Chapter 5
Second Place
~ROMAN~
“Absolutely not.”
The cruiser door slams behind me with enough force to rattle the rearview mirror, and I don’t give a single shit about the damage because my hands need something to do that isn’t wrapping around the steering wheel and snapping it in half.
Too late.
I’m already gripping the wheel, both fists locked at ten and two with the kind of white-knuckled intensity that the department’s anger management seminar would flag as a “concerning behavioral indicator.” The leather creaks under my palms. The veins in my forearms stand at attention, tracing blue highways beneath the Norse runes and wolf iconography that I’d spent the last decade having etched into my skin as if the ink could somehow contain the things I don’t trust myself to say out loud.
Hazel Martinez.
Hazel. Fucking. Martinez.
My heart is slamming against my ribcage like a suspect trying to breach a locked door—furious, arrhythmic, completely insubordinate.
I can feel my pulse in my throat, in my temples, in the tips of my fingers where they dug into the wheel’s stitching.
The pounding has been going since the moment I stepped out of this cruiser and locked eyes with her across a gravel parking lot, and it hasn’t slowed.
Hasn’t eased. Hasn’t done me the basic goddamn courtesy of returning to a rate that doesn’t suggest I’m having a cardiac event in the driver’s seat of a department vehicle.
Because the woman I haven’t seen in years.
My rival.
My first official crush.
The only female who has ever lit a fire under my ass that I couldn’t outrun, outsmart, or extinguish through sheer force of competitive willpower—
Is now my temporary chief in command.
Chief Hazel Martinez.
Chief.
The title grinds against the inside of my skull like glass in a wound.
Not because she doesn’t deserve it—I’m a lot of things, but delusional isn’t one of them, and anyone who watched that woman operate at the academy knows she was built for command the way some people are built for breathing.
But because hearing it from her mouth, directed at me, with that slow, devastating smirk pulling at her lips while she corrected my address like I was a rookie who’d forgotten protocol—
It did something.
Something I refuse to name.
Something that is currently manifesting as approximately thirty percent rage, thirty percent grudging respect, and forty percent of a biological response that my tactical pants are doing a poor job of concealing.
I shift in the seat, adjusting with the covert precision of a man who has spent a decade hiding exactly this kind of reaction to exactly this kind of woman.
Her scent is still on me.
Not physically—we hadn’t touched, hadn’t even shaken hands, had maintained the kind of strategic distance that two people maintain when they know proximity is a loaded weapon.
But the October wind had done the work for us, carrying her pheromones across the three feet of gravel between our bodies and embedding them into my jacket, my hair, the lining of my lungs where they now sit like squatters who have no intention of vacating.
Cold eucalyptus frost.
That was the first layer. The defensive perimeter.
The scent she deploys like a shield, sharp and crystalline, designed to keep every Alpha in a fifty-foot radius at arm’s length.
I remember it from the academy—the way it would hit during morning drills when she was focused, when she was performing, when she was in the zone that made her scores match mine and her instructors’ jaws clench with the frustration of encountering someone they couldn’t rattle.
Dark cocoa husk.
Beneath the frost. Deeper. The note that most people never got close enough to detect because Hazel Martinez didn’t let people close.
But I’d been close. Closer than either of us would admit to anyone outside the academy’s walls.
Close enough to know that when the eucalyptus dropped—when she was exhausted, or furious, or pressed against me on a sparring mat with her hair escaping its regulation bun and her hazel-brown eyes almost black with something that had nothing to do with combat—the cocoa emerged like the truth beneath the lie.
Rich. Velvety. The kind of warm that makes you forget the cold exists.
And the cocoa wasn’t even the worst of it.
Smoked clove.
The undertone that only surfaced when she was genuinely affected—not the controlled, strategic affect she performed for professional purposes, but the real, unfiltered thing.
The scent that had leaked through her defenses exactly once in my presence, on a night in the academy’s training annex when we’d been the last two cadets standing after a forty-eight-hour tactical simulation, both running on caffeine and mutual hatred and the kind of physical exhaustion that strips away every pretense until there’s nothing left but raw honesty.
She’d smelled like smoked clove that night.
And I’d almost kissed her.
Would have, if she hadn’t turned away first, her chin lifting in that defiant way she has, her scent locking back behind the frost like a door slamming in my face.
The memory hits with enough force to make my grip on the steering wheel audibly creak.
And the lavender ash.
The ghost note. The scent beneath the scent, so faint it was practically theoretical, detectable only in moments of genuine vulnerability that Hazel permitted approximately never.
I’d caught it once. Once. During our final sparring match at the academy, when I’d pinned her for the first time in our entire training history and her eyes had gone wide—not with defeat but with surprise that her body had allowed it.
For two seconds, maybe three, the lavender ash had filtered through every other layer, and my entire Alpha hindbrain had short-circuited with a signal so primal and so clear that I’d released her immediately, stepping back like she’d burned me.
She had.
She always had.
And now that scent—all of it, every layer, every infuriating, intoxicating note—is cloaking me like a drug I didn’t consent to take, and my body is responding with the enthusiastic cooperation of a system that has been waiting for this particular substance for over a decade.
The rear door opens.
Oakley slides into the backseat with the casual disregard for personal space and dramatic timing that has become his signature since joining the unit.
He settles against the leather, stretches his legs, and sighs with the performative contentment of a man who has just witnessed something deeply entertaining and is preparing to extract maximum conversational value from it.
“Aww.”
The single syllable drips with the kind of sugary mockery that makes my molars ache.
“Are you smitten for your police academy crush?” He leans forward, resting his forearms on the back of my seat, close enough that his candied blood-orange scent invades my personal territory with the cheerful persistence of a man who has never once in his life respected a boundary he could charm his way past. “She’s hot still, huh? ”
I find him in the rearview mirror.
The glare I deliver through the glass has ended interrogations, silenced conference rooms, and made grown officers reconsider their career trajectories.
It carries the specific frequency of Alpha authority that my rank and my temperament have spent years perfecting—a look that says the next word out of your mouth will determine whether this conversation ends professionally or personally.
“Don’t,” I say, and the word comes out low enough to vibrate through the seat frame, “call her hot.”
Oakley shrugs.
Just…shrugs. The motion is so aggressively unbothered, so completely devoid of the survival instinct that my glare is supposed to trigger, that I have to physically unclench my jaw before I crack a molar.
This kid.
Deputy Oakley Torres is thirty years old, which makes him the youngest member of my unit and the single greatest test of my leadership patience since assuming command.
He’s competent—I’ll give him that, grudgingly, the way I give most compliments.
His field work is sharp. His instincts in community operations are better than officers with twice his experience.
And his physical capabilities are genuinely concerning in ways that have nothing to do with his lean, sprinter’s build and everything to do with the fact that this unassuming, auburn-haired, Pokémon-referencing Alpha apparently holds a third-degree black belt in some martial discipline I can’t pronounce and runs like he’s got Usain Bolt’s genetics encoded in his DNA.
Which means he could either outrun me or kick my ass, and the uncertainty of which option he’d choose is the only thing keeping my threats from escalating to physical demonstrations.
He leans back in his seat, unfazed, green eyes bright with the amusement of someone who knows exactly how much rope he’s been given and is content to test its length daily.
The passenger door opens.
Alaric enters the way Alaric enters everything—slowly, deliberately, with the measured precision of a man who treats the act of sitting down like a tactical decision that requires full situational assessment before commitment.
The beige coat arranges itself around him as he settles, the door closing with a controlled click that makes my slam feel juvenile in retrospect.
He’s thinking.
I know the signs. After two years of working alongside Alaric Venezuela, I’ve learned to read his silences the way other people read facial expressions.
The man communicates more in what he doesn’t say than most officers convey in a full debriefing, and right now, his silence is loud enough to fill the cruiser.