Chapter 15 Shrapnel And Shadows #3
Against the wall. Hazel unconscious against my chest, her pulse steady under my fingers, her scent—the eucalyptus frost dissolved, the dark cocoa and smoked clove pouring off her skin unguarded—blending with the smoke and the chemical tang and my own frozen pine in a cocktail that my lungs are processing along with whatever the aerosol deposited.
I look at her face.
Dust on her cheeks. A small cut along her hairline where debris made contact—superficial, already clotting, the blood mixing with the dirt and the icy blue strands that have escaped her bun and fallen across her closed eyes.
Her glasses—the rectangular frames from the nightstand, the ones Oakley had placed on her face while she was feverish—are gone.
Lost in the blast. Somewhere in the debris field, crushed under shrapnel that should have been her.
Sixty seconds.
If I’d been sixty seconds later returning from the registry.
If I’d taken one more wrong turn in city traffic.
If I’d stopped for the gas I’d considered stopping for and decided against because something—instinct, impatience, the particular urgency that has been running through my blood since I heard what her pack did to her—told me to keep driving.
Sixty seconds and she would be in that car.
Sixty seconds and the woman who karate-chopped me awake this morning and called me Commander with a smirk that rearranged my cardiovascular system would be a body in a gravel lot and I would be standing over it instead of holding her.
I can’t do this.
Not the holding. Not the protecting. Not the tactical assessment that my training continues to run on autopilot while the rest of me fractures along lines I’d spent a decade reinforcing.
I can’t do this alone.
The admission is so foreign to my internal vocabulary that it takes a moment to recognize as mine.
Roman Kade does not ask for help. Roman Kade does not acknowledge operational limitations.
Roman Kade competes, commands, and occasionally concedes when Oakley’s black belt makes the argument more persuasively than his pride can counter.
But he does not—has never—admitted that a situation has exceeded his capacity.
This situation has exceeded my capacity.
Someone has tried to kill Hazel twice in twenty-four hours.
The fire was a probe. The bomb was the execution.
And whoever is behind it has resources—access to the station, knowledge of her routine, the ability to acquire accelerant and explosive materials in a rural town where the hardware store closes at five and everyone knows everyone’s name.
This isn’t local.
This is organized. Funded. Connected to whatever operation Hazel’s investigation is threatening to expose—the missing Omegas, the shell companies, the property acquisitions, the new Omega who arrived at her old station with the precision of a replacement part being installed in a machine.
I need resources I don’t have.
I need authority that my rank in a rural oversight assignment doesn’t provide.
I need someone who operates above the jurisdictional ceiling that is currently preventing me from treating this situation with the response it demands.
I bite my lip.
The contact is grounding—the small, sharp pain anchoring me in the present, in the bushes, in the reality of Hazel’s weight against my chest and the smoke in the air and the distant sound of Oakley’s pursuit carrying across the paddock.
My phone is still in my hand.
I pull up the contact.
The name stares back at me from the screen with the specific, charged weight of a number I have not dialed since the day I accepted this assignment.
A number that was given to me with the explicit instruction that it be used only when the situation warranted escalation beyond my operational mandate.
A number attached to a man who operates in the space between institutional authority and the kind of power that doesn’t appear in organizational charts.
CALLAHAN
I stare at it.
For a long moment. Long enough that the fire extinguisher foam settles on the cruiser’s wreckage.
Long enough that the smoke column begins to thin.
Long enough that Hazel’s breathing changes—not waking, not yet, but the rhythm shifting from the deep unconsciousness of impact to the shallower pattern that precedes surfacing.
Director Callahan.
The man who reassigned Hazel to Sweetwater Falls.
The man who told her the transfer was protective—a temporary relocation while an internal investigation into her old station played out.
The man who, according to Alaric’s assessment, either sent her here to connect dots to something hidden or sent her here as a distraction while the real operation continued in the city.
Either way, he knows more than he’s told any of us.
And either way, he’s the only person with the institutional leverage to provide what we need: a real investigation, with real resources, backed by real authority that can’t be blocked by whatever local or municipal power structure is protecting the people who just tried to blow up my—
Hazel.
Who just tried to blow up Hazel.
I take a deep breath.
The air tastes like smoke and chemicals, and the eucalyptus-cocoa signature of a woman who is alive because sixty seconds of traffic made the difference.
I press the number.
The line rings.
Once. Twice. The specific, measured interval of a phone that is not set to voicemail because the man who owns it considers missed calls an operational failure.
Click.
“Callahan speaking.”
The voice is exactly as I remember—clipped, authoritative, carrying the specific cadence of a man who answers his phone the same way he enters a room: already in command, already assessing, already three steps ahead of whatever conversation is about to unfold.
“Hey,” I say.
The greeting is insufficient. The word carries none of the urgency, none of the gravity, none of the tactical context that the situation demands. It’s the verbal equivalent of showing up to a war zone in civilian clothes.
But it’s all I’ve got.
Because the next sentence is the one that costs me.
The one that requires Roman Kade to do the thing he has built his entire identity around never doing—admitting that the mission has exceeded his capacity, that the people he’s responsible for are in danger he can’t mitigate alone, that the woman in his arms deserves better protection than a parking lot and a man in the bushes can provide.
I look down at Hazel.
At the dust on her cheeks and the cut on her hairline and the icy blue hair falling across her closed eyes.
At the woman who gave me a hug thirty seconds before someone tried to end her life.
Who whispered “thank you” against my chest and said “don’t be a douche about it” and pulled away blushing like she’d just done the bravest thing she’d ever done.
Maybe she had.
For someone who learned that touch is a weapon, maybe a voluntary hug is the most courageous thing a body can do.
I take one more breath.
And say the words that I have never said to anyone, in any context, in any operational scenario across nearly fifteen years of command.
“I need your help.”