“Good boy,” Kade says, so softly I almost miss it.
The sound I make is small and embarrassing, but he doesn’t point it out. Neither of us says goodbye. The line stays open for another breath, then the call ends, and I sit there with the phone in my hands until the screen goes black.
For a while, I don’t move. The apartment still feels too quiet, but now it has his absence in it too, and that’s worse. I push myself up from the floor and go to the pantry because if I stay still any longer, I’ll start listening for him on the other side of a door he can’t come through.
I pull out flour, yeast, cardamom, honey, and butter. My hands shake before I even get the bowl down. Flour spills over the rim and dusts the counter, suddenly everywhere, bringing me back to the moment I was pressed against the wall.
“It’s just flour,” I tell myself, shoving that memory back down.
It isn’t just flour, but I make myself scrape it back toward the bowl. I can’t make myself concentrate, all of my hard work ending up with a sticky ball of dough that’s too heavy and not quite right. I could make the bread in my sleep but tonight everything is wrong.
And when baking has always soothed me, tonight, it’s failing me.
A frustrated growl rips from my throat as I push the dough away and stomp toward my room, hoping that my nest can smother me to sleep. I strip off my clothes as I get closer, only stopping in the bathroom to wash my hands.
The usual expanse of plush swallows me whole and I dig my face into one of the pillows, willing myself to settle. But the safety I’m so used to doesn’t come. That absence of Kade in mybuilding grows larger, overriding the panic, the quietness of my apartment, and the fear that Kade will get wrongly charged.
Nothing about my nest has changed, and that’s the problem. It still belongs to the person who came home from normal shifts and slept through hallway sounds without checking the door. I pull the cream blanket up to my chin and try to make my body settle. It doesn’t. The softness feels too open around me, making my skin crawl. I last maybe five minutes before I sit up with my chest tight and my hands already reaching for the first blanket.
The cream blanket comes off first, yanked so hard one of the cushions tumbles with it. The blue throw follows, then the pillows, then the old hoodies I’d tucked along the back because they usually made the corner feel warmer. I drag everything apart with my breathing getting rougher, panic blooming in my chest. Fabric catches under my knee. A cushion hits the dresser. The lavender sachet Priya gave me falls somewhere in the mess, but I don’t stop to find it. I can’t. I can’t make myself stay in something that feels like it’s lying to me.
By the time the corner is empty, I’m standing in the middle of the room with blankets around my feet and both hands shaking at my sides. My chest hurts from how hard I’m breathing. The nest is gone, and the empty space looks worse for half a second, like I’ve ruined the only place that was supposed to work.
Then I see the closet door half-open across from the bed.
I grab one blanket and one cushion from the floor, not caring which ones, and shove my way inside. Clothes brush my face. Hangers knock together above me. I push everything back with one arm, drop the cushion, and fold myself down onto the floor before I can think too long about how small it is. The wall is close on one side, the door close on the other, and for the first time since I walked into the bedroom, my breathing has something solid to push against.
I pull the door most of the way closed, leaving only a thin line of dark room outside, then yank the blanket up under my chin. My body aches from what happened but the tightness of this space feels perfect. It’s nothing I can make sense of but my Omega starts to settle. I drag my phone out and text Priya, ‘home’.
I hate that it no longer feels like that.
Skylar
By the sixth hour of staring at the footage this morning, the man in the dark jacket still hasn’t had the decency to turn his face. I drag the clip back again and pause on his shoulder. The angle’s useless, the pixels get worse the longer I stare, and the alley feed still jumps right where I need it whole. One second, Emrys is coming into frame. The attacker moves out of the shadows. Then the footage skips, and by the time it steadies again, Kade has Emrys wrapped against him and patrol is about to come in hot with the wrong story already waiting for them.
The corridor camera shows Kade leaving his apartment, but there’s no timestamp to tie it cleanly to the exterior footage, which means I’ve got enough to know something’s wrong and not enough to make everyone else stop pretending this is just messy.
“Come on,” I mutter, leaning closer until the screen blurs. “Just turn your face a little. Fucking hell.”
The figure keeps his head down because, apparently, he’s committed to making my life worse.
I type another note, stop, and read the last three. They’re all the same concern wearing different pants. The call came in too early. The feed skipped too neatly. The corridor footage backs Kade’s statement, but can’t lock the timing. Chief Morrison stood in the briefing forty minutes ago, called the footage incomplete, restated that the protective order appropriate, and moved on before Miles could finish saying the cut looked deliberate. She smiled when she said that all of this was just procedure, and that’s the part I can’t make fit.
Nothing about this shit is procedure.
A strained chuckle rumbles through me as I open a parallel file for the case. With years in the police force, I’ve learned to keep a separate, secret file with all of my true thoughts, concerns, and details that would never hold up with the officers, let alone the chief.
Mostly because I’m always accusing someone or connecting dots people don’t want to see. I add one line under the morning briefing note.
Morrison continued to frame Rourke as the primary threat despite the victim's statement, timing concerns, and footage irregularities.
Then I type her name under internal concerns, sit back, and stare at it until the letters stop looking like a decision I can take back.
Reyes sets a coffee beside my keyboard and reads the screen without asking. Her face doesn’t change when she sees Morrison’s name, but her hand settles over my notebook before I can reach for it again. “You’re not going to solve this by sitting here until the pixels confess. If you keep pushing at it like this, it’s going to start looking personal even where you’re right. Go outside, get coffee that didn’t come from this building, and come back when you can read your own notes without looking like you’re about to fight the monitor.”
I glance at the paused figure on the screen, then at the coffee she brought me. It smells like the machine downstairs has started brewing evidence from cold cases. “For the record, the pixels started it.”
Reyes gives me a look that has no patience left to spend. “Outside, Sky. Walk. Eat something. Call it casework if that makes you feel better, but leave the building before you write yourself into a corner Morrison can use against you.”
