Then they travel.
Slowly. Not the hungry, assessing sweep I’ve learned to tolerate from Alphas who mistake an Omega’s presence for an invitation. This is clinical. Observational. The gaze of a man who has spent his career reading crime scenes and has just encountered evidence that doesn’t match the expected narrative.
The wet hair hanging in ropes around my face. The drenched V-neck clinging to my collarbone, my ribs, the outline of the sports bra beneath it. The soaked shorts. The bare feet. The water still dripping from my clothes onto the hardwood behind me, creating a trail from the door to the bathroom that tells a story I have no intention of narrating.
His eyebrow arches.
Slowly. One millimeter at a time. The deliberate ascent of a man who is choosing his words with the precision of a bomb technician choosing which wire to cut.
I roll my eyes.
“Unless the station is onfucking fire,” I say, and the irritation in my voice is both genuine and strategic—genuine because I am standing in a doorway drenched and shaking, strategic because irritation is infinitely preferable to any of the other emotions currently vying for air time—“I want to know why you thought it was anything close to appropriate to be at my house at whatever ungodly hour it is, Alaric.”
His name exits my mouth before I can correct it to his surname.
Alaric. Not Venezuela. Not investigator. Not the professional distance that titles provide when personal space has already been compromised.
He notices.
Of course he notices. The man notices everything. It’s his most infuriating quality and the one I’m least equipped to defend against right now.
He opens his mouth.
Closes it.
Opens it again.
“Hmmm.” The sound is low, thoughtful, vibrating with something I can’t identify from the doorway. His dark eyes hold mine with an intensity that feels less like assessment and more like something he’s trying not to name. “Having you call me Alaric instead of my surname is a bit of a mind fuck.”
The honesty of the admission—raw, un-performative, delivered with the straightforward vulnerability of a man who didn’t plan to say it and couldn’t stop it—catches me so completely off guard that my brain stalls for a full second.
I groan.
“I’m closing the door.”
My hand is already on the frame, already swinging the wood toward the gap, already retreating behind the only barrier between his burnt-vanilla-cedarwood-bourbon scent and the last fraying threads of my composure?—
His boot catches the door.
Not aggressively. Not with the forced entry of someone exercising dominance. Just…precisely. The toe of his shoe inserting itself into the gap between door and frame with the exact amount of pressure required to prevent closure without creating confrontation. The move of a man who has knocked on enough doors in enough investigations to know the difference between keeping a conversation open and forcing entry.
“Well,” he says, and I can hear the shift in his tone—the playful undertone receding, the investigator surfacing with the clinical focus that makes him effective and makes me wary, “the station actually is on fire.”
I stop pushing the door.
“The fire department is there handling it, which is why they need you to come assess the situation. Something about jurisdiction, official reports, and the chief being required on-scene for documentation purposes.”
I stare at him.
For ten full seconds.
Counting them internally because my brain needs the mechanical task to keep from going under. Ten seconds of searching his face for the telltale signs of deception—the micro-expressions, the pupil dilation, the scent shifts that accompany lies in people who haven’t trained themselves out of biological honesty. Finding nothing. Finding only the earnest, slightly exasperated expression of a man who has driven to his temporary chief’s apartment in the middle of the night to deliver information that is simultaneously absurd and apparently genuine.
The station. Is on fire.
I threatened to disband it. I didn’t mean literally incinerate it.
Is this town cursed? Is this building specifically hexed? Is there a cosmic entity somewhere keeping a list of things that can go wrong for Hazel Martinez and systematically checking boxes?
