Chapter 11 What We Call It When It Happens To Us #2
“I don’t know how that information helps in the slightest,” I say, and I mean it.
The pack is done. The Omega candidate has my chair, my desk, probably my parking spot.
Whatever dynamics existed between us have been made irrelevant by the specific, institutional cruelty of replacement. “They were like any other pack.”
The sponge circles the plate.
“It was…convenient, I guess.” The word surfaces with more honesty than I intend, rising through the soapy water like something that’s been submerged too long.
“Becoming a pack. It meant I wasn’t slowed down by all the rules and regulations against Omegas.
Made it easier to get promotions when I was doing the extra mile—solving cases, closing files, executing operations that other officers didn’t have the stomach for.
The pack status removed the bureaucratic barriers.
Gave me clearance. Access. The ability to do my job without every form requiring a pack signature I didn’t have. ”
I rinse.
“Sure, most people didn’t like me for it.
” The admission carries no self-pity—just the flat, observational tone of a woman reporting weather conditions.
“But that’s life. Why would they like me?
Why would the station or the pack like someone who’s doing her job correctly when doing the job correctly means holding everyone else accountable for not doing theirs? ”
“Well, they should like you,” Roman interrupts from the table, and his voice carries the particular intensity of an Alpha whose sense of justice has been activated.
“Or at least respect you. You’re doing your fucking job.
That’s what we signed up for. That’s the whole point of the badge—you serve, you protect, you do the work.
You don’t get to resent someone for doing it better than you. ”
I look over my shoulder at him.
He’s leaning forward in his chair, forearms on the table, the annoyance rolling off him in waves of frozen pine that sharpen the air between us.
But the annoyance isn’t aimed at me—not this time.
It’s directed at the concept. At the system.
At whatever institutional reality allows a woman to be punished for the crime of competence.
He’s angry on my behalf.
That’s a thing that people do, apparently. Get angry on behalf of someone else. I just…don’t have a lot of data points for it.
“True,” I concede, turning back to the sink. “But doesn’t make me the station’s favorite, does it.”
The tap runs. I dry the plate. Set it in the rack.
And then, because the water is running and the act of cleaning gives my hands something to do while my mouth does something reckless, I keep talking.
“Well. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a vendetta against me or something.
” The words come out casual—too casual, the specific variety of detachment that I deploy when the subject matter is anything but casual and the only way to get through it is to pretend it doesn’t weigh what it weighs.
“I guess the pack had been mad that I’ve been taking suppressants.
Work was insane with the promotion to chief for a few months, and since I’m on suppressants I don’t get my heat, and since I don’t get my heat, they don’t get to… fuck me, I guess.”
The tap runs.
“So maybe replacing me with the new Omega candidate was the perfect way to humiliate me. Get a new Omega who’ll actually put out on schedule instead of the one who’s too busy solving murders to be biologically available.”
I shrug.
The gesture is practiced. Automatic. The physical manifestation of it is what it is, delivered by a body that has been performing nonchalance in the face of devastation for so long that the performance has become indistinguishable from the genuine article.
“Wait.”
Oakley’s voice.
The single word cuts through the sound of running water with the surgical precision of someone who has heard something that doesn’t belong in a casual statement and is isolating it for examination.
“What do you mean, ‘don’t get to fuck you whenever’?”
I close the tap.
The silence that follows is immediate and total—the apartment’s ambient sounds collapsing into a void that makes the drip of water from the faucet into the sink sound like gunshots.
I turn around.
Three faces. Three expressions. Identical in their intensity, differentiated only by the specific variety of tension each man carries—Roman’s jaw locked, the temple vein visible; Alaric’s stillness deepened into something glacial; Oakley’s easy warmth replaced by a focus so sharp it looks like it could cut glass.
Stern.
All three of them, stern.
I grab the towel from the counter and begin drying my hands, the motion providing the anchor of normalcy that this conversation apparently requires.
“You know,” I say, and my voice is level because my voice is always level when I’m discussing things that other people consider significant and I consider environmental.
“That’s why most packs are mad at Omegas right now.
The suppressants. Without our heats, the Alphas don’t get to fuck us for those seventy-two to ninety-six hours.
Don’t get to do whatever they want during the cycle. ”
I fold the towel.
Set it on the counter.
“So that’s probably why they’re mad at me. It’s been a couple of months since I decided to stop having heats. Can’t really blame them for being frustrated when the whole point of a pack is biological access and I removed the access.”
The whole point of a pack is biological access.
I said that like it’s a fact.
Because it is a fact.
Isn’t it?
Nobody answers.
The silence in the apartment is the loudest sound I’ve ever heard—louder than the station fire must have been, louder than Roman’s cursing or Alaric’s measured observations or Oakley’s easy laughter.
It’s the kind of silence that has texture, that has weight, that presses against the walls of a four-hundred-square-foot apartment and makes the space feel even smaller.
I frown.
“What?”
The question is directed at the collective, at the three-headed silence that is staring at me with expressions I can’t decode because they don’t match any of the responses I’ve been trained to expect.
Not agreement. Not dismissal. Not the nodding acknowledgment that accompanies information everyone already knew.
Something else.
Oakley speaks.
Quietly.
So quietly that the word barely disturbs the air between us, as if the question he’s about to ask is made of something fragile that might shatter if delivered with too much force.
“Hazel…did you not want to have sex with them?”
The question enters my brain and doesn’t find a place to land.
It hovers. Circling. Looking for the neural pathway that leads to a coherent response and finding that the path has been rerouted through territory I don’t visit.
Territory with locked doors and caution tape and the specific kind of silence that exists in rooms where bad things happened and good lighting was never installed.
Did I want to—
The memory surfaces.
Not gradually. Not with the soft fade-in that nostalgia employs for palatable recollections. This one arrives the way all the bad ones arrive—fully formed, high-definition, sensory-complete.
Rain.
Heavy rain, the kind that turns city streets into rivers and alleys into corridors of sound where the water hitting concrete creates a white noise dense enough to swallow a voice.
Running. My boots slipping. My body wrong—the heat building beneath the suppressants that weren’t strong enough yet, the biology breaking through the chemical barrier with the unstoppable insistence of a system that doesn’t care about professional obligations or personal preferences.
The alley. The dead end. The wall I couldn’t climb.
Shadows in the mouth of the passage. White teeth in the dark.
The leader’s voice: “That’s not the way to help your pack, Officer.”
Hands I didn’t consent to. A wall against my back. Rain and tears indistinguishable on my face because both were cold and both were falling and neither could wash away what was happening.
The bruises afterward. Purple and green on my thighs, my wrists, the places where grip becomes restraint that becomes evidence, that I covered with long sleeves and foundation and the particular, practiced composure of a woman who goes to morning briefing the day after with her hair in regulation compliance and her report filed on time.
The doors I started locking. The showers at two a.m. The towel pressed to my mouth to muffle what my body needed to release and my pride refused to acknowledge.
One of many nights.
One of many.
I don’t know how long I’m quiet.
The apartment exists around me in a state of suspended animation—three men waiting, the October light holding its angle through the window, the coffee cooling in mugs that no one is drinking because the air has changed and everyone in the room can feel it except, apparently, me.
When I answer, my voice is level.
Steady.
The same tone I use for witness statements, incident reports, case debriefs—the professional monotone that exists specifically for the purpose of converting lived experience into clinical data.
“Well…no.”
The word is small.
Smaller than a word should be from a woman who has commanded departments and dissolved units and karate-chopped a six-four Alpha in his sleep. But it comes out the size it needs to be, which is barely above a whisper, because anything louder would require me to hear myself say it.
“I had to,” I continue, and the phrase is so practiced, so deeply embedded in my vocabulary of self-narration, that it leaves my mouth with the frictionless ease of something that’s been said a thousand times in the privacy of my own head.
“Cause I was about to have my heat. And it was raining. And they…cornered me into an alleyway.”
I shrug.