Chapter 13 Hope Is A Luxury #3
Are you thinking about Maggie? About the academy? About the assignment that separated us and the decade that calcified the distance and the fact that we’re standing in the same parking lot for the first time in years and neither of us knows what to do with that except compete?
I don’t turn around.
Don’t look back.
The side entrance is ten steps away, the door propped open with a brick that one of the officers must have placed to air out the smoke residue still clinging to the building’s interior.
I can smell it—the acrid, chemical tang of accelerant-fueled fire mixing with the stale coffee and old carpet scent that has defined this station since before I arrived.
I think, instead, about the proposal.
Temporary pack.
The phrase sits in my mind with the careful, tentative quality of something placed on a shelf I’m not sure can hold the weight.
Alaric had laid it out with the clinical precision of a legal contract—registration for medical access, support during heat, consent as the governing principle, everything controlled by me.
Roman hadn’t been present for the conversation, but Alaric had assured me he’d agree.
Oakley had already been operating as if the arrangement were a foregone conclusion, administering medication and monitoring vitals with the proprietary attentiveness of a pack member rather than a colleague.
They want to register as my pack.
Three Alphas I’ve known for less than a week.
An oversight investigator who carries a pager and smokes cigarettes and caught me when I fell.
A deputy who holds black belts and cooks breakfast and asks permission before he kisses cheeks.
A commander who learned Japanese on Rosetta Stone and ran a mile in five minutes and used his body heat to stop me from shivering because the radiator wasn’t fast enough.
They want to help.
The thought should comfort me.
It doesn’t.
Because I’ve been here before.
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 says take it and the scarred part says they 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 whispered I wasn’t giving you an option against 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.
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…