Chapter 28 #2
“How would I possibly catch the obvious stalker trying to end my life,” she says, the words delivered with the reasonable, measured logic of a woman presenting a closing argument that happens to be insane, “if I moved out of the way? That’s just silly.”
She’s such a smart, sexy, infuriating, brilliant, reckless, cunning Omega.
Fucking hell.
Because she’s right.
She’s right and I know she’s right because I know exactly what she did and how she did it and the tactical architecture of her improvised operation is so clean that I’d be impressed if I weren’t still processing the image of a gun barrel pointed at her sternum.
She noticed him.
In the crowd. At some point during the evening—maybe when she first entered the second room, maybe earlier, maybe on the dance floor when her Omega receptors identified a scent signature that her limbic system had filed under threat years ago.
She noticed the stalker following them through the bar, tracking her movements, maintaining the surveillance that had been documented at the bookshop and at the station and at every other point where someone had been watching and waiting.
And she decided.
Not to alert her pack. Not to call for help. Not to retreat.
To bait.
She went to the washroom. Alone. Knowing it would create an opportunity for the stalker to follow—to close the distance, to move from observation to proximity, to enter the space that Hazel had just exited and leave his scent trail for anyone trained to read it.
Then she took the selfie.
Sent it to me.
Knowing. Knowing that I would recognize the signal beneath the taunt.
Because she knows me. Knows that I haven’t been absent for three weeks because of station meetings and coordination calls—she knows I’ve been absent because I’ve been watching her.
Stalking her myself. Maintaining a parallel surveillance operation that tracked every move she made, every place she went, every contact she had, cataloguing the pattern of whoever was following her so that when the moment came, I would know the player and the game and the exact coordinates where the endgame would unfold.
She knew why I wasn’t around.
She knew I was the shadow watching the shadow that was watching her.
And the selfie—you’re stuck at the desk while I get to be hot and sexy without you—was not a taunt. It was a location ping. A signal flare dressed in tequila and a cocktail dress. I’m here. He’s here. Come get us both.
And when she went to the dance floor—when she stood in the neon and the bass and the moving crowd and found his eyes and held them and refused to look away—she was holding the target in place.
Pinning him with her gaze and her defiance so that he wouldn’t move, wouldn’t relocate, wouldn’t disappear into the crowd before the net closed.
She was the bait.
And the trap.
And the woman who trusted me enough to stand in the crosshairs knowing that I would be behind her before the trigger was pulled.
My girl gave me the exact coordinates to bring the entire crew.
Because she knew. Because she’s Hazel. Because the most dangerous thing about this woman has never been her combat training or her case clearance rate or her competitive streak.
It’s her mind. The mind that solved cases the department wanted buried.
The mind that identified patterns in data that three separate analysts missed.
The mind that, five shots of tequila deep on a dance floor with a gun pointed at her chest, calculated the tactical scenario faster than I did and positioned herself as the fixed point around which the entire operation pivoted.
Smart. Sexy. Reckless. Mine.
An officer rushes toward us.
Young. The specific, wide-eyed urgency of a subordinate who has been told to check on the commander and is discovering that the commander is standing in the middle of a compromised dance floor holding a drunk woman and an unholstered weapon and appears to be having a conversation rather than commanding.
“Sir, are you okay? Is—is the chief good?”
“Yep,” I say. “Good and drunk. Perfect combo.”
Hazel grins up at me.
“Aww,” she croons, the word dripping with the saccharine, tequila-enhanced playfulness that is the most dangerous version of her personality. “Want me to order you around too?”
I roll my eyes.
Look at the officer.
“Let Venezuela and Torres know she’s with me,” I say. The names landing with the professional weight of a command that expects compliance without repetition. “We’ll meet back at the location.”
The officer blinks. “Just…location?”
“Yep.”
And I scoop her up.
One arm under her knees. The other behind her back.
The same motion I’ve been performing at the ranch for the last two weeks—lifting her from couches and carrying her to bed—except this time she’s in a cocktail dress and heels and the venue is a compromised crime scene rather than a living room and I am doing this in front of a subordinate officer and a SWAT team and whoever else is watching and I do not care.
She giggles.
Kicks her heeled feet.
The shoes catching the neon light as her legs swing in the delighted, uninhibited motion of a woman who is being carried by a man who just shot someone for her and who considers this the most romantic thing that has ever happened.
The officer is blushing.
The visible, ears-to-hairline flush of a young man who is witnessing his commanding officer carry a giggling woman in a cocktail dress through a crime scene and is experiencing the specific professional confusion of someone whose training did not prepare him for this scenario.
“Eyes on me, officer,” I say.
He snaps to attention.
“She’s my Omega.” I hold his gaze. “And I still have one more round in my chamber.”
“Yes, sir!”
He salutes.
Actually salutes. The rigid, arm-at-angle, palm-forward military salute that has no place in a civilian police operation and yet somehow feels entirely appropriate given the circumstances.
“Repeat exactly what I said,” I tell him. “They’ll get it.”
I’m leaving before he can reply.
Moving through the chaos with the focused, crowd-navigating efficiency of a man who has a destination and a woman in his arms and approximately zero interest in any stimulus that is not one of those two things.
SWAT officers step aside as I pass—the instinctive, hierarchical deference of men who recognize rank even when rank is carrying a giggling civilian through an active scene.
Down the hall.
Past the bathrooms where Hazel took her selfie and sent me the coordinates that brought the operation to its conclusion.
Down another hall.
The venue’s back-of-house—staff areas, storage, the utilitarian infrastructure that exists behind every bar’s public face.
The lighting is fluorescent here. The floors concrete.
The ambient aesthetic shifting from “grand opening” to “commercial kitchen” with the abruptness of crossing a threshold between two worlds.
I find a room.
A prep space, by the look of it. Metal counters. Shelving. The cool, industrial atmosphere of a space designed for function rather than atmosphere. The door has a lock.
I close the door.
Lock it.
Set Hazel on the metal counter.
She squirms immediately.
“Cold!”
The word comes out as a yelp—the involuntary, high-pitched protest of a woman whose thighs have just made contact with a metal surface that has been absorbing the building’s ambient temperature and is communicating that temperature through the thin barrier of her cocktail dress.
She pouts.
Looking up at me with the wide-eyed, lower-lip-forward expression that drunk Hazel deploys as a weapon and sober Hazel would never admit to possessing.
“You’re lucky it’s cold,” I say, “and I’m not slapping that ass of yours.”
She grins.
The mischievous, tequila-fueled, completely unintimidated grin of a woman who has just been threatened with a spanking and considers the threat a promise.
“I like to be spanked, Commander,” she says. “So you can try.”
This woman.
This impossible, infuriating, brilliant, reckless, brave, drunk, beautiful woman who stood in the crosshairs of a gun and smirked and sent me a selfie and danced while the world tried to kill her and is now sitting on a cold metal counter in a back room of a bar telling me she likes to be spanked.
I’m never going to survive her.
And I’m never going to want to survive anything else.
I huff.
Throw my gun to the side.
The weapon clattering onto the adjacent counter with the careless, function-served discard of a tool that has completed its purpose and is no longer needed.
I reach for the tactical vest—the body armor that I’ve been wearing beneath my jacket for the last four hours, the equipment that distinguishes “commander attending a bar opening” from “commander running an undercover operation at a bar opening”—and strip it.
The Velcro tears with the ripping, aggressive sound of a man who is removing barriers between himself and the woman on the counter with the specific urgency that three weeks of operational distance and one near-death experience have produced.
The vest hits the floor.
And my hands find her face.
Both of them. Palms against her cheeks, fingers threading into the icy blue hair that has come loose from its arrangement and is framing her face in the wild, tousled chaos that several hours of dancing and kissing and nearly dying have created. I cradle her jaw. Hold her still. And I kiss her.
Senseless.