Chapter 27 #3
Let’s be specific. She is not tipsy anymore.
She has crossed the threshold from warm-and-loosened to fully, gloriously, unapologetically intoxicated.
Her cheeks are flushed. Her eyes are bright—the amber irises catching the bathroom’s overhead light with a warmth that looks almost golden.
The icy blue hair, which started the evening in a sleek arrangement, has devolved into the tousled, wind-touched chaos that several hours of dancing and kissing and being crowded between two men produces.
And she looks alive.
That’s the thing.
That’s the thing that I notice before anything else and that stops me in front of the mirror with the sudden, breath-catching recognition of encountering someone you thought was gone.
She looks alive. Not the functional, baseline alive of a body performing its biological requirements.
The other kind. The incandescent, lit-from-the-inside, this is what it looks like when a human being is having the experience of being alive and is aware of it and is grateful for it kind.
One of the girls mentioned it earlier. Before they’d gone off to party. Leaned in with the conspiratorial warmth of a woman sharing a secret and said, “You look different, Hazel. You look happy.”
Happy.
Is that what this is?
I smirk at my reflection.
Then pout.
Because Roman isn’t here.
Roman, who would be standing at the bar with his arms crossed and his ice-blue eyes tracking every Alpha who looked at me for longer than three seconds.
Roman, who would have danced with me by not dancing—by standing still while I moved around him, his body the fixed point that my orbit circled.
Roman, who would have hated every second of the social obligation and loved every second of being near me and expressed both of those things through the same gruff, territorial, I’d-rather-be-anywhere-else-but-I’m-not-leaving silence.
I pull out my phone.
Open the camera.
The selfie is devastating.
I know it because I took it and I am, despite my general disinterest in vanity, capable of recognizing when a photograph captures something true.
The flush on my cheeks. The brightness in my eyes.
The smirk that sits on my lips like a challenge addressed to a specific recipient.
The black dress doing exactly what Alaric selected it to do.
I send it to Roman.
With a message: You’re stuck at the desk while I get to be hot and sexy without you. Tough luck.
He calls in three seconds flat.
I watch the screen light up with his name—ROMAN KADE—the contact pulsing with the urgent, immediate energy of a man whose phone has just delivered a photograph that has physically compelled him to respond.
I smirk.
And ignore the call.
Slip the phone back into my pocket.
Let him stew.
I used to love driving him mad.
At the academy. When we were rookies and the world was smaller and simpler and the competition between us was the most important thing in either of our lives.
I’d leave notes in his locker. Walk past him in the cafeteria wearing something that made him forget his sentence.
Score one point higher on an assessment and watch his jaw tighten from across the room.
The art of making Roman Kade lose his composure was my greatest extracurricular achievement.
And I’d do it now—properly, thoroughly, with the full arsenal of a woman who is no longer twenty and is no longer competing and has significantly more to work with—if he wasn’t stuck at the office.
Coming out of the washroom, the music catches me.
Not the muted, wall-filtered version from the hallway.
The full, unobstructed, chest-vibrating output from the bar’s second room—a space I hadn’t explored yet, located through an archway at the far end of the hall.
The bass is deeper here. The rhythm more insistent.
The kind of music that doesn’t ask your body to move but informs it that movement is now mandatory.
I gravitate.
With ease. The way water gravitates toward lower ground—without decision, without resistance, following the path that physics and desire and five shots of tequila have laid.
The second room is darker than the main bar.
The lighting reduced to moving beams and the ambient glow of neon installations that paint the crowd in shifting colors—blue, violet, amber, the palette rotating with the music’s rhythm.
The dance floor is packed. Bodies moving in the specific, synchronized-but-individual patterns of a crowd that has found its collective frequency and is riding it.
I step in.
And I disappear.
Not hiding. Not retreating. Disappearing the other way—into the music, into the crowd, into the specific, liberating anonymity of being one body among many in a space where no one knows your name or your case clearance rate or your suppressant history.
Where you are not Officer Martinez or Chief Martinez or the woman with six months or the target of an assassination campaign.
Where you are just a body that the bass line has claimed and the rhythm has freed.
I dance.
Not the performative, socially-conscious movement that I’ve occasionally produced at department functions—the minimal, keep-the-peace shuffling that satisfies the requirement of participation without exposing anything personal.
This is different. This is the full-body, eyes-closed, hips-leading, arms-raised dancing of a woman who has stopped caring about the world and is letting the music tell her body what to do.
When has she ever been able to dance like no one is watching?
When has she ever been this free?
Not at the academy. Not at the department.
Not at any point during the years with the former pack, who would have mocked her for moving like this, who would have told her she looked ridiculous, who would have used the vulnerability of a woman lost in music as another leverage point in their catalog of control.
Never.
The answer is never.
And the fact that “never” has just ended—here, tonight, on a dance floor in a bar in a Montana town with tequila in her blood and two Alphas somewhere in the crowd and a third who is staring at a selfie on his phone and losing his mind—is making me grin.
I’m lost in it.
The bass and the heat and the bodies and the specific, chemical euphoria of a woman whose brain has been relieved of its operational duties and is running on the backup system of pure, unfiltered sensation.
And then I catch it.
Not consciously.
Not through the analytical, sector-by-sector scanning that my officer’s training usually employs.
Through the older system. The primal one.
The Omega-receptor, limbic-level, survival-coded awareness that has been running in the background since before I had a badge and will continue running long after I lose one.
Eyes.
On me.
Not the ambient, crowd-level attention of strangers noticing a woman dancing. The specific, targeted, fixed-point focus of someone who is watching with intent. The particular weight of a gaze that has a purpose beyond observation.
My eyes open.
My body keeps moving—the rhythm still coursing through my hips and shoulders and arms, the music still doing its work—but my vision is active now, scanning the crowd with the automatic, threat-assessment protocol that five shots of tequila cannot fully suppress.
And I find him.
Across the room.
In all black.
The crowd parts in the way that crowds part around a presence that doesn’t belong—not dramatically, not like a scene in a film, but through the subtle, unconscious adjustments that bodies make when they register something in their proximity that triggers the avoidance response.
A space around him. A clearing that the dancers maintain without knowing they’re maintaining it.
Our eyes lock.
And I know him.
Or rather—some part of me knows him. The part that operates below the tequila and below the joy and below the three weeks of healing and happiness that have been building a new architecture over the ruins of what he left.
The part that stored his face and his scent and the specific, soul-level pattern of his presence in the files labeled danger and damage and do not forget what this person did to you.
He’s far away.
Twenty meters, maybe more. The crowd and the darkness and the shifting neon creating a visual interference that makes him less a person and more an impression—dark clothing, rigid posture, the fixed, unblinking focus of a man who is not here for the music.
My former pack lead.
The one who thought I was worthy of dumping for some new Omega. The one who signed off on the alley. The one who told me a nest wasn’t necessary and a second plate of food was excessive and my career was a hobby that should be abandoned when biology called.
He’s here.
A part of me should be concerned.
The sober part. The officer part. The part that catalogues threats and calculates escape routes and maintains the constant, vigilant awareness that has kept me alive through a fire and a car bomb and a stalker in a bookshop.
That part is present—she’s always present—and she’s noting the exits and the distance and the fact that my pack doesn’t know I’m in this room and my phone is in my pocket and I’m unarmed.
But the rest of me.
The rest of me looks at him across this dark, bass-heavy, neon-painted room and realizes with a clarity that the tequila hasn’t dulled but sharpened:
I don’t give a fuck.
I don’t care that he’s here.
I don’t care that the lead fucker who considered me disposable, who orchestrated years of abuse masked as pack duty, who threatened Roman into leaving me and cornered me in an alley and replaced me with an Omega he could control—I don’t care that he has the audacity to show up at a bar on the night I am alive and happy and free and dancing like no one is watching.
He’d have to kill me.