Kicks her heeled feet.
The shoes catching the neon light as her legs swing in the delighted, uninhibited motion of a woman who is being carried by a man who just shot someone for her and who considers this the most romantic thing that has ever happened.
The officer is blushing.
The visible, ears-to-hairline flush of a young man who is witnessing his commanding officer carry a giggling woman in a cocktail dress through a crime scene and is experiencing the specific professional confusion of someone whose training did not prepare him for this scenario.
“Eyes on me, officer,” I say.
He snaps to attention.
“She’s my Omega.” I hold his gaze. “And I still have one more round in my chamber.”
“Yes, sir!”
He salutes.
Actually salutes. The rigid, arm-at-angle, palm-forward military salute that has no place in a civilian police operation and yet somehow feels entirely appropriate given the circumstances.
“Repeat exactly what I said,” I tell him. “They’ll get it.”
I’m leaving before he can reply.
Moving through the chaos with the focused, crowd-navigating efficiency of a man who has a destination and a woman in his arms and approximately zero interest in any stimulus that is not one of those two things. SWAT officers step aside as I pass—the instinctive, hierarchical deference of men who recognize rank even when rank is carrying a giggling civilian through an active scene.
Down the hall.
Past the bathrooms where Hazel took her selfie and sent me the coordinates that brought the operation to its conclusion.
Down another hall.
The venue’s back-of-house—staff areas, storage, the utilitarian infrastructure that exists behind every bar’s public face. The lighting is fluorescent here. The floors concrete. The ambient aesthetic shifting from “grand opening” to “commercial kitchen” with the abruptness of crossing a threshold between two worlds.
I find a room.
A prep space, by the look of it. Metal counters. Shelving. The cool, industrial atmosphere of a space designed for function rather than atmosphere. The door has a lock.
I close the door.
Lock it.
Set Hazel on the metal counter.
She squirms immediately.
“Cold!”
The word comes out as a yelp—the involuntary, high-pitched protest of a woman whose thighs have just made contact with a metal surface that has been absorbing the building’s ambient temperature and is communicating that temperature through the thin barrier of her cocktail dress.
She pouts.
Looking up at me with the wide-eyed, lower-lip-forward expression that drunk Hazel deploys as a weapon and sober Hazel would never admit to possessing.
“You’re lucky it’s cold,” I say, “and I’m not slapping that ass of yours.”
She grins.
The mischievous, tequila-fueled, completely unintimidated grin of a woman who has just been threatened with a spanking and considers the threat a promise.
