And this time the hug is different.
Not the desperate, survival-grip of the first one—the drowning woman finding solid ground. This one is slower. Gentler. Her arms wrapping around my waist with a pressure that saysI choose thisrather thanI need this, the distinction as important as the contact itself. Her cheek presses against my chest where the crewneck covers the lettering tattoo along my collarbone. Her breathing is steady. Even. The respiration of someone who is, for this moment, not fighting.
I hold her.
And in the quiet of a kitchen that smells like breakfast and resolve, in an apartment too small for four people and too emptyfor one, I make the calculation that I’ve been circling since I caught her in my arms last night.
Three weeks.
Three weeks to get her scanned. To stabilize her health. To investigate the station fire and the missing Omegas and whatever is rotting beneath the postcard surface of Sweetwater Falls.
Three weeks to show one woman that the word “pack” doesn’t have to mean what she’s been taught it means.
That consent isn’t a negotiation. That care isn’t a transaction. That being held doesn’t have to end with bruises.
Three weeks is not a lot of time.
But it’s enough.
We need to prove to her that a pack doesn’t need to be perfect, but they can truly support an Omega they respect.
CHAPTER 13
Hope Is A Luxury
~HAZEL~
“Showing up in one cruiser is weird as fuck.”
The observation exits my mouth as Roman pulls the vehicle into the station’s gravel lot, the tires crunching over the same pocked surface that I’d been navigating on foot since arriving in Sweetwater Falls. The parking lot looks different this morning—or rather, the building beyond it does. The station’s east wall is streaked with soot, a blackened scar climbing from the ground-floor window to the roofline like a column of smoke frozen mid-ascent. The damage is localized but visible, a dark blemish on the otherwise rustic, forgettable architecture of a department that had been struggling to stay relevant before someone decided to set it on fire.
My station.
My temporary, falling-apart, cobweb-infested, barely-functional station that I threatened to disband three days ago.
Someone tried to burn it down.
And I missed the whole thing because I was unconscious in a bed being used as a body pillow by my academy rival.
The professional indignity of that sequence of events is something I will be processing for approximately the rest of my natural life.
Oakley chuckles from the backseat, his auburn hair catching the morning light through the rear window in copper flashes that I clock in my peripheral vision and immediately file undernot relevant.
“Fine. Alaric and I will go in first,” he offers, leaning forward between the front seats with the easy confidence of someone who treats vehicle seating arrangements as suggestions rather than assignments. His candied blood-orange scent threads through the cruiser’s interior, blending with the frozen pine that Roman’s proximity has embedded into every surface. “Give it ten minutes before you come in. Reduces the optics of four people emerging from the same vehicle like a clown car.”
Alaric nods from the passenger side, the beige coat reassembled around him with the precise, armor-like arrangement that suggests he’s transitioned fully back into professional mode. The dark circles under his eyes remain—evidence of a night without sleep that his composure is working overtime to conceal—but the investigator is operational, the man who held me in a kitchen an hour ago tucked safely behind the analytical exterior.
“I’ll get an update from the fire crew’s report and coordinate with whatever officers showed up this morning,” he says, his voice carrying the measured authority of someone who has managed enough crises to turn chaos into agenda items. “Then I’ll brief you in your office once you’ve checked in. Should have the full picture by then.”
I nod.
“Cool with me.”
The words come out casual, professional, calibrated to communicate that Chief Hazel Martinez is operational and readyto resume command of a department that someone attempted to incinerate while she was having a medical emergency. Standard Tuesday morning in the life of an Omega who can’t catch a single, solitary break.
They hadn’t discussed the fire.
Not because we couldn’t—the drive from my apartment to the station was fifteen minutes, more than enough time to cover the basics of accelerant analysis and damage assessment and the list of suspects that a targeted arson in a town this size inevitably generates. I’d tried to bring it up. Twice. Once over the last of the coffee, and again as we’d piled into the cruiser with the logistical awkwardness of four adults sharing a vehicle designed for three and a suspect.
