Staring after him.
At the tall, dark-haired man with the burnt vanilla scent and the investigator’s mind and the quiet, devastating habit of doing exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment without announcing it or requiring credit.
He’s going to take me shopping.
For clothes. Real clothes. The kind of clothes that a woman wears when she has a life outside of a station and people who want to see her in it.
And he said “my treat” like spending money on me was a pleasure rather than an obligation, and he winked like the whole thing was fun, and he chose me over a phone call from his department with the same effortless, non-negotiable certainty that he brings to everything.
Alaric Venezuela.
Who tells me about nests like he’s handing me something I was supposed to have all along.
Who looks at the gaps in my life and doesn’t flinch—just starts filling them. One by one. Quietly. Without asking for anything in return.
I can’t help but stare at him in shock.
Because I’m starting to realize that this man isn’t just investigating the crimes against me.
He’s investigating every way I’ve been failed.
And building the case for why I deserve better.
CHAPTER 25
Three Floors
~ALARIC~
“THREE FLOORS?!”
I have never—in thirty-eight years of existing on this planet, across two metropolitan police departments, one private investigation firm, three countries visited for work, and approximately ten thousand interactions with human beings in various states of emotional expression—seen a woman this excited about books.
Hazel Martinez is standing in the entrance of Whitfield & Daughters, the three-story independent bookshop that occupies a converted Victorian on the lake town’s main street, and she issquealing.
Not figuratively.
Literally.
A high-pitched, involuntary vocalization of pure, unfiltered delight that she would absolutely deny making if confronted with evidence. Her dark amber eyes are wide—not the diagnostic width of a woman processing shock or fear but the luminous, child-on-Christmas-morning width of a person who has walkedinto a space that their soul recognizes as home. Her lips are parted. Her hands are clenched at her sides in the specific, full-body tension of someone who is physically restraining themselves from running.
The building is extraordinary, I’ll give it that. The Victorian architecture has been preserved with the obsessive care that small-town historical societies apply to their most beloved structures—original hardwood floors, tin ceiling tiles, crown molding that has been repainted so many times it carries the layered texture of a century’s worth of aesthetic opinions. The bookshelves are floor-to-ceiling dark wood, built into the walls with the permanent, load-bearing intention of furniture that was designed to hold weight and be beautiful doing it. Rolling library ladders are positioned at intervals, the brass rails polished to a warm gold.
And it smells.
Like paper.
Old paper and new paper and the specific, complex perfume of a space where thousands of books have been breathing their chemical signatures into the air for decades. Vanilla from lignin breakdown. The faint, metallic tang of printing ink. The warm, woody undertone of shelf material. And layered beneath all of it: coffee, drifting from the small cafe that occupies the corner of the ground floor, the aroma carrying notes of espresso and cinnamon that complement the paper-and-wood atmosphere with an intimacy that suggests the two scents have been blending in this space for years.
Three floors of this.
And Hazel looks like she’s found religion.
She tugs my hand.
The contact is still new to me—this whole hand-holding development. Hazel Martinez initiating physical contact with the unconscious, unguarded ease of a woman who has forgottento be careful. Her fingers laced through mine, the grip warm, tight, carrying the particular urgency of someone who wants to go somewhere and wants the person attached to the other end of her hand to come with her.
She’s holding my hand.
