I sit down.
And begin.
Because the investigation won’t solve itself, and the missing Omegas won’t be found by a woman who’s busy hoping, and the fire won’t explain itself to a chief who’s distracted by the scent of frozen pine on her henley and the ghost-warmth of a kiss on her cheek and the devastating, terrifying possibility that three men in a Montana town might actually mean what they’ve said.
Guard your heart, Martinez.
Lock the gates. Reinforce the walls. Keep the drawbridge up and the moat full and the sentinels posted at every entrance.
Because you’ve been here before.
And the last time you let someone in, they burned the house down from the inside.
Surely, this will be no different…
CHAPTER 14
Detonation
~HAZEL~
Seven hours.
I’ve been at this desk for seven hours and I don’t know it yet.
The files are spread across the surface in the organized chaos that my brain produces when it’s deep in analysis mode—papers fanned in overlapping arcs, photographs pinned to temporary clusters with paperclips I’d bent into makeshift hooks, the footage from the station’s one functional security camera paused on my laptop screen at a timestamp that shows nothing useful because whoever set this fire understood sight lines better than our own officers do.
I lean back in my chair, crossing my arms, staring at the evidence without seeing it.
The fire had been deliberate. That much was beyond dispute. The accelerant analysis from the fire department’s preliminary report—delivered to my desk this morning by an investigator who seemed genuinely surprised that the new chief wanted to read it rather than file it—confirmed the use of a petroleum-based compound applied along the east corridor’s baseboard, trailing beneath the drywall in a pattern designed to travel with maximum efficiency and minimum visibility.
Designed to reach my office the fastest.
That detail sits at the center of my analysis like a bullet in a wound, lodged and impossible to ignore. The fire hadn’t been aimed at the station generically. It hadn’t targeted the evidence room or the armory or any of the operational spaces that a standard act of departmental sabotage would prioritize. The accelerant trail led directly to the administrative wing. To my door. To the office where a temporary chief sits behind a borrowed desk examining cases that someone doesn’t want examined.
A targeted assault.
Against me specifically.
Thankfully, the officers had been out on a call—the kind of routine domestic disturbance that even Sweetwater Falls’ glorified parking enforcement manages to respond to when it occurs during business hours. No one had been inside the building when the fire caught. No injuries. No casualties. The structural damage was contained to the east wing, where the soot now climbed the exterior wall like a black accusation pointed at the October sky.
Workers were on-site this morning—a team of contractors in hard hats and reflective vests, moving through the damaged corridor with the methodical efficiency of people who have assessed smoke inhalation risk in buildings that don’t want to admit they have it. They’d run air quality tests, checked the ventilation system’s intake for particulate contamination, placed monitoring equipment in the hallways that beeped at intervals I’d stopped hearing three hours ago. The verdict: safe for occupancy with ventilation running and windows open. Marginal, but safe.
There was a secondary location available—a community center two blocks north that the department had earmarked as an emergency operations site. I’d reviewed the option and dismissed it. Moving the department signals retreat. Retreat signals fear. And fear signals to whoever planted that accelerant trail that their message was received and internalized.
I don’t internalize messages from people who try to burn down my office.
I trace the accelerant back to its source and I find the hands that poured it.
But the puzzle isn’t cooperating.
I sigh, laying the remaining papers out in a final configuration that connects the fire to the broader investigation I’d been building since my first day.
First, I was driven out of my old station.
The sealed investigation. The reassignment. The new Omega candidate arriving the same day I was told to pack my desk—the choreography so precise it could only have been pre-planned, a coordinated removal designed to look like consequence when it was actually architecture.
That should have satisfied whoever had a vendetta against me.
