Alaric’s voice follows me to the sink.
“Do you mind explaining how your dynamic was with your old pack?”
I turn on the tap.
The water runs warm against my fingers, and I let the physical task anchor me—soap, sponge, plate, the methodical process of cleaning something that has already served its purpose. Behind me, the apartment holds its breath, three Alphas waiting for an answer to a question I don’t understand the relevance of.
“Why?” I ask, keeping my gaze on the water. “Think they’re behind my lovely ‘temporary’ leave?”
“Maybe,” Alaric concedes, his voice carrying the measured weight of a man who is building a case and needs information the way a foundation needs concrete. “Or maybe they’re related to whoever targeted the station last night. The fire wasn’t accidental, Hazel. Accelerant was used. Someone wanted that building to burn, and the timing—your first week as chief, your first night of medical vulnerability—suggests this isn’t random.”
Oh fuck.
Right. The fire. The actual, literal, station-is-on-fire fire that Alaric had come to tell me about before my body staged its latest rebellion and I missed the entire event because I was unconscious in a bed being used as a human heating pad by my academy rival.
“Oh, right. Yeah. You have to—explain what happened with that.”
“I’ll explain in the car,” he says, the investigator reasserting itself over whatever personal concern had been driving the question. “But answer mine first.”
I shrug.
The gesture is aimed at the soapy water, the plate, the small kitchen of a small apartment in a small town where I’m being asked to dissect the architecture of a relationship I’d rather leave in the rearview mirror.
“I don’t know how that information helps in the slightest,” I say, and I mean it. The pack is done. The Omega candidate has my chair, my desk, probably my parking spot. Whatever dynamics existed between us have been made irrelevant by the specific, institutional cruelty of replacement. “They were like any other pack.”
The sponge circles the plate.
“It was…convenient, I guess.” The word surfaces with more honesty than I intend, rising through the soapy water like something that’s been submerged too long. “Becoming a pack. It meant I wasn’t slowed down by all the rules and regulations against Omegas. Made it easier to get promotions when I was doing the extra mile—solving cases, closing files, executing operations that other officers didn’t have the stomach for. The pack status removed the bureaucratic barriers. Gave me clearance. Access. The ability to do my job without every form requiring a pack signature I didn’t have.”
I rinse.
“Sure, most people didn’t like me for it.” The admission carries no self-pity—just the flat, observational tone of a woman reporting weather conditions. “But that’s life. Why would they like me? Why would the station or the pack like someone who’sdoing her job correctly when doing the job correctly means holding everyone else accountable for not doing theirs?”
“Well, they should like you,” Roman interrupts from the table, and his voice carries the particular intensity of an Alpha whose sense of justice has been activated. “Or at least respect you. You’re doing your fucking job. That’s what we signed up for. That’s the whole point of the badge—you serve, you protect, you do the work. You don’t get to resent someone for doing it better than you.”
I look over my shoulder at him.
He’s leaning forward in his chair, forearms on the table, the annoyance rolling off him in waves of frozen pine that sharpen the air between us. But the annoyance isn’t aimed at me—not this time. It’s directed at the concept. At the system. At whatever institutional reality allows a woman to be punished for the crime of competence.
He’s angry on my behalf.
That’s a thing that people do, apparently. Get angry on behalf of someone else. I just…don’t have a lot of data points for it.
“True,” I concede, turning back to the sink. “But doesn’t make me the station’s favorite, does it.”
The tap runs. I dry the plate. Set it in the rack.
And then, because the water is running and the act of cleaning gives my hands something to do while my mouth does something reckless, I keep talking.
“Well. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a vendetta against me or something.” The words come out casual—too casual, the specific variety of detachment that I deploy when the subject matter is anything but casual and the only way to get through it is to pretend it doesn’t weigh what it weighs. “I guess the pack had been mad that I’ve been taking suppressants. Work was insane with the promotion to chief for a few months, and sinceI’m on suppressants I don’t get my heat, and since I don’t get my heat, they don’t get to…fuck me, I guess.”
The tap runs.
“So maybe replacing me with the new Omega candidate was the perfect way to humiliate me. Get a new Omega who’ll actually put out on schedule instead of the one who’s too busy solving murders to be biologically available.”
I shrug.
The gesture is practiced. Automatic. The physical manifestation ofit is what it is, delivered by a body that has been performing nonchalance in the face of devastation for so long that the performance has become indistinguishable from the genuine article.
