She answers immediately, the tactical mind engaging before the emotional one can intervene.
“Only one can reach the top.”
“And in our society,” I continue, the words careful, measured, each one a step deeper into territory she already knows but hasn’t examined from this angle, “between Alphas and Omegas, who would have gotten it?”
She nods.
Slowly. The realization moving through her expression like dawn across a landscape—not sudden, but irreversible.
“Roman,” she says.
“Roman,” I confirm. “Because the system would have chosen him. Not because he’s better—I’ve seen both your records, and frankly, yours is more impressive. But because the system wasn’t built to choose an Omega over an Alpha, regardless of qualification. So it made sense for him to leave. So you had the best chance to thrive in a city that would have no choice but to give a chance to someone who’s slicing the crime rate in half in less than six months.”
Her jaw drops.
Marginally. The controlled version of a gawk, filtered through years of professional composure that won’t allow her face to do anything as undignified as fully gaping.
“You know that?”
I smirk.
The expression is involuntary—the flicker of genuine satisfaction that surfaces when my thoroughness surprises someone who assumed they were the only person in the room who does their homework.
“You thought I wouldn’t do my research?”
She huffs.
But the huff carries none of its usual sharpness. It’s soft, deflated, the exhale of a woman who is running out of defenses and finding that their absence doesn’t feel as catastrophic as she expected. She leans further against the counter, armsrewrapping around herself, but the posture has shifted—less fortress, more cocoon. Holding herself, rather than shielding.
“So,” she whispers, and her eyes close. “I guess my PTSD is valid, huh.”
The sentence comes out like a question she’s been afraid to ask for years and is only now finding the courage to voice because the walls are down and the room is safe and the man standing in front of her has not used anything she’s said as a weapon.
“Who,” I ask, keeping my voice at the low register that communicates openness rather than interrogation, “would make you think it isn’t?”
She doesn’t answer.
The silence that follows is the kind I’ve learned to respect in two decades of investigative work—the silence of someone who has the answer but isn’t ready to voice it because voicing it means acknowledging that the people who were supposed to protect her were also the people who taught her that her pain wasn’t real.
She sighs.
Her eyes close.
And then, with the slow, halting cadence of someone reading aloud from a document they’ve memorized but never shown anyone, she begins.
“The night it happened…the first time…I wasn’t feeling well.”
Her voice is distant. Not the professional distance of a witness giving testimony—the personal distance of someone who has to separate from the memory in order to survive narrating it.
“I knew it was my heat coming. Could feel it in the way my body was running off. The day had been terrible. An incident at the station where the guys—my pack—hadn’t backed me up. In fact, they…kinda made fun of me.”
She swallows.
“I think it had to do with me needing an extra plate of food. At lunch. My energy levels were tanked—I’m anemic sometimes, and the pre-heat makes it worse, and I just wanted to get my iron up. And they…took it on a spree. The jokes. The comments. An Omega eating too much, can you imagine. How embarrassing for the chief.”
Her jaw tightens.
“Just felt like an uphill battle all day. And by the end of shift, I didn’t want to be touched. Didn’t feel?—”
