“Did you and the pack have a fall out?”
The question arrives like a blade between the ribs—quiet, precise, aimed at the exact tender spot I’ve been guarding since the moment I walked out of Callahan’s office.
The pack.
My pack.
Were they ever really mine?
I exhale slowly, the breath carrying a scent shift I can’t quite control—the eucalyptus frost retreating, leaving the raw cocoa exposed, the clove warming into something dangerously close to grief before I slam the lid back down.
“We didn’t have a fucking fall out.” The correction comes out harder than intended, edged with a bitterness that tastes like old copper in my mouth. I push off the counter and start pacing the length of my microscopic kitchen—four steps one way, four steps back, a cage walk that would be pathetic if I cared about optics right now. “What happened was the moment I was temporarily reassigned—themoment, Jamie—that lovely pack of betrayers suddenly announced their new candidate Omega. Arrived just as I was cleaning out my desk. Practically bumped shoulders with me in the goddamn elevator.”
The memory surfaces with cinematic clarity—me carrying a box of personal effects, badge still warm in my pocket, and her stepping through the lobby doors like she’d been waiting in the wings for her cue. Young. Twenty-four, maybe twenty-five. Fresh out of the Omega Academy with the kind of bright-eyed eagerness that hasn’t been beaten out by a decade of institutional resistance. Her scent had been obnoxiously sweet—peaches and cream, the olfactory equivalent of a recruitment poster.
And the Alphas who were supposed to be mine had flanked her like she’d always been theirs.
My pacing stops.
“She’s sitting where I was, isn’t she.”
It’s not a question.
Jamie’s silence is the loudest confirmation I’ve ever heard. It stretches across the phone line like a held breath, filling the three hundred miles between us with everything she can’t bring herself to say. I close my eyes, pressing two fingers to the bridge of my nose, and take a breath so measured it could pass a polygraph.
“But…like…fuck, Hazel.” Jamie’s voice cracks on my name, and I can hear her struggling between professional discretion and personal outrage. “Didn’t you actually love those dudes?”
Love.
The word detonates in my chest like a flashbang—blinding, disorienting, forcing everything else into temporary silence.
Did I love them?
I lean against the wall, letting the cool plaster press into my shoulder blades, right against the ink of the raven that spans my back. My eyes close, and the memories unspool without permission.
Three Alphas from the department. My pack—or what had passed for one during the two years we’d maintained ourarrangement. Strong. Competent. Attractive in the way that checked every conventional box the system valued. They’d courted me with professional respect that had slowly, carefully shifted into something more personal. Shared meals after late shifts. Hands on my lower back during high-stress operations that lingered a beat too long to be collegial. Scents that blended with mine well enough to make the department raise appreciative eyebrows.
But love?
I’d liked them. Appreciated their competence. Enjoyed the physical chemistry that had made the nights less empty and the heat cycles less brutal.
But had I feltsafein their presence?
Had I believed, with the kind of bone-deep certainty that real love demands, that they would protect me when danger came? That they would stand between me and whatever tried to destroy me? That my back was covered, not just professionally, but in the fundamental, primal way that pack bonds are supposed to guarantee?
No.
The realization doesn’t arrive with the dramatic violence of revelation. It settles quietly, like snow covering a grave—soft, inevitable, cold enough to burn.
I never felt safe with them. Not truly. Not in the way that loosens the vigilance in your spine, that lets you sleep without one ear tuned to the door, that makes you believe—even for a moment—that someone else is carrying the weight so you don’t have to.
They were there. They were adequate. They were convenient.
But they were never mine. And I was never theirs.
I sigh, and the sound scrapes my throat raw.
“I’m not sure,” I tell Jamie, and for once, the honesty doesn’t feel like weakness. It feels like excavation—unearthing something that’s been buried under two years of going through the motions. “If you want my honesty? I liked them. I respected what we had. But if that was love…”
