Chapter 3
But this time, she brought Zeus with her.
The converted conference room looked more settled now.
Books lined the shelves, a few framed certificates hung on the walls, and a small succulent sat next to the pothos on the windowsill, catching the afternoon light.
It was starting to look less like a borrowed space and more like Jade belonged here, which irritated Maddox more than it should’ve.
“Officer Shaw.” Jade looked up from her desk with that same calm expression, the one that suggested nothing Maddox could say or do would rattle her, not even Maddox bringing Zeus. “Come in. Zeus can make himself comfortable wherever he wants.”
Maddox walked to the same chair she’d taken last week and sat with the same rigid posture: knees together and hands flat on her thighs. Zeus circled once before lying down at her feet, his weight a comforting pressure against her boots.
“How was your week?” Jade asked, settling into her own chair with a notepad balanced on her knee.
“Fine.”
“Any difficult calls?”
“Nothing unusual.” Maddox kept her gaze steady, her voice neutral. She’d practiced this on the drive over—clinical recitation, no emotional engagement, give nothing away.
Jade nodded slowly, like she’d expected exactly this response. “I wanted to follow up on the domestic call from two weeks ago. The one with the armed subject.”
Maddox’s jaw tightened reflexively, but she kept her expression blank. “What about it?”
“Walk me through it again. Not the tactical details again; I want to know what it felt like.”
What it felt like. As if feelings mattered when a drunk man was waving a rifle around and his terrified ex-girlfriend was crying on the sidewalk. As if Maddox’s internal state had any bearing on whether she’d done her job correctly.
“It felt like work,” Maddox said flatly. “The subject was volatile, and the situation required de-escalation. Zeus performed his function. It was a clean takedown with no injuries, and the weapon was secured. That’s all the relevant information.”
Jade’s pen moved across her notepad, and Maddox resisted the urge to lean forward and see what she was writing. Probably something clinical about resistance and avoidance. Fine. Let her write whatever she wanted.
“Zeus performed his function,” Jade repeated, looking up at her. “That’s an interesting way to describe it. He’s your partner, right? Not just a tool.”
Maddox felt the familiar prickle of defensiveness crawl up her spine. “He’s both. That’s what makes him effective.”
“How does Zeus read you during a call like that? When the pressure’s on?”
The question caught Maddox slightly off-guard. She’d expected Jade to keep pushing about feelings, not pivot to the tactical dynamics.
“He watches my body language. My breathing, posture, and hand signals. We’ve worked together long enough that half the time I don’t need to give him commands; he already knows what I need.”
“Five years together is a long time,” Jade said. “That’s a deep bond with a lot of trust built over hundreds of calls.”
Maddox nodded once, wary of where this was going.
“You told me last week he’s the best partner you’ve had.” Jade’s tone stayed even and conversational. “That implies you’ve had others before him.”
Yep, there it was. The trap springing shut.
Maddox’s hands pressed harder against her legs, her fingers blanching white at the knuckles. Zeus shifted at her feet, sensing the change in her tension, and she forced herself to breathe slowly through her nose.
“I was a K-9 handler in the Marines,” she said, keeping her voice carefully level. “Before Zeus.”
“What was your partner’s name?”
“Titan.” The name still tasted like bitter almonds in her mouth, and she hated that it still did after eight years. She hated that Jade had maneuvered her into saying it out loud.
Jade waited, her pen still and her expression insufferably patient. The silence stretched between them like a wire pulled taut, and Maddox counted her own heartbeats—three, four, five—before Jade spoke again.
“Do you want to talk about him?”
“No.”
“Okay.” Jade set her pen down, a small gesture that felt unsettlingly deliberate. “Let’s talk about K-9 handling in general, then. What makes a good partnership?”
Maddox exhaled slowly, grateful for the reprieve, even as she recognized it for what it was: a tactical retreat, not a surrender. Jade was backing off the direct approach, circling around to try another angle. Whatever. She could talk about the work without talking about Titan.
“Trust,” she said. “And communication. The dog has to know you’ll back them up, and you have to trust their instincts. They’re doing more than just following commands and reading the situation then making decisions. A good handler knows when to direct and when to let the dog work.”
“That sounds like a real partnership with mutual respect and reliance.”
“It’s the only kind of relationship that makes sense.” The words came out before Maddox could stop them, and she immediately regretted the admission. That was way too much, way too revealing.
Jade tilted her head slightly. “Because it’s straightforward? Clear expectations with no ambiguity?”
“Because he does his job, and I do mine. It’s simple.”
“Is it, though?” Jade’s voice stayed gentle, but there was something sharper underneath. “It sounds like you trust Zeus with your life. That’s not simple. That’s profound.”
Maddox felt her defenses rising like hackles, the need to shut this down before it went any further. “Animals don’t lie. They don’t have agendas, or—” She stopped herself, but it was too late. The sentence hung unfinished between them, and Jade’s knowing look said she’d heard the rest of it anyway.
They don’t leave.
“People are harder to trust,” Jade said quietly. It wasn’t a question.
Maddox said nothing. Silence was safer than agreement, and agreement felt too much like vulnerability.
Jade leaned back in her chair, her posture relaxed despite the tension thickening the air. “You know, I was an Army medic for six years, and I learned pretty quickly that you had to trust the people around you from corpsmen, infantry, K-9 units. Lives depended on it.”
The shift to shared experience was deliberate, and Maddox recognized it for the tactic it was.
But something in her chest loosened slightly anyway, the way it always did when she talked to another veteran.
The language was different with people who’d been there.
Fewer words were needed. There was less explaining.
“Marines don’t trust Army medics,” Maddox said, her tone flat but edged with the barest hint of dry humor.
Jade’s mouth quirked at the corner. “Marines don’t trust anyone except other Marines. Sometimes not even then.”
“It’s a smart policy.”
“Is it smart?” Jade’s expression turned serious again. “Or is it just lonely?”
The question hit like a jab to the ribs, unexpected and too accurate. Maddox felt her walls slam back up, steel reinforced and impenetrable. She was done with this, done with being poked and prodded, and seen.
“Are we done?” she asked, her voice growing cold.
Jade glanced at the clock on the wall. “We have twenty minutes left.”
Twenty minutes. Maddox could sit here for twenty more minutes without saying another word. She’d done harder things than enduring silence with a therapist who thought she could crack Maddox open with sincere questions and shared military service.
She settled back in her chair, crossed her arms over her chest, and fixed her gaze somewhere past Jade’s left shoulder. The succulent on the window was thriving—probably the kind of plant that didn’t need much attention, that did better when left alone. Maddox could relate.
To her relief, Jade didn’t push. She just sat there with her notepad and patient expression, occasionally writing something down, letting the scratch of pen on paper fill the room like water rising.
Zeus sighed heavily at Maddox’s feet, his way of commenting on the sudden tension, and Maddox dropped one hand to rest on his head.
His fur was warm and soft under her palm, grounding her when everything else felt unsteady.
The minutes crawled past. Maddox counted them by the clock on the wall: fifteen left, then ten, then five. Outside the office, the sounds of the precinct continued, normal work happening while she sat here wasting time she could be spending on patrol.
When the clock finally hit 2:50 p.m., Jade closed her notepad and stood. “Same time next week, Officer Shaw.”
Maddox was on her feet before Jade finished the sentence, Zeus rising smoothly beside her. She nodded once, a curt but professional nod, and headed for the door.
“Maddox.”
She stopped mid-stride and looked back.
“You showed up,” Jade said quietly. “That matters.”
Maddox breathed forcefully through her nose and turned around, opening the door and walking out without responding.
Zeus fell into step at her side as always.
The hallway was blindingly bright with the afternoon sun streaming through the windows, and she blinked against her.
She massaged the small of her jaw with her right hand.
After almost an hour of it being clenched to prevent her from revealing more, it ached.
Therapy was helping, that was a fact. It was just annoying. Just one more obligation, one more hour of someone trying to get inside her head where they didn’t belong. And the worst part, the part that made her hands curl into fists, was that she couldn’t stop thinking about it afterward.
Her voice replayed in her memory: “Animals don’t lie. They don’t have agendas, or—”
Except even though she didn’t finish the sentence, she knew that Jade knew what she was going to say.
Jade had heard all of it, every word Maddox hadn’t said, and that knowing look in her eyes had been unbearable.
Like she could see straight through the mask Maddox had spent eight years building, like all that armor she’d been wrapping herself in was transparent.