Chapter 27 #2
Ex-coworkers from the city station. The ones who weren’t assholes—the handful who had treated me with respect, who had acknowledged my work without resentment, who had been decent in a department that incentivized otherwise.
They’re here. Transferred to different stations, they explain—pulled out during the restructuring with clean records and reassigned to positions that, if anything, represented lateral promotions.
“The investigation is massive,” one of them tells me, a Beta forensic tech named Davies whose work I’d always respected.
He leans in, his voice competing with the music.
“Only a few of us got clean transfers. Everyone else is on unpaid leave pending review. And the allegations—” He shakes his head.
“It’s deep, Hazel. Financial. Operational.
The shell company stuff you were looking at?
It was the tip of an iceberg that goes all the way to departmental budget allocation. ”
I absorb the information with the outward composure of a woman having a casual conversation and the internal processing speed of an investigator whose corkboard just expanded by three rows.
“You standing your ground,” Davies says, clinking his glass against mine, “is the only reason any of us got out clean. It’s clear you were innocent. You were the one they were trying to bury, and the fact that you’re still standing is the reason the truth came out.”
I smile.
Genuine. The relief settling into my chest with the specific, structural weight of a fear being retired—the fear that my work hadn’t mattered, that the cases I’d flagged had vanished into the same institutional machinery that had disappeared the Omegas.
They didn’t vanish. Someone pulled the thread. The fabric is tearing.
“I’m gonna go dance,” I announce.
Because the music is calling and the drinks are warm in my bloodstream and the relief is making me lighter than I’ve felt in years and the idea of standing still when my body wants to move feels like a crime against the evening.
Oakley finds me on the edge of the dance floor.
His auburn curls catching the warm bar lighting, his eyes bright with the specific energy of a man who is out with his Omega and intends to enjoy every minute.
“Want to do shots?” he asks.
I grin.
The expression is full. Unguarded. The kind of grin that the old Hazel—the pre-Sweetwater, pre-pack, pre-everything Hazel—would have suppressed because grins are vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities are how you get hurt.
“You’d fail,” I tell him. “I have a high tolerance.”
“Oh.” His eyebrows rise. The competitive spark igniting behind the hazel irises. “You’re gonna blame my age now, hmm?”
“Obviously.”
“Then let’s go, Chief.”
We go.
The shots are lined up—ten of them, arranged in a row of clear liquid that catches the bar’s amber lighting like tiny windows. Tequila. The good kind, smooth enough that the burn is a warmth rather than an assault.
One.
Two.
Three.
I match him shot for shot with the practiced, mechanical ease of a woman who learned to drink at the academy—where the social currency was alcohol tolerance and the competition extended to everything including who could stay vertical longest on a Friday night.
Four.
Five.
And the world shifts.
Not dramatically. Not the stumbling, vision-blurring overconsumption of a woman who has exceeded her limits.
The softer shift. The loosening. The specific, warm, inhibition-reducing transition that occurs when the alcohol reaches the concentration that tells the nervous system you can stop clenching now.
My shoulders drop. My smile widens. The music’s bass line, which has been a background presence, moves into the foreground and becomes a physical experience—a pulse that I feel in my ribcage and my hips and the soles of my feet.
I’m tipsy.
Gloriously, warmly, fully tipsy.
Oakley chuckles. “Okay. Maybe time out on the shots.”
I’m giggly.
And I don’t mind. Don’t mind the way my laugh comes easier and louder and without the monitoring apparatus that usually governs its volume and duration.
Don’t mind the way my body gravitates toward Oakley’s with the unguarded, unapologetic physicality of a woman who wants to be close and has stopped making excuses for wanting.
I pull him down.
My hands on his collar. The fabric bunching in my fists as I drag his face to mine with the specific, non-negotiable urgency of a woman who wants to kiss this man and considers the three seconds it takes to close the height differential an unacceptable delay.
I kiss him.
Hard.
Not the tentative, permission-seeking contact of our early interactions.
The full, uninhibited, alcohol-encouraged, five-shots-of-tequila-deep kiss of a woman who has decided that public displays of affection are not a vulnerability but a freedom and she is exercising that freedom with extreme prejudice.
He groans.
Into my mouth. The sound vibrating through the kiss with the involuntary, dragged-from-somewhere-deep quality that Oakley’s vocalizations carry when his composure slips.
His arm hooks around my waist, pulling me against him, keeping me crowded against his body in the specific, full-contact configuration that blocks out the bar and the music and the hundred other people in the room.
We’re making out.
On a dance floor. At a bar. In a town where people are watching and gossip travels at the speed of light.
And I don’t care. Don’t care that this is visible.
Don’t care that it will be talked about.
Don’t care that somewhere in the crowd, someone might be documenting the fact that Officer Hazel Martinez is kissing an Alpha in a public venue with the enthusiastic, thorough commitment of a woman who has been denied this for years and is catching up.
Then I smell him.
Alaric.
The burnt vanilla arriving before the contact—his scent threading into the space behind me with the warm, grounding weight that his proximity always carries.
His body close. His chest against my back, the heat of him bracketing me between two Alphas in a configuration that the bar’s ambient crowd absorbs without comment because packs are normal and public affection between packs is expected and the only unusual thing about this particular display is how long it took the woman in the middle to allow it.
I break the kiss.
Turn my head.
Look up.
Alaric is there. Close. His dark eyes warm in the bar’s low lighting, the charcoal shirt open enough at the collar that I can see the hollow of his throat and the faintest shadow of the collarbone that I have recently become intimately familiar with.
“What?” I taunt. The word coming out with the playful, tipsy boldness of a woman who has consumed enough tequila to convert inhibition into audacity. “Can’t take a shot?”
He smirks.
Reaches past me.
His arm extending to the bar behind us where the remaining line of shots sits, his hand closing on the sixth glass with the precise, unhesitating motion of a man who accepts challenges the way he accepts case files—with the quiet assumption that he will execute.
He brings the glass to his lips. Tips it back. Swallows.
Sets the glass down.
And before I can comment—before the taunt can develop into the competitive escalation that my tipsy brain is constructing—his hand moves to the front of my throat.
Not gripping.
Not squeezing.
Resting. His large hand settling against the column of my neck with the warm, encompassing contact of a palm that has found its position and intends to hold it.
His fingers curve along the side. His thumb sits at the hollow of my throat, pressing with exactly enough pressure to feel the pulse that is hammering beneath the skin.
He tilts my face up.
And kisses me.
Deeply.
The taste of tequila on his tongue. The burnt vanilla flooding my senses at the closest possible range. The hand on my throat holding me in place while his mouth takes its time—slow, thorough, devastatingly controlled even with alcohol in his system.
He breaks.
“Designated driver, remember?” he says.
His voice low.
I giggle.
Giggle.
Hazel Martinez just giggled at a man in a bar. File that under “things that have never happened before and are happening now because tequila and Alaric’s hand on my throat and Oakley’s arm around my waist are collectively dismantling whatever remains of my professional composure.”
“No,” I declare, the word arriving with the cheerful, unassailable logic of a woman who is five shots deep and considers sober reasoning overrated. “I don’t remember. So. Yolo.”
I slip between them.
The motion is fluid—or as fluid as a tipsy woman in heels can manage, which is considerably more fluid than it should be thanks to years of physical training that has taught my body to maintain coordination well past the point where my mouth can manage sentences.
“I’m gonna go pee,” I announce.
Alaric arches an eyebrow. “Do you even know where the bathroom is?”
“Down the hall on the left.”
I say this with the confident, navigational certainty of a woman who cased the venue’s layout upon entry because she is a police chief and police chiefs catalogue exits and bathrooms and structural vulnerabilities as a matter of professional reflex, even when they are five shots of tequila into an evening and wearing a cocktail dress.
Getting there is a breeze.
The hallway beyond the main bar area is quieter—the music dulled by walls and distance, the lighting warmer, the air cooler against my flushed skin.
I navigate with the practiced, muscle-memory efficiency of a woman whose motor skills remain operational even when her decision-making has been liberated from its usual constraints.
The bathroom is clean. Private. A single-occupancy space with a lock and a mirror and the merciful silence of a room that the bass line can’t fully reach.
I do my business.
And then I look in the mirror.
The woman staring back at me is drunk.