Not to alert her pack. Not to call for help. Not to retreat.
To bait.
She went to the washroom. Alone. Knowing it would create an opportunity for the stalker to follow—to close the distance, to move from observation to proximity, to enter the space that Hazel had just exited and leave his scent trail for anyone trained to read it.
Then she took the selfie.
Sent it to me.
Knowing.Knowingthat I would recognize the signal beneath the taunt. Because she knows me. Knows that I haven’t been absent for three weeks because of station meetings and coordination calls—she knows I’ve been absent because I’ve been watching her. Stalking her myself. Maintaining a parallel surveillance operation that tracked every move she made, every place she went, every contact she had, cataloguing the pattern of whoever was following her so that when the moment came, I would know the player and the game and the exact coordinates where the endgame would unfold.
She knew why I wasn’t around.
She knew I was the shadow watching the shadow that was watching her.
And the selfie—you’re stuck at the desk while I get to be hot and sexy without you—was not a taunt. It was a location ping. A signal flare dressed in tequila and a cocktail dress.I’m here. He’s here. Come get us both.
And when she went to the dance floor—when she stood in the neon and the bass and the moving crowd and found his eyes and held them and refused to look away—she was holding the target in place. Pinning him with her gaze and her defiance so that he wouldn’t move, wouldn’t relocate, wouldn’t disappear into the crowd before the net closed.
She was the bait.
And the trap.
And the woman who trusted me enough to stand in the crosshairs knowing that I would be behind her before the trigger was pulled.
My girl gave me the exact coordinates to bring the entire crew.
Because she knew. Because she’s Hazel. Because the most dangerous thing about this woman has never been her combat training or her case clearance rate or her competitive streak. It’s her mind. The mind that solved cases the department wanted buried. The mind that identified patterns in data that three separate analysts missed. The mind that, five shots of tequila deep on a dance floor with a gun pointed at her chest, calculated the tactical scenario faster than I did and positioned herself as the fixed point around which the entire operation pivoted.
Smart. Sexy. Reckless. Mine.
An officer rushes toward us.
Young. The specific, wide-eyed urgency of a subordinate who has been told to check on the commander and is discovering that the commander is standing in the middle of a compromised dance floor holding a drunk woman and an unholstered weapon and appears to be having a conversation rather than commanding.
“Sir, are you okay? Is—is the chief good?”
“Yep,” I say. “Good and drunk. Perfect combo.”
Hazel grins up at me.
“Aww,” she croons, the word dripping with the saccharine, tequila-enhanced playfulness that is the most dangerous version of her personality. “Want me to order you around too?”
I roll my eyes.
Look at the officer.
“Let Venezuela and Torres know she’s with me,” I say. The names landing with the professional weight of a command that expects compliance without repetition. “We’ll meet back at the location.”
The officer blinks. “Just…location?”
“Yep.”
And I scoop her up.
One arm under her knees. The other behind her back. The same motion I’ve been performing at the ranch for the last two weeks—lifting her from couches and carrying her to bed—except this time she’s in a cocktail dress and heels and the venue is a compromised crime scene rather than a living room and I am doing this in front of a subordinate officer and a SWAT team and whoever else is watching and I do not care.
She giggles.
