Chapter 13 Hope Is A Luxury
Hope Is A Luxury
~HAZEL~
“Showing up in one cruiser is weird as fuck.”
The observation exits my mouth as Roman pulls the vehicle into the station’s gravel lot, the tires crunching over the same pocked surface that I’d been navigating on foot since arriving in Sweetwater Falls.
The parking lot looks different this morning—or rather, the building beyond it does.
The station’s east wall is streaked with soot, a blackened scar climbing from the ground-floor window to the roofline like a column of smoke frozen mid-ascent.
The damage is localized but visible, a dark blemish on the otherwise rustic, forgettable architecture of a department that had been struggling to stay relevant before someone decided to set it on fire.
My station.
My temporary, falling-apart, cobweb-infested, barely-functional station that I threatened to disband three days ago.
Someone tried to burn it down.
And I missed the whole thing because I was unconscious in a bed being used as a body pillow by my academy rival.
The professional indignity of that sequence of events is something I will be processing for approximately the rest of my natural life.
Oakley chuckles from the backseat, his auburn hair catching the morning light through the rear window in copper flashes that I clock in my peripheral vision and immediately file under not relevant.
“Fine. Alaric and I will go in first,” he offers, leaning forward between the front seats with the easy confidence of someone who treats vehicle seating arrangements as suggestions rather than assignments.
His candied blood-orange scent threads through the cruiser’s interior, blending with the frozen pine that Roman’s proximity has embedded into every surface.
“Give it ten minutes before you come in. Reduces the optics of four people emerging from the same vehicle like a clown car.”
Alaric nods from the passenger side, the beige coat reassembled around him with the precise, armor-like arrangement that suggests he’s transitioned fully back into professional mode.
The dark circles under his eyes remain—evidence of a night without sleep that his composure is working overtime to conceal—but the investigator is operational, the man who held me in a kitchen an hour ago tucked safely behind the analytical exterior.
“I’ll get an update from the fire crew’s report and coordinate with whatever officers showed up this morning,” he says, his voice carrying the measured authority of someone who has managed enough crises to turn chaos into agenda items. “Then I’ll brief you in your office once you’ve checked in. Should have the full picture by then.”
I nod.
“Cool with me.”
The words come out casual, professional, calibrated to communicate that Chief Hazel Martinez is operational and ready to resume command of a department that someone attempted to incinerate while she was having a medical emergency.
Standard Tuesday morning in the life of an Omega who can’t catch a single, solitary break.
They hadn’t discussed the fire.
Not because we couldn’t—the drive from my apartment to the station was fifteen minutes, more than enough time to cover the basics of accelerant analysis and damage assessment and the list of suspects that a targeted arson in a town this size inevitably generates.
I’d tried to bring it up. Twice. Once over the last of the coffee, and again as we’d piled into the cruiser with the logistical awkwardness of four adults sharing a vehicle designed for three and a suspect.
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 the cases, but the city.
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 of an errand from 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.”
My hand finds the door handle again. I pull.
His hand catches mine.
Not the door. My hand. His fingers closing over my knuckles with a pressure that isn’t restraint but isn’t casual either—the specific, deliberate contact of a man who needs one more moment before the professional world reclaims both of us and the cruiser’s privacy becomes the station’s scrutiny.
I look at him.
His expression has shifted. The grumpy, stone-wall blankness has cracked, and what’s beneath it is the same thing that was beneath it this morning when he’d caught me mid-fall and asked what’s wrong with you, health-wise—the concern he can’t quite mask and the vulnerability he’d rather die than name.
“How bad is it?”
I frown.
“What?”
“How bad does it get?” A beat. His thumb moves against my knuckle—unconscious, I think, a micro-gesture that his body is producing without his brain’s authorization. “At night. How bad does it get?”
The PTSD.
He’s asking about the nightmares. The cold showers. The thing Alaric mentioned in the apartment—that Roman does it too, the ice water at three a.m., the same ritual, the same desperate override of a body that can’t stop replaying what the mind refuses to file.