And I’d do it now—properly, thoroughly, with the full arsenal of a woman who is no longer twenty and is no longer competing and has significantly more to work with—if he wasn’t stuck at the office.
Coming out of the washroom, the music catches me.
Not the muted, wall-filtered version from the hallway. The full, unobstructed, chest-vibrating output from the bar’s second room—a space I hadn’t explored yet, located through an archway at the far end of the hall. The bass is deeper here. The rhythm more insistent. The kind of music that doesn’t ask your body to move but informs it that movement is now mandatory.
I gravitate.
With ease. The way water gravitates toward lower ground—without decision, without resistance, following the path that physics and desire and five shots of tequila have laid.
The second room is darker than the main bar. The lighting reduced to moving beams and the ambient glow of neon installations that paint the crowd in shifting colors—blue, violet,amber, the palette rotating with the music’s rhythm. The dance floor is packed. Bodies moving in the specific, synchronized-but-individual patterns of a crowd that has found its collective frequency and is riding it.
I step in.
And I disappear.
Not hiding. Not retreating. Disappearing the other way—into the music, into the crowd, into the specific, liberating anonymity of being one body among many in a space where no one knows your name or your case clearance rate or your suppressant history. Where you are not Officer Martinez or Chief Martinez or the woman with six months or the target of an assassination campaign. Where you are just a body that the bass line has claimed and the rhythm has freed.
I dance.
Not the performative, socially-conscious movement that I’ve occasionally produced at department functions—the minimal, keep-the-peace shuffling that satisfies the requirement of participation without exposing anything personal. This is different. This is the full-body, eyes-closed, hips-leading, arms-raised dancing of a woman who has stopped caring about the world and is letting the music tell her body what to do.
When has she ever been able to dance like no one is watching?
When has she ever been this free?
Not at the academy. Not at the department. Not at any point during the years with the former pack, who would have mocked her for moving like this, who would have told her she looked ridiculous, who would have used the vulnerability of a woman lost in music as another leverage point in their catalog of control.
Never.
The answer is never.
And the fact that “never” has just ended—here, tonight, on a dance floor in a bar in a Montana town with tequila in her blood and two Alphas somewhere in the crowd and a third who is staring at a selfie on his phone and losing his mind—is making me grin.
I’m lost in it.
The bass and the heat and the bodies and the specific, chemical euphoria of a woman whose brain has been relieved of its operational duties and is running on the backup system of pure, unfiltered sensation.
And then I catch it.
Not consciously.
Not through the analytical, sector-by-sector scanning that my officer’s training usually employs. Through the older system. The primal one. The Omega-receptor, limbic-level, survival-coded awareness that has been running in the background since before I had a badge and will continue running long after I lose one.
Eyes.
On me.
Not the ambient, crowd-level attention of strangers noticing a woman dancing. The specific, targeted, fixed-point focus of someone who is watching with intent. The particular weight of a gaze that has a purpose beyond observation.
My eyes open.
My body keeps moving—the rhythm still coursing through my hips and shoulders and arms, the music still doing its work—but my vision is active now, scanning the crowd with the automatic, threat-assessment protocol that five shots of tequila cannot fully suppress.
And I find him.
Across the room.
In all black.
