I’m gone. Three hundred miles away, in a town that most GPS systems can’t find, investigating cases that someone closed within forty-eight hours to make sure no one ever looked at them twice. I’m out of the city. Out of the department. Out of the way.
So why target the new station?
The question loops through my brain with the obsessive, circular urgency of a case that doesn’t fit its own evidence. If the goal was removal, removal was achieved. If the goal was silencing, the reassignment accomplished that more effectively than fire—a chief in a rural jurisdiction has approximately thesame operational influence as a crossing guard at an intersection no one uses.
Unless the goal wasn’t removal.
Unless removing me from the city wasn’t the ending. It was the setup.
Alaric said it in the cruiser—someone wants me here. Wants me connecting dots to something hidden in this town. Or wants me distracted while the real operation continues in the city without interference.
But the fire contradicts that. If someone wanted me here, why try to destroy the office where I’m doing the work? Unless the work has gotten close to something it wasn’t supposed to find. Unless the investigation that Callahan asked me to conduct has already yielded results that someone can’t afford to have documented.
The missing Omegas.
My eyes drift to the corkboard. Three faces. Three women. Ages twenty-four, twenty-nine, thirty-one. All reported missing within eighteen months. All cases closed within forty-eight hours as “voluntarily relocated.” All with property connected to shell companies that acquired the land within weeks of their disappearance.
And at the center of the board, the new Omega. The replacement. The woman who arrived the same day I left, who took my chair, my desk, my pack, my parking spot—installed with the surgical precision of a component being slotted into a machine that requires an Omega-shaped piece to function.
What function?
What does the machine do?
And who built it?
The questions multiply faster than the answers. The fire connects to the station. The station connects to the missing Omegas. The missing Omegas connect to the shell companies.The shell companies connect to property acquisitions that form a pattern I can see but can’t yet name—a shape in the static, a face in the noise, almost resolved but not quite, the kind of near-recognition that drives investigators to their breaking point.
What are you hiding, Sweetwater Falls?
What’s underneath the postcard?
I think.
For what feels like a few minutes. My eyes close. My arms stay crossed. My body settles into the chair with the specific, absent-minded comfort of a woman who has spent more of her adult life in office chairs than in beds and whose spine has adapted accordingly.
A touch.
Light. On my forehead. Fingertips that are warm and deliberate and carry the scent of burnt vanilla before I register the contact itself—the pads of someone’s fingers pressing against my skin with the diagnostic gentleness of a man checking for fever.
My eyes open.
Halfway. The heavy-lidded, disoriented emergence of someone who has been deeper in thought—or deeper in an accidental nap disguised as thought—than they realized. The fluorescent office light makes me squint, and through the squint I see Alaric above me, his dark eyes carrying the particular expression of a man who found what he expected and is not pleased about it.
“Do you have a headache?” he asks.
I blink.
Several times, consciousness rebooting with the sluggish, buffering quality of a system that’s been running hot for too long. I pout—the involuntary expression that keeps surfacing around him, the unguarded facial response that my professional persona would normally suppress but apparently can’t whenhe’s standing over my desk with his sleeves pushed to the forearms and the silver at his temples catching the bad lighting.
He smirks.
And then he presents his offerings.
An iced coffee in a clear cup, the condensation already beading on the plastic, the liquid inside dark and rich and approximately three times the quality of anything the station’s break room could produce. And beside it—a paper bag. Open. The interior visible, displaying a collection of baked goods that someone has selected with the curatorial attention of a man who treats pastry acquisition as a mission-critical operation.
Cream custard. A glazed croissant. Something that looks like an almond danish. And a cinnamon roll that’s large enough to qualify as a minor act of structural engineering.
My stomach responds before my brain does.
