Chapter 1 #2
Good.
Let them be uncomfortable. Let them choke on the absence of the woman who held that department together with bare hands and sheer goddamn will.
Jamie’s voice drops further, barely above a whisper, and I can picture her cupping the phone close to her mouth, one eye on the hallway.
“Did you and the pack have a fall out?”
The question arrives like a blade between the ribs—quiet, precise, aimed at the exact tender spot I’ve been guarding since the moment I walked out of Callahan’s office.
The pack.
My pack.
Were they ever really mine?
I exhale slowly, the breath carrying a scent shift I can’t quite control—the eucalyptus frost retreating, leaving the raw cocoa exposed, the clove warming into something dangerously close to grief before I slam the lid back down.
“We didn’t have a fucking fall out.” The correction comes out harder than intended, edged with a bitterness that tastes like old copper in my mouth.
I push off the counter and start pacing the length of my microscopic kitchen—four steps one way, four steps back, a cage walk that would be pathetic if I cared about optics right now.
“What happened was the moment I was temporarily reassigned—the moment, Jamie—that lovely pack of betrayers suddenly announced their new candidate Omega. Arrived just as I was cleaning out my desk. Practically bumped shoulders with me in the goddamn elevator.”
The memory surfaces with cinematic clarity—me carrying a box of personal effects, badge still warm in my pocket, and her stepping through the lobby doors like she’d been waiting in the wings for her cue.
Young. Twenty-four, maybe twenty-five. Fresh out of the Omega Academy with the kind of bright-eyed eagerness that hasn’t been beaten out by a decade of institutional resistance.
Her scent had been obnoxiously sweet—peaches and cream, the olfactory equivalent of a recruitment poster.
And the Alphas who were supposed to be mine had flanked her like she’d always been theirs.
My pacing stops.
“She’s sitting where I was, isn’t she.”
It’s not a question.
Jamie’s silence is the loudest confirmation I’ve ever heard.
It stretches across the phone line like a held breath, filling the three hundred miles between us with everything she can’t bring herself to say.
I close my eyes, pressing two fingers to the bridge of my nose, and take a breath so measured it could pass a polygraph.
“But…like…fuck, Hazel.” Jamie’s voice cracks on my name, and I can hear her struggling between professional discretion and personal outrage. “Didn’t you actually love those dudes?”
Love.
The word detonates in my chest like a flashbang—blinding, disorienting, forcing everything else into temporary silence.
Did I love them?
I lean against the wall, letting the cool plaster press into my shoulder blades, right against the ink of the raven that spans my back. My eyes close, and the memories unspool without permission.
Three Alphas from the department. My pack—or what had passed for one during the two years we’d maintained our arrangement.
Strong. Competent. Attractive in the way that checked every conventional box the system valued.
They’d courted me with professional respect that had slowly, carefully shifted into something more personal.
Shared meals after late shifts. Hands on my lower back during high-stress operations that lingered a beat too long to be collegial.
Scents that blended with mine well enough to make the department raise appreciative eyebrows.
But love?
I’d liked them. Appreciated their competence. Enjoyed the physical chemistry that had made the nights less empty and the heat cycles less brutal.
But had I felt safe in their presence?
Had I believed, with the kind of bone-deep certainty that real love demands, that they would protect me when danger came?
That they would stand between me and whatever tried to destroy me?
That my back was covered, not just professionally, but in the fundamental, primal way that pack bonds are supposed to guarantee?
No.
The realization doesn’t arrive with the dramatic violence of revelation. It settles quietly, like snow covering a grave—soft, inevitable, cold enough to burn.
I never felt safe with them. Not truly. Not in the way that loosens the vigilance in your spine, that lets you sleep without one ear tuned to the door, that makes you believe—even for a moment—that someone else is carrying the weight so you don’t have to.
They were there. They were adequate. They were convenient.
But they were never mine. And I was never theirs.
I sigh, and the sound scrapes my throat raw.
“I’m not sure,” I tell Jamie, and for once, the honesty doesn’t feel like weakness. It feels like excavation—unearthing something that’s been buried under two years of going through the motions. “If you want my honesty? I liked them. I respected what we had. But if that was love…”
I stare at the ceiling, water stains mapping continents I’ll never visit.
“…it’s surely dead now. Because I was replaced so fast, I’m probably the paint drying on the wall to them. Barely noticeable. Already forgotten.”
“That’s so unfair,” Jamie whispers, and there’s real anger in it now, the kind she usually reserves for horoscope skeptics and people who don’t tip. “You deserved better than that, Hazel. You deserved—”
“Life is unfair, isn’t it.”
The sentence lands flat as a slammed door. No self-pity. No dramatic inflection. Just the stripped-down truth of a woman who stopped expecting fairness around the same time someone stubbed cigarettes out on her sixteen-year-old skin and called it discipline.
Something drips.
For one disorienting second, I think the pipe has resumed its campaign of psychological warfare, and my head whips toward the sink with the kind of fury usually reserved for armed suspects. But the sink is dry. The faucet is silent.
The drip is coming from me.
Specifically, from my nose.
A single drop of blood lands on the laminate counter—bright crimson against the beige, vivid as evidence at a crime scene. I lift my hand to my upper lip and my fingers come away red, the warm metallic scent of it cutting through my eucalyptus frost like a knife through smoke.
Fuck.
I frown, tilting my head forward slightly to keep the blood from tracking down my chin, and reach for the paper towels with the kind of practiced efficiency that suggests this isn’t the first time. It’s the third nosebleed in four days. Each one a little heavier. Each one lasting a little longer.
Nothing. It’s nothing. Dry air. Stress. The radiator turning this apartment into a dehydration chamber.
It’s not the suppressants.
It’s not.
“—but they were helping you during your heats, weren’t they?”
Jamie’s question filters through the blood and the denial, and I realize I’ve missed the first half of whatever she said.
The topic shift hits a nerve I didn’t know was exposed—heat cycles, the biological vulnerability I’ve spent my entire career trying to engineer around.
The suppressants. The schedules. The careful, clinical management of a body that insists on reminding me I’m an Omega no matter how many Alpha-dominated rooms I’ve commanded.
I press the paper towel harder against my nose, watching the white fiber bloom crimson.
Don’t answer. Deflect. Change the subject.
But Jamie knows my silences the way Callahan knows my expressions. And this one is answering for me.
“They were there when I needed it,” I say finally, the words carefully stripped of anything that could be mistaken for sentiment. “But I’d never rely on men I can’t feel one hundred percent safe with. So.”
I shrug, the motion aimed at no one, since Jamie can’t see me through the phone and the apartment doesn’t contain so much as a houseplant to witness my performative nonchalance.
The tissue in my hand is soaked through now, requiring replacement, and I switch to fresh paper towels while my free hand adjusts the phone’s position on the dish rack.
The bleeding is slowing. Good.
You’re fine. It’s nothing.
I lift my head, catching my reflection again in the window glass.
The woman staring back looks thinner than she did a week ago—cheekbones more prominent, the olive skin stretched tighter across the jaw, the shadows beneath her eyes deeper.
The icy blue hair, usually meticulously maintained, has faint dark roots showing at the temples where the stress-induced greying is staging its slow coup.
Thirty-two years old and falling apart at the seams.
Your body is a crime scene, Martinez, and you’re the worst detective on the case.
“Listen,” I say, straightening as I toss the bloody paper towels into the trash with a precision that borders on aggressive.
“I’ll check in later. Something else in this house is probably broken.
The radiator’s been making sounds that suggest it’s either haunted or about to become a pipe bomb, and I haven’t confirmed which yet. ”
“Wait—” Jamie’s voice sharpens, shifting from casual to urgent with the speed of someone who’s been waiting for the right moment to drop something heavy.
“Before you go. I need you to listen to me, okay? Not roll your eyes, not dismiss it, not give me that tone you give when you think I’m being dramatic. ”
My hand pauses over the phone.
“Jamie.”
“Keep up with your vitamins. Eat actual food, not just coffee and spite.” She takes a breath, and when she continues, her voice is lower, weighted with something that sounds disturbingly close to fear. “And please—please—be careful with the heat suppressants. Try to wean off them if you can.”
My eyebrow arches at the wall.
“Why?”
The pause that follows is the kind that rewrites a conversation’s entire temperature.
“Two Omegas died last week.”
The words land in the kitchen like a body hitting concrete. Flat. Final. Irreversible.