He hadn’t met me yet.
CHAPTER 2
HARLAN - THE THREAT
The call came in less than five blocks from where I was grabbing a coffee, I wouldn't have been able to tell you if it was to ward off the cold or for the caffeine.
"Assault with a weapon. Carter & Sinclair trauma clinic. Officers on route."
I was back in the car before dispatch finished the sentence.
By the time I walked through the front door, officers were already on scene, and it was chaos. A man crumpled on the floor, blood seeping through the shoulder of his denim jacket, crying that he’d been attacked. Nearby, a woman with dark hair and features knelt with her hands raised in front of her, bloody fingers, wide eyes, a weapon visible in front of her. But somehow calm.
And across from her, another woman. She was not calm; she was screaming.
“Hands where I can see them!” someone barked.
The kneeling woman obeyed without a word.
I scanned the room. Two women. One armed. One unarmed. One bleeding man.
My instinct took over: Secure the scene. Protect life. Detain the threat.
“Get your hands off her!” the other woman yelled, voice sharp and laced with rage.
I stepped in quickly and decisively. My hands found the cuffs. They clicked shut around the kneeling woman’s wrists. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t argue.
But the other one?
She came for me with fire in her eyes.
“What the fuck are you doing?” She snapped, “She saved me! He came at me with a knife!”
I turned to her. Blonde. Petite. Eyes like blue-green storms.
“Ma’am, I need you to step back.”
“You need to open your goddamn eyes, Chief!”
Her voice cut clean through the adrenaline haze. Loud. Sharp. Full of fury that made the rookie at my side take a full step back.
That was my first impression of Ava Sinclair.
Not fear. Not hesitance. Just fire.
At the station, I reviewed the scene report while Remi Carter was being booked.
Ava arrived less than fifteen minutes later, all heat and hellfire, and blew straight past the front desk. Her hair was just as wild as her eyes, tiny fists clenching and unclenching at her sides. My first thought was that even in chaos, she was breathtaking, but I had to push that thought aside. That wasn't me; it had to be the exhaustion of taking over the precinct after my father passed, the months of playing catch-up and still not knowing everything I needed to know. But I had a job to do and I did it well.
“Hey!” Erin stepped in her path. “You can’t be back here. You need to return to the scene and wait for official...”
“Back off,” Ava snapped. “You’ve got one shot to do this right, or I’ll drag your whole department through the shit and light it up on every media channel in the county.”
Erin crossed her arms. “You threatening an officer, ma’am?”
Ava gave her a smile that was decisively not pleasant, “I would never threaten an officer...Sergeant. But... threaten your perverted sense of justice... Watch me."
Before I could figure out what that was about or try to get between them, the door to holding opened and Remi’s voice cut in.
