I’m already gripping the wheel, both fists locked at ten and two with the kind of white-knuckled intensity that the department’s anger management seminar would flag as a “concerning behavioral indicator.” The leather creaks under my palms. The veins in my forearms stand at attention, tracing blue highways beneath the Norse runes and wolf iconography that I’d spent the last decade having etched into my skin as if the ink could somehow contain the things I don’t trust myself to say out loud.
Hazel Martinez.
Hazel. Fucking. Martinez.
My heart is slamming against my ribcage like a suspect trying to breach a locked door—furious, arrhythmic, completely insubordinate. I can feel my pulse in my throat, in my temples, in the tips of my fingers where they dug into the wheel’s stitching. The pounding has been going since the moment I stepped out of this cruiser and locked eyes with her across a gravel parking lot, and it hasn’t slowed. Hasn’t eased. Hasn’t done me the basic goddamn courtesy of returning to a rate that doesn’t suggest I’m having a cardiac event in the driver’s seat of a department vehicle.
Because the woman I haven’t seen in years.
My rival.
My first official crush.
Theonlyfemale who has ever lit a fire under my ass that I couldn’t outrun, outsmart, or extinguish through sheer force of competitive willpower?—
Is now my temporary chief in command.
Chief Hazel Martinez.
Chief.
The title grinds against the inside of my skull like glass in a wound. Not because she doesn’t deserve it—I’m a lot of things, but delusional isn’t one of them, and anyone who watched that woman operate at the academy knows she was built for command the way some people are built for breathing. But because hearing it from her mouth, directed at me, with that slow, devastating smirk pulling at her lips while she corrected my address like I was a rookie who’d forgotten protocol?—
It did something.
Something I refuse to name.
Something that is currently manifesting as approximately thirty percent rage, thirty percent grudging respect, and forty percent of a biological response that my tactical pants are doing a poor job of concealing.
I shift in the seat, adjusting with the covert precision of a man who has spent a decade hiding exactly this kind of reaction to exactly this kind of woman.
Her scent is still on me.
Not physically—we hadn’t touched, hadn’t even shaken hands, had maintained the kind of strategic distance that two people maintain when they know proximity is a loaded weapon. But the October wind had done the work for us, carrying her pheromones across the three feet of gravel between our bodies and embedding them into my jacket, my hair, the lining of my lungs where they now sit like squatters who have no intention of vacating.
Cold eucalyptus frost.
That was the first layer. The defensive perimeter. The scent she deploys like a shield, sharp and crystalline, designed to keep every Alpha in a fifty-foot radius at arm’s length. I remember it from the academy—the way it would hit during morning drills when she was focused, when she was performing, when she was in the zone that made her scores match mine and her instructors’ jaws clench with the frustration of encountering someone they couldn’t rattle.
Dark cocoa husk.
Beneath the frost. Deeper. The note that most people never got close enough to detect because Hazel Martinez didn’t let people close. But I’d been close. Closer than either of us would admit to anyone outside the academy’s walls. Close enough to know that when the eucalyptus dropped—when she was exhausted, or furious, or pressed against me on a sparring mat with her hair escaping its regulation bun and her hazel-brown eyes almost black with something that had nothing to do with combat—the cocoa emerged like the truth beneath the lie. Rich. Velvety. The kind of warm that makes you forget the cold exists.
And the cocoa wasn’t even the worst of it.
Smoked clove.
The undertone that only surfaced when she was genuinely affected—not the controlled, strategic affect she performed for professional purposes, but the real, unfiltered thing. The scent that had leaked through her defenses exactly once in my presence, on a night in the academy’s training annex when we’d been the last two cadets standing after a forty-eight-hour tactical simulation, both running on caffeine and mutual hatred and the kind of physical exhaustion that strips away every pretense until there’s nothing left but raw honesty.
She’d smelled like smoked clove that night.
And I’d almost kissed her.
Would have, if she hadn’t turned away first, her chin lifting in that defiant way she has, her scent locking back behind the frost like a door slamming in my face.
The memory hits with enough force to make my grip on the steering wheel audibly creak.
And the lavender ash.
