Chapter 5 #3
“To be an Omega. By yourself. At her age—which, for the record, is similar to yours.” He doesn’t look at me.
His eyes remain fixed on the window, watching the department building recede in the side mirror as if the architecture holds answers the conversation can’t provide.
“Being in this small town, alone, after your entire station seemed to turn on you.”
My hand freezes on the gear shift.
“As someone who’s dedicated his life to the force—” The pause is intentional, loaded with the kind of pointed implication that Alaric delivers like a scalpel.
“—maybe put yourself in her shoes for a moment. And wonder what level of betrayal you’d feel to be outcast and discarded after giving your all in every performance, every case, every action executed that saved a life. ”
I say nothing.
Not because I don’t have a response. My brain is generating approximately seventeen of them simultaneously, ranging from defensive to dismissive to the one honest answer that I will bury in concrete before allowing it to reach my mouth.
But I say nothing, because sometimes silence is the only reaction that doesn’t betray you.
Oakley’s voice comes from the backseat, barely above a whisper.
“You think she’s lonely?”
The question is so quiet, so stripped of his usual performative energy, that it almost disappears beneath the idling engine.
But it doesn’t disappear. It lingers. Expands.
Fills the cruiser’s interior with the specific, uncomfortable weight of a truth that none of us are equipped to carry but all of us recognized the moment we stood in that parking lot and watched Hazel Martinez hold herself together with nothing but posture and pride.
Alaric reaches for his seatbelt, clicking it into place with the mechanical efficiency of a man preparing for forward motion in every sense.
He rolls the window down—just slightly, just enough to admit a blade of October air—and produces a cigarette from the inner pocket of the beige coat with the practiced fluidity of a habit he’s never bothered to quit.
He lights it. The flame catches. The smoke curls.
And then, exhaling into the gap between the window glass and the Montana sky, he says:
“I would be.”
No one speaks.
The words settle into the cruiser like ash, like snowfall, like the kind of quiet that follows a confession no one was prepared to hear.
Alaric smokes. Oakley stares at his hands.
And I shift the cruiser into drive with fingers that aren’t as steady as they should be, pulling out of the parking lot at a speed that has nothing to do with urgency and everything to do with the need to put distance between myself and the building where Hazel Martinez is currently sitting in an office that was supposed to be someone else’s, doing a job she didn’t ask for, in a town that doesn’t deserve her.
I would be.
Alaric’s words loop through my skull like a siren I can’t silence, each repetition peeling back another layer of the defensive architecture I’ve spent a decade constructing specifically to avoid thinking about this woman in any terms that don’t involve competition or professional benchmarking.
Lonely.
Alone.
An Omega without a pack in a town that isn’t hers, solving cases that aren’t hers, sleeping in an apartment that isn’t hers, maintaining a career that someone is actively trying to take from her.
The road unfurls ahead of us—two lanes of cracked asphalt cutting through Montana grassland that stretches to the horizon in every direction, interrupted only by ranch fencing and the occasional cluster of cattle that watch our cruiser pass with the bored indifference of animals who have seen everything and been impressed by none of it.
The silence in the vehicle is so complete that I can hear the cherry of Alaric’s cigarette crackle with each inhale, can hear Oakley’s breathing in the backseat, can hear my own heart still pounding with a rhythm that refuses to normalize.
And then the memory surfaces.
Not gradually. Not with the soft fade-in of nostalgia. It arrives fully formed, vivid as a crime scene photograph, as if my brain has been preserving it in evidence storage for over a decade, waiting for exactly this moment to unseal the file.
Third year of the academy. February. Two a.m.
I’d been heading back to the barracks from a late study session—one of the solo ones I’d started scheduling after the library incidents with Hazel made it clear that proximity plus exhaustion plus our combined scent profiles equaled situations that neither of us could afford to repeat.
The campus was dead at that hour, dormitory lights off, the paths between buildings lit only by the anemic security lamps that the academy’s budget prioritized below literally everything else.
I’d taken the shortcut through the service alley behind the mess hall—the one the instructors pretended didn’t exist because maintaining it would require acknowledging that the campus had a blind spot in its security coverage.
And that’s where I found her.
Hazel.
Kicking a trash can with enough force to send it ricocheting off the brick wall, the metallic crash splitting the silence of the alley with a violence that made me flatten against the nearest doorway on pure instinct.
She didn’t see me.
Or if she did, she was past caring.
She was bruised. Even in the dim light, I could see the damage—swelling along her jaw, the dark bloom of impact already forming across her cheekbone, a split in her lower lip that caught what little illumination the security lamp provided and glinted with fresh blood.
Her hair was loose, which never happened—Hazel Martinez kept her hair in regulation compliance the way she kept everything else in regulation compliance, controlled and contained and permitting no deviation—and it fell around her face in dark waves that she hadn’t yet started dyeing, the natural espresso brown catching shadows like spilled ink.
She was breathing hard. Ragged. The kind of breathing that happens when your body is processing pain and your mind is processing rage and neither system has enough oxygen to operate efficiently.
Her uniform was torn at the shoulder. Dirt on her knees. Scrapes along her forearms that looked like they’d come from being shoved against concrete—the kind of abrasions that don’t happen in sanctioned training and don’t appear in official incident reports.
A group of them.
A group of fucking assholes who’d wanted her to drop out.
I’d heard the whispers, of course. Everyone had.
The cadets who thought an Omega in a combat training program was an insult to the profession.
The ones who whispered about “biological limitations” and “designation-appropriate career paths” as if the academy’s enrollment criteria were a suggestion rather than a standard she’d exceeded to get there.
The ones who believed that competition between designations cheapened the program and that Martinez should do everyone a favor and withdraw.
I’d dismissed it as talk. Cadets ran their mouths. It was part of the culture, ugly and persistent but ultimately impotent.
I’d been wrong.
The trash can hit the wall a second time.
A third. Each impact accompanied by a sound from her throat that wasn’t a scream, wasn’t a sob, wasn’t any expression of weakness that the academy’s Alpha-majority culture would have used as ammunition.
It was a growl. Low and broken and furious, the sound of a woman who had been knocked down and was in the process of deciding that the ground was not where she fucking belonged.
She stopped kicking.
Stood still.
Breathing through her teeth in sharp, controlled bursts that I could hear from twenty feet away. Her hands were shaking—I could see the tremor in her fingers, the adrenaline aftermath that the body produces when the fight is over but the nervous system hasn’t received the memo.
Then she straightened.
Slowly. Vertebra by vertebra. The way she always straightened—with the kind of deliberate, agonizing composure that costs more than most people will ever understand.
She pulled her torn uniform closed. Pushed her hair back from her face.
Lifted her chin until it was level, until her posture said command even though her body said pain.
And she walked away.
Not toward the infirmary. Not toward the security office. Not toward any of the institutional resources that existed specifically to prevent what had clearly just happened to her.
She walked toward the barracks.
Back to her bunk.
To sleep—or try to—so she could be at morning drills seven hours later as if nothing had occurred.
And she was.
Five a.m. roll call. Hazel Martinez, present, in a fresh uniform with her hair in regulation compliance and concealer covering the bruise on her jaw and foundation masking the split lip and her posture straight as a blade despite the fact that every step she took had to be excruciating.
She ran the drills. Completed the qualifications.
Scored within two points of my own marks despite operating on what had to be a body in agonizing pain.
She didn’t report it.
Didn’t tell anyone.
Didn’t ask for help, accommodation, sympathy, or the kind of institutional intervention that any reasonable person would demand after being assaulted by their own peers.
She just…kept going.
Grit her teeth and walked through it, the way she walks through everything—alone, upright, refusing to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing her break.
I’d stood in the shadows of that alley for a long time after she’d disappeared.
Long enough for the cold to seep through my jacket.
Long enough to memorize the dent she’d made in the trash can.
Long enough to feel something shift inside my chest with the slow, irreversible permanence of continental plates realigning—a tectonic event that I wouldn’t have the vocabulary to name for years, that I’d bury under competition and rivalry and the carefully maintained fiction that Hazel Martinez was nothing more than the obstacle between me and the top of the class.
The Montana road stretches ahead, empty and indifferent.
Alaric’s cigarette smoke trails out the cracked window.
Oakley is silent in the backseat, lost in whatever thoughts a thirty-year-old Alpha has when confronted with the reality that the woman he’d winked at an hour ago is carrying the kind of weight that most people would collapse under.
And I drive.
Hands on the wheel, jaw clenched, eyes fixed on the road, scent locked down tight enough to asphyxiate because if either of them catches the shift in my pheromones right now—the way the frozen pine has softened at the edges, the way the peppermint bark undertones are surfacing like something thawing after a long winter—they’ll know.
They’ll know that the memory didn’t just resurface.
It never left.
It’s been sitting in the locked chamber of my chest since a February night over a decade ago, preserved with the same forensic precision I apply to crime scenes, because some evidence is too important to file away and too dangerous to examine in the light.
That was the first time I realized what was happening.
Not the competition. Not the rivalry. Not the professional benchmarking or the tied scores or the mutual antagonism that the academy had mistaken for animosity.
Standing in the dark of that alley, watching her walk away with bruises she’d never report and strength she’d never ask anyone to acknowledge, feeling something crack open inside me that no amount of competitive posturing would ever fully seal again.
Maybe that was the first time I realized…I was falling for this Omega.