Both times, Alaric had shut it down.
Not aggressively. Not with the dismissive authority of a man pulling rank. With something quieter—the measured, firm redirection of someone who has decided that certain spaces serve certain purposes and is unwilling to compromise.
“Your home space shouldn’t be tainted by worries of work,”he’d said, his dark eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror with the specific expression of a man who was not making a suggestion.“You already spend more than enough time working. You don’t need to be doing that when you should be resting.”
And that had been that.
No further discussion. No operational updates over the breakfast dishes. No case analysis while Roman drove and Oakley occupied the backseat with the territorial sprawl of a man whose legs are apparently too long for the space allotted.
Instead, we’d talked.
Just…talked. The way people talk when they’re not performing for an audience or building toward an agenda. Oakley had asked about the city—not the department, not thecases, but thecity. What it looked like at night. Whether the food was any good. Whether the subway system was as terrible as every documentary claimed or whether locals had a secret code for navigating it. I’d answered, surprised by how easily the words came, describing the way the skyline looked from the precinct’s rooftop during late shifts, the taco truck that parked outside the courthouse every Thursday, the specific corner where the street musician played cello at eleven p.m. and the sound carried through the office windows like something beautiful had accidentally wandered into a building full of crime statistics.
Alaric had compared it to the towns they’d worked in—smaller places, rural jurisdictions where the nearest backup was forty minutes away and the cases were less frequent but no less brutal. Roman had contributed approximately four sentences, all of them critical of city infrastructure, which was his version of participating in a conversation that didn’t involve competition or confrontation.
It had been…nice.
Don’t call it nice, Martinez. Nice is a word for weather and hotel lobbies. What it was, was dangerous. Because nice leads to comfortable, and comfortable leads to trusting, and trusting leads to the specific, devastating moment where you look around and realize you’ve allowed people inside the perimeter and the perimeter was the only thing keeping you alive.
Alaric opens his door. The October air floods in—cold, carrying the faint residual tang of smoke from last night’s fire and the earthier notes of horse paddock and Montana grassland. He turns to me before exiting.
“Twenty minutes. Then your office.”
I nod. He exits. Oakley follows, unfolding from the backseat with the fluid grace of a man whose martial arts training has made even the act of leaving a vehicle look choreographed. He catches my eye through the window and winks—quick, warm,the silent punctuation mark he appends to every interaction—before falling into step beside Alaric.
I watch them walk toward the station’s front entrance, the beige coat and the auburn hair disappearing through the doors with the synchronized efficiency of two men who have been entering buildings together long enough to match stride without coordinating.
The cruiser falls quiet.
The engine idles. The heater ticks. And the specific, concentrated silence of two people alone in a vehicle fills the space with the same charged density it carried ten years ago, in academy parking lots, after training sessions, during the moments when the competition paused long enough for something else to exist in the gap.
Roman’s hands are on the steering wheel.
Not gripping—resting. His fingers draped over the leather at ten and two, the Norse runes visible on his forearms below the rolled sleeves of the tactical jacket he’d retrieved from the cruiser’s kit bag. He’s staring through the windshield at the soot-streaked building with an expression I can’t fully read from the passenger seat—something between assessment and calculation, the commander evaluating a tactical landscape.
I reach for the door handle.
“I’ll meet him inside,” I say, my hand finding the latch, my body already preparing for the transition from the cruiser’s warm, pine-scented interior to the cold authority of Chief Martinez reporting for duty.
“He said no,” Roman says, his eyes still on the building. “I’ve got an errand to run real quick.”
I pause.
My hand on the door, my curiosity activated by the specific vagueness ofan errandfrom a man who does not strike me as the errand-running type.
“What’s that?”
He turns his head.
Looks at me.
And says nothing.
Just…looks. Ice-blue eyes holding mine with the flat, unreadable expression of a man who has decided that the information I’ve requested falls outside my operational clearance, and his method of communicating this decision is to simply not speak until the question dissolves under the weight of its own unanswered existence.
I roll my eyes.
“Never mind. I don’t need to know if you’re being grumpy.”
