Chapter 12 Walls Down #2
She looks up at me, and the height difference feels more pronounced than it should—not physically, but emotionally. She’s looking up at me with the expression of someone who is standing at the base of something tall and trying to decide whether to climb.
“He feels like he failed you,” I explain, “because chances are, he accepted that placement knowing that in order to get power in this field, you have to move up from the ground. And let’s be real.
” I let the pause do its work—the investigator’s instinct for timing, deployed not for confession extraction but for clarity.
“If you two were rivals, you can’t both be in one place and reach the top spot. Because what happens?”
She answers immediately, the tactical mind engaging before the emotional one can intervene.
“Only one can reach the top.”
“And in our society,” I continue, the words careful, measured, each one a step deeper into territory she already knows but hasn’t examined from this angle, “between Alphas and Omegas, who would have gotten it?”
She nods.
Slowly. The realization moving through her expression like dawn across a landscape—not sudden, but irreversible.
“Roman,” she says.
“Roman,” I confirm. “Because the system would have chosen him. Not because he’s better—I’ve seen both your records, and frankly, yours is more impressive.
But because the system wasn’t built to choose an Omega over an Alpha, regardless of qualification.
So it made sense for him to leave. So you had the best chance to thrive in a city that would have no choice but to give a chance to someone who’s slicing the crime rate in half in less than six months. ”
Her jaw drops.
Marginally. The controlled version of a gawk, filtered through years of professional composure that won’t allow her face to do anything as undignified as fully gaping.
“You know that?”
I smirk.
The expression is involuntary—the flicker of genuine satisfaction that surfaces when my thoroughness surprises someone who assumed they were the only person in the room who does their homework.
“You thought I wouldn’t do my research?”
She huffs.
But the huff carries none of its usual sharpness.
It’s soft, deflated, the exhale of a woman who is running out of defenses and finding that their absence doesn’t feel as catastrophic as she expected.
She leans further against the counter, arms rewrapping around herself, but the posture has shifted—less fortress, more cocoon. Holding herself, rather than shielding.
“So,” she whispers, and her eyes close. “I guess my PTSD is valid, huh.”
The sentence comes out like a question she’s been afraid to ask for years and is only now finding the courage to voice because the walls are down and the room is safe and the man standing in front of her has not used anything she’s said as a weapon.
“Who,” I ask, keeping my voice at the low register that communicates openness rather than interrogation, “would make you think it isn’t?”
She doesn’t answer.
The silence that follows is the kind I’ve learned to respect in two decades of investigative work—the silence of someone who has the answer but isn’t ready to voice it because voicing it means acknowledging that the people who were supposed to protect her were also the people who taught her that her pain wasn’t real.
She sighs.
Her eyes close.
And then, with the slow, halting cadence of someone reading aloud from a document they’ve memorized but never shown anyone, she begins.
“The night it happened…the first time…I wasn’t feeling well.”
Her voice is distant. Not the professional distance of a witness giving testimony—the personal distance of someone who has to separate from the memory in order to survive narrating it.
“I knew it was my heat coming. Could feel it in the way my body was running off. The day had been terrible. An incident at the station where the guys—my pack—hadn’t backed me up. In fact, they…kinda made fun of me.”
She swallows.
“I think it had to do with me needing an extra plate of food. At lunch. My energy levels were tanked—I’m anemic sometimes, and the pre-heat makes it worse, and I just wanted to get my iron up.
And they…took it on a spree. The jokes. The comments.
An Omega eating too much, can you imagine. How embarrassing for the chief.”
Her jaw tightens.
“Just felt like an uphill battle all day. And by the end of shift, I didn’t want to be touched. Didn’t feel—”
A breath.
“Pretty. Or sexy. Or whatever I’m supposed to feel when my heat is approaching.
I felt dirty. Fat.” The words fall from her mouth like stones dropped from a height, each one landing with a weight that contradicts its size.
“Disgusting. Mocked. Once again an Omega in a world full of Alphas who think my biology is a public utility.”
She opens her eyes, but the gaze is focused on something that isn’t in the apartment. Something thirteen months ago. Something in the rain.
“I left because I wanted to go home. Just…home. Alone. My bed. My shower. My own space where no one was watching me eat or commenting on my body or calculating when my heat would arrive so they could schedule their access.”
Her fingers tighten on her own arms.
“And then it started raining. So bad. The kind where you can’t see two feet ahead and the streets flood in minutes.
My pack realized I was going into heat—said they’d give me a ride.
But I didn’t want to be in a car with them.
Didn’t want to be in an enclosed space where their scents would be everywhere and their hands would be on the wheel and then on me before we made it home. ”
Her voice goes flat.
“I’d rather be alone with a damn dildo than deal with them. Hell, my own hands would be better. Anything. Anything that was mine. Anything where the touch was a choice I made rather than a service I provided.”
She swallows again.
“I ran. Thought I could make it to the subway. Cut through the back streets because I knew the layout better than them—I’d mapped every shortcut in the district for pursuit operations. I was faster. Smarter. I should have—”
The sentence fractures.
“But I turned wrong. Or the rain disoriented me. Or my body was already failing because the heat was hitting faster than I expected. And I ended up in a dead end.”
She stops.
The silence is total. The apartment holds its breath—the radiator pausing its ticking, the October wind dying against the windows, even the residual scents of breakfast and coffee and three Alpha pheromones seeming to still as if the air itself understands that what follows requires absolute quiet.
Her eyes go distant.
Not unfocused—the opposite. Hyper-focused on something that isn’t here, something playing behind her pupils with the high-definition clarity of a memory that has been preserved in pristine condition because the brain determined it was too important to degrade.
She’s there. In the alley. In the rain. Against the wall that was too tall and too slick and too final.
I reach out.
Slowly. With the deliberate, telegraphed motion of a man who has learned that sudden movements near people carrying trauma are not gestures—they’re triggers. My fingers brush her cheek.
Lightly. The barest contact of fingertips against skin. Not grabbing. Not guiding. Just the physical equivalent of a voice saying come back.
She blinks.
Several times, the rapid flutter of re-entry, consciousness returning from wherever the memory had taken her. Her hazel-brown eyes find mine, and for a moment they’re wide and unfocused and somewhere between the alley and the kitchen, and then they settle.
Here.
With me.
“They should have never done a single thing to you that night,” I whisper.
“That is a no. When someone runs, when someone says they want to go home alone, when someone’s body language and words and actions are all communicating the same message—that is a no.
And a no from an Omega to her pack carries the same authority as a no from anyone to anyone.
It is not a suggestion. It is not a starting negotiation. It is not an invitation to override.”
She counters immediately.
The response is reflexive, automatic, the deeply embedded script of a woman who has been given the counter-argument so many times that it lives in her mouth like muscle memory.
“They said it was best for me.”
I have to physically hold back the response that surges behind my teeth—the one that involves profanity and detailed descriptions of what I would do to three Alpha men who used the language of care to disguise the mechanics of assault.
I bite the inside of my cheek. Breathe through the burst of my own pheromones, the burnt vanilla going acidic with a rage I cannot—will not—direct at the woman who is reciting her abusers’ justifications as if they were medical advice.
“You know what’s best for you,” I whisper instead, keeping my voice at the precise frequency that communicates conviction without pressure. “Now tell me—was what they did best for you? Did it feel like it helped you? Or did it hurt you?”
The simplicity of the question does what complexity couldn’t.
It bypasses every defense. Slides past the rationalizations and the “that’s just life” and the years of self-narration that have converted her trauma into a weather condition.
It asks the one thing no one has ever asked her—not the system, not the pack, not the institution that processed her heat cycles like schedule items and her body like shared infrastructure.
Did it hurt?
She swallows.
The motion is visible—her throat working, the tendons in her neck tensing, the physical manifestation of a word trying to surface through layers of suppression that are cracking under the gentle, relentless pressure of being asked a question that deserves a honest answer.
“Hurt me,” she whispers.
Two words.