Of course they’re not.
Because nothing in this department is where it should be, when it should be, in the condition it should be.
I hold his gaze for exactly two seconds longer than comfortable—long enough for the implications to register, short enough that it doesn’t qualify as intimidation in any official capacity—and nod once.
“I’ll look into it myself.” The words are neutral, professional, completely devoid of the frustration currently eating through my sternum like battery acid. “Go ahead and do your rounds with the others. And Briggs?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“When I say I want something on my desk by morning, that means the file, the supplementary documents, and any associated evidence logs. Not a verbal apology and a shrug. Clear?”
He nods with the vigor of someone who’s just been told his salvation depends on head movement.
“Crystal, Chief.”
I let him retreat, watching him grab his patrol hat and disappear through the side exit with a speed that suggests he’s as eager to leave my presence as I am to have him leave it. Then I pivot toward the second desk in the row, where Deputy Morales—Beta, mid-twenties, dark ponytail, the kind of performative busyness that involves typing on a keyboard without ever actually hitting Enter—is doing an admirable impression of someone engaged in critical police work.
“Morales.”
She startles, which is telling, because I’ve been standing in the middle of the bullpen in full uniform for three minutes. If I were a threat, half this department would be dead before they looked up from their screens.
“Chief Martinez.” She straightens in her chair, arranging her expression into something she clearly hopes passes for competent attentiveness. “What can I?—”
“The task reports I assigned Monday,” I interrupt, because pleasantries are a currency I stopped spending around day three of this assignment. “The community outreach logs, the incident response time audits, and the evidence room inventory I specifically requested be completed by close of business yesterday. Status?”
Morales blinks.
The pause that follows is the conversational equivalent of watching someone reach for a weapon they’ve forgotten to load.
“Well, Chief, today is the scheduled training rotation, so the officers who specialize in those particular units aren’t present at the?—”
“Stop.”
The word isn’t loud. Doesn’t need to be. I’ve spent a decade learning that volume is the tool of officers who’ve run out of authority, and I have plenty to spare.
I close the distance between us—three steps, deliberate, each one tightening the invisible perimeter of my command presence until Morales is looking up at me from her chair with the expression of someone who’s just realized the weather report was wrong about today.
“On Friday,” I say, keeping my voice at a register that forces everyone in earshot to lean in rather than away, “you gave me a similar excuse. Something about the weekend shift overlap and the personnel scheduling conflict. Correct?”
She opens her mouth.
“So if I ask tomorrow,” I continue, not giving her the runway, “is there going to be a different excuse? Or are we going to cycle through the entire calendar of reasons why a task that should take two competent adults a single afternoon has somehow defeated your entire department for seven consecutive days?”
Morales’ jaw works, no sound emerging, the visible mechanics of someone trying to construct a response that doesn’t exist.
“She’s being too harsh.”
The voice comes from the second row—Officer Dennings, I think, though I haven’t bothered to memorize all the surnames yet because half of them haven’t earned the distinction. He’s mid-thirties, Alpha by scent—cheap cologne masking stale aggression, the olfactory equivalent of spray-painting a condemned building—and he’s delivered the comment to his computer screen rather than to my face, which tells me everything about his courage.
I give him a side look.
Not a glance. Not a passing acknowledgment. Alook—the kind that has made perps reconsider their life choices in interrogation rooms, the kind that communicates in the ancient, preverbal language of predator and prey that the person on the receiving end has made a miscalculation they may not get the chance to repeat.
Dennings meets my eyes for approximately one and a half seconds before his gaze drops back to his screen. His shoulders curl inward. His fingers begin typing with sudden, furious purpose on a keyboard that, based on the blank document open on his monitor, is producing absolutely nothing.
That’s what I thought.
The eucalyptus frost of my scent sharpens, pushing outward through the bullpen like a temperature drop before a storm. I feel every nose in the room register it—the subtle flinches, the slight shifts in posture, the instinctive biological response to an Omega whose pheromones have just telegraphed something far more dangerous than distress.
