No one speaks.
The words settle into the cruiser like ash, like snowfall, like the kind of quiet that follows a confession no one was prepared to hear. Alaric smokes. Oakley stares at his hands. And I shift the cruiser into drive with fingers that aren’t as steady as they should be, pulling out of the parking lot at a speed that has nothing to do with urgency and everything to do with the need to put distance between myself and the building where Hazel Martinez is currently sitting in an office that was supposed to be someone else’s, doing a job she didn’t ask for, in a town that doesn’t deserve her.
I would be.
Alaric’s words loop through my skull like a siren I can’t silence, each repetition peeling back another layer of the defensive architecture I’ve spent a decade constructing specifically to avoid thinking about this woman in any terms that don’t involve competition or professional benchmarking.
Lonely.
Alone.
An Omega without a pack in a town that isn’t hers, solving cases that aren’t hers, sleeping in an apartment that isn’t hers, maintaining a career that someone is actively trying to take from her.
The road unfurls ahead of us—two lanes of cracked asphalt cutting through Montana grassland that stretches to the horizon in every direction, interrupted only by ranch fencing and the occasional cluster of cattle that watch our cruiser pass with the bored indifference of animals who have seen everything and been impressed by none of it.
The silence in the vehicle is so complete that I can hear the cherry of Alaric’s cigarette crackle with each inhale, can hear Oakley’s breathing in the backseat, can hear my own heart still pounding with a rhythm that refuses to normalize.
And then the memory surfaces.
Not gradually. Not with the soft fade-in of nostalgia. It arrives fully formed, vivid as a crime scene photograph, as if my brain has been preserving it in evidence storage for over a decade, waiting for exactly this moment to unseal the file.
Third year of the academy. February. Two a.m.
I’d been heading back to the barracks from a late study session—one of the solo ones I’d started scheduling after the library incidents with Hazel made it clear that proximity plus exhaustion plus our combined scent profiles equaled situations that neither of us could afford to repeat. The campus was dead at that hour, dormitory lights off, the paths between buildings lit only by the anemic security lamps that the academy’s budget prioritized below literally everything else.
I’d taken the shortcut through the service alley behind the mess hall—the one the instructors pretended didn’t exist because maintaining it would require acknowledging that the campus had a blind spot in its security coverage.
And that’s where I found her.
Hazel.
Kicking a trash can with enough force to send it ricocheting off the brick wall, the metallic crash splitting the silence of the alley with a violence that made me flatten against the nearest doorway on pure instinct.
She didn’t see me.
Or if she did, she was past caring.
She was bruised. Even in the dim light, I could see the damage—swelling along her jaw, the dark bloom of impact already forming across her cheekbone, a split in her lower lipthat caught what little illumination the security lamp provided and glinted with fresh blood. Her hair was loose, which never happened—Hazel Martinez kept her hair in regulation compliance the way she kept everything else in regulation compliance, controlled and contained and permitting no deviation—and it fell around her face in dark waves that she hadn’t yet started dyeing, the natural espresso brown catching shadows like spilled ink.
She was breathing hard. Ragged. The kind of breathing that happens when your body is processing pain and your mind is processing rage and neither system has enough oxygen to operate efficiently.
Her uniform was torn at the shoulder. Dirt on her knees. Scrapes along her forearms that looked like they’d come from being shoved against concrete—the kind of abrasions that don’t happen in sanctioned training and don’t appear in official incident reports.
A group of them.
A group of fucking assholes who’d wanted her to drop out.
I’d heard the whispers, of course. Everyone had. The cadets who thought an Omega in a combat training program was an insult to the profession. The ones who whispered about “biological limitations” and “designation-appropriate career paths” as if the academy’s enrollment criteria were a suggestion rather than a standard she’d exceeded to get there. The ones who believed that competition between designations cheapened the program and that Martinez should do everyone a favor and withdraw.
I’d dismissed it as talk. Cadets ran their mouths. It was part of the culture, ugly and persistent but ultimately impotent.
I’d been wrong.
The trash can hit the wall a second time. A third. Each impact accompanied by a sound from her throat that wasn’ta scream, wasn’t a sob, wasn’t any expression of weakness that the academy’s Alpha-majority culture would have used as ammunition. It was a growl. Low and broken and furious, the sound of a woman who had been knocked down and was in the process of deciding that the ground was not where she fucking belonged.
She stopped kicking.
Stood still.
