“You think a different team at the city station set her up?” Oakley’s voice has gone quiet, the playful energy entirely absent now, replaced by the focused intensity of an officer who is connecting operational dots faster than his casual demeanor would suggest. “Like maybe an ex-pack? We didn’t ask if she was in a pack or not.”
The wordpacklands against the inside of my chest with a weight I wasn’t prepared for.
Was she in a pack? Is she in one now? Has she found Alphas who can handle her, who match her, who don’t crumble under the weight of her competence the way most men crumble when confronted with a woman who is simply, objectively, better than them?
I shove the thought into the same locked compartment where I keep every other thought about Hazel Martinez that doesn’t serve a tactical purpose.
“Who would want to be with her stubborn ass?” I mutter, and even as the words leave my mouth, I can hear them for what they are—deflection masquerading as dismissal, the competitive reflex so deeply ingrained that it fires even when the competition has been over for years.
Alaric gives me a side-eye.
It’s not the fast, casual kind. It’s the slow, deliberate kind—the kind that a man delivers when he has spent two years cataloguing your tells and has decided to deploy that knowledge at the most surgically precise moment.
“Just like who would want to be with your filthy mouth,” he says, and the observation is so calmly delivered, so devoid of malice, so perfectly aimed at the exact intersectionof my hypocrisy and my self-awareness that it lands like a professional-grade gut punch.
I frown.
Then huff, because frowning without an accompanying exhale feels insufficient.
“What?” The word comes out defensive in a way I can hear but can’t correct, my scent spiking with the frozen pine that always accompanies irritation. “You suddenly have a soft spot for her because she’s actually a no-nonsense Omega? Is that what this is?” I scoff, the sound carrying more venom than the situation warrants because the venom isn’t really aimed at Alaric. “You’re fucking soft, Venezuela.”
Alaric doesn’t answer.
The silence from the passenger seat is worse than any rebuttal—a void that my words fall into without impact, without resistance, without the satisfaction of hitting something solid enough to justify the force behind them.
I reach for the ignition, turning the engine over with more aggression than the mechanism requires, the cruiser rumbling to life beneath us with the mechanical obedience of a vehicle that doesn’t have opinions about its occupants’ emotional states.
But before I can shift into drive, Alaric speaks.
“How isolating it must be.”
His voice is quiet. Not soft—Alaric Venezuela does not do soft. But quiet in the way of a man choosing his words with the same precision he applies to crime scene analysis, each syllable weighted and positioned for maximum impact.
“To be an Omega. By yourself. At her age—which, for the record, is similar to yours.” He doesn’t look at me. His eyes remain fixed on the window, watching the department building recede in the side mirror as if the architecture holds answers the conversation can’t provide. “Being in this small town, alone, after your entire station seemed to turn on you.”
My hand freezes on the gear shift.
“As someone who’s dedicated his life to the force—” The pause is intentional, loaded with the kind of pointed implication that Alaric delivers like a scalpel. “—maybe put yourself in her shoes for a moment. And wonder what level of betrayal you’d feel to be outcast and discarded after giving your all in every performance, every case, every action executed that saved a life.”
I say nothing.
Not because I don’t have a response. My brain is generating approximately seventeen of them simultaneously, ranging from defensive to dismissive to the one honest answer that I will bury in concrete before allowing it to reach my mouth.
But I say nothing, because sometimes silence is the only reaction that doesn’t betray you.
Oakley’s voice comes from the backseat, barely above a whisper.
“You think she’s lonely?”
The question is so quiet, so stripped of his usual performative energy, that it almost disappears beneath the idling engine. But it doesn’t disappear. It lingers. Expands. Fills the cruiser’s interior with the specific, uncomfortable weight of a truth that none of us are equipped to carry but all of us recognized the moment we stood in that parking lot and watched Hazel Martinez hold herself together with nothing but posture and pride.
Alaric reaches for his seatbelt, clicking it into place with the mechanical efficiency of a man preparing for forward motion in every sense. He rolls the window down—just slightly, just enough to admit a blade of October air—and produces a cigarette from the inner pocket of the beige coat with the practiced fluidity of a habit he’s never bothered to quit.
He lights it. The flame catches. The smoke curls.
And then, exhaling into the gap between the window glass and the Montana sky, he says:
“I would be.”
