Not in this town. Not with these men. But in this exact emotional coordinate—the specific intersection of need and offer, where someone extends a hand and the rational part of your brain saystake itand the scarred part saysthey all extend hands before they close them into fists.
My first pack had offered help too.
That’s how it started. Three Alphas in my department who recognized that a packless Omega chief was operating with one hand tied behind her back by a system designed to penalize her existence. They’d offered partnership. Medical access. Heat support. The institutional legitimacy that would allow her to do her job without every form, every request, every operational decision being filtered through the bureaucratic obstacle of “but does your pack approve?”
And it had worked.
For a while.
Long enough for her to lower the drawbridge. Long enough for her to let them inside the perimeter, to share meals and synchronize schedules and begin the cautious, fragile process of trusting that these particular hands meant what they offered.
Long enough for the betrayal to be devastating rather than merely painful.
Because that’s how it works. The depth of the wound is directly proportional to the height of the trust. You can’t be gutted by strangers. Only by people you let close enough to hold the knife.
I reach the side entrance.
Pause with my hand on the door frame, the brick rough beneath my fingertips, the October air cold at my back and the smell of smoke and stale coffee warm at my face.
They’re different.
That’s what the traitorous, optimistic corner of my brain keeps whispering. The corner that watched Oakley ask permission for a cheek kiss and filed it under “evidence that not all Alphas are the same.” The corner that heard Alaric say “your consent is the ultimatum” and felt something unlock behind the sternum that has been sealed since the alley. The corner that woke up curled against Roman’s chest and felt, for the first disoriented, sleep-warm seconds before consciousness kicked in, safe.
They’re different, the corner insists.
And maybe they are.
But so was the last pack, in the beginning.
I step inside.
The station’s corridor swallows me—dim lighting, linoleum floors, the institutional architecture of a building that has been performing the minimum function of law enforcement for longer than I’ve been alive. The smoke damage is worse inside, the east corridor blocked by caution tape and the bitter smell of burnt drywall, but the administrative wing is intact. My office is ahead. The corkboard is in there. The investigation is in there. The work that brought me to this town and the mystery that’s keeping me here and the answers that someone doesn’t want me to find.
Work, I understand.
Work has never let me down. Work has never extended a hand and closed it into a fist. Work has never cornered me in an alley or mocked me for eating a second plate or whisperedI wasn’t giving you an optionagainst skin that was already bruised.
Work is safe because work doesn’t ask for trust.
People do.
And people are where the damage lives.
Don’t get your hopes up, Martinez.
The directive is old. Worn smooth by repetition, the same way the river wears stone—slowly, relentlessly, until the surface is too polished to grip. I’ve been issuing it to myself since I was sixteen and learned that hope is a currency my father’s world didn’t accept. Since I was twenty-two and walked away from the only family I’d known with nothing but a badge application and the stubborn, incandescent belief that she could build something that was hers. Since I was twenty-eight and signed pack papers with three men who looked like safety and turned out to be the most sophisticated threat she’d ever faced.
Don’t get your hopes up.
Because whenever you have in the past—whenever you’ve allowed the drawbridge to lower and the perimeter to soften and the cautious, starving, desperate part of you to believe that this time might be different?—
It’s been nothing but a let down.
My hand finds my office door.
Pushes it open.
The room is exactly as I left it—corkboard on the wall, red strings connecting photographs and documents, the investigation that waits for me with the patience of the dead. The chair behind the desk is mine. The badge on the surface is mine. The authority that this room represents—temporary,conditional, potentially fabricated by a system that sent me here for reasons I haven’t yet unraveled—is mine.
