Suspiciously low.
The phrase snags in my mind like a fishhook, embedding itself alongside the detective instincts I can’t turn off no matter how thoroughly my career is being dismantled. Suspiciously low crime rates in small towns usually mean one of two things: either the community is genuinely peaceful, or someone is very, very good at making problems disappear.
“I need a month,” Callahan continues, his voice dropping again, conspiratorial in a way that makes the hair on my arms rise. “At least a month to try to figure out who’s pulling strings and why they’ve targeted you specifically. If you can lay low, handle whatever cases come across the desk there in the meantime, I can do my part from this end.”
A month.
Thirty days in a town I’ve never heard of, doing work that will feel like playing police chief at a kindergarten crime scene, while everything I’ve built here burns to the ground without me.
The silence stretches.
I stare at him—long, hard, unflinching—cataloguing every micro-expression, every twitch of his jaw, every slight variation in his scent that might betray deception or uncertainty. Finding nothing but resolve and something that looks dangerously close to grief.
My arms tighten across my chest, fingers digging into my own biceps hard enough to leave crescents in the skin. The eucalyptus frost of my scent has settled into something colder now, something resigned, the dark cocoa notes flattening into ash.
“This is my life, Sir.”
The words emerge barely above a whisper, stripped of the fury and the posturing and the armored professionalism I’ve worn like a second skin since the day I earned my badge. Just raw, unfiltered truth, spoken by the woman behind the title.
This department is my life. This badge is my identity. This rank is the only thing I’ve ever had that no one gave me—I took it, earned it, bled for it.
And now someone’s ripping it from my hands like it was never mine to begin with.
Callahan nods, the motion heavy with understanding that transcends professional duty.
“I know,” he says quietly, and for a moment, the director disappears entirely, replaced by the man who’d mentored me through academy hazing, who’d advocated for my promotion when the board wanted to pass me over for a younger, pack-bonded Alpha who checked every conventional box. “But foronce, Hazel—for once, I need you to trust that I want the best for you. That everything I’m doing right now, including this—” He gestures at the file, the folder, the quiet devastation of this conversation. “—is because I’m trying to protect what you’ve built. Whatwe’vebuilt.”
Trust.
He’s asking me to trust.
When every molecule of my being is screaming that trust is the weapon people use against you right before they twist the knife.
But it’s Callahan.
Eleven years. Two hundred and thirty-eight meetings. Countless cases, countless battles, countless moments where he could have thrown me under the bus and chose to stand beside me instead. If there’s one person in this entire building—in this entiresystem—who has earned the right to ask for my trust, it’s the man sitting behind that desk with grief written into the lines around his eyes.
I nod.
Once. Sharp. The kind of nod that seals decisions in courtrooms and on battlefields.
Then I rise from the chair, and the motion feels like leaving a body behind. The leather whispers as I stand, the sound impossibly loud in the silence, and I turn away from him because if I look at that sympathetic expression for one more second, something inside me is going to shatter in a way I won’t be able to reassemble.
My boots carry me toward the door on autopilot, each step measured, precise, regulation-perfect. The raven on my back stretches between my shoulder blades, ink and skin and the memory of covering wounds that never fully healed. The constellation tattoos on my thighs pulse with phantom heatbeneath my uniform pants, each star a mapped trauma, each burn scar a galaxy of survival.
I reach the door.
My fingers close around the brass knob, cool metal against skin that feels too hot, too tight, too close to breaking. The eucalyptus frost of my scent has gone completely flat—no sharp edges, no defensive bite, just the raw, exposed underbelly of cocoa and clove and lavender ash. The scent of an Omega in pain.
Don’t you dare.
Don’t you fucking dare cry in this office, Martinez. Not here. Not in front of anyone. Not ever.
I grip the doorknob harder, knuckles bleaching white, channeling every ounce of approaching grief into the metal beneath my palm.
“So I’ll clean my desk now, I guess.”
The words come out flat. Dead. The vocal equivalent of a flatline, stripped of inflection and emotion and anything that might suggest the woman speaking them is currently holding herself together with nothing but pride and muscle memory.
