten-by-ten concrete box because I was too paranoid to keep it where I lived.
And I was right to be paranoid. That’s the worst part. The paranoia wasn’t pathological—it was accurate. It was the survival instinct of a woman who had learned through direct experience that the people closest to her would weaponize her attachments if given the chance. The pack did take things. Took my autonomy. Took my safety. Took my body in an alley and called it biology. If they’d known about the storage unit, they’d have taken that too. Would have held my grandmother’s skillet hostage the way they held everything else—as leverage, as control, as another thread in the web that kept me compliant.
So I guess the paranoia did me a favor.
And now I’m standing in a hospital room in potentially borrowed clothes with a suitcase’s worth of possessions to my current name and three Alphas who are asking me to move into their government-secured home as if that’s a thing that happens to women like me.
I must have been in my thoughts for too long.
A hand settles on my shoulder.
Light. Warm. The contact telegraphed with enough gentleness that my body registers it as intentional comfort rather than unexpected intrusion—the specific, Oakley-calibrated pressure that I’ve started to recognize as his signature. He touches the way he moves: with an ease that looks casual and is actually precise.
I blink.
Surface.
He’s standing beside me now—closer than he was, having crossed the remaining distance while my mind was elsewhere—and his hazel eyes are on mine with the focused, undemanding attention of a man who noticed I’d gone somewhere and waited for me to come back rather than pulling me out.
