Sorry, Alpha. You're Not My Type

The parking officer was on his knees in front of a Cadillac Escalade when Nora Ashwood arrived, and he was apologizing to it.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice flat and glassy, his hands pressed to the hood like it might forgive him. “I’m sorry for doubting you. I’m sorry for the citation. You are a beautiful vehicle.”

Nora stopped on the sidewalk and consulted her clipboard, mostly so the small crowd of onlookers would believe she already knew exactly what she was looking at. She did not. She rarely did, at first. That was what the clipboard was for.

“Whose dog is this?” she asked, pointing to the man kneeling on the asphalt. “And can someone call it off?”

A tall man in a leather jacket detached himself from a cluster of pack members gathered outside what was supposed to be a private residence and was, according to her paperwork, currently hosting an unregistered gathering of eleven werewolves on a public block. He had the kind of jaw that suggested he practiced looking at it in mirrors.

“He towed my car,” the Alpha said, as if that settled something. “He apologized. That’s between us.”

“It’s between you, him, and the eleven pack members currently blocking a public sidewalk without a gathering permit,” Nora said. “Also he’s a city employee, not a pet. You can’t Command city employees. You can’t Command anyone, actually, but I know saying that to an Alpha is like telling water not to be wet, so let’s start smaller.”

The Alpha’s eyes narrowed. Somewhere behind her, a few pack members laughed, then remembered themselves and stopped.

“You don’t get to tell me how to speak to my own—”

“He’s not yours,” Nora said. “That’s the part you keep forgetting. He’s a man with a ticket book and a mortgage, and you turned his knees to jelly in front of a traffic camera. Compliance code four-twelve, abuse of dominance against a non-pack civilian. I could write you up for that alone, but I’m feeling generous, so I’m only going to write you up for the gathering, the obstruction, and the dog thing.”

“There is no dog thing.”

“There will be, in my report.”

She crouched beside the parking officer, whose expression had gone blank and faraway, fixed somewhere past the hood ornament. “Sir. Hello. It’s over now. You can stand.”

He blinked at her like a man surfacing from deep water. “I think I said I loved that car.”

“You didn’t. You apologized to it. There’s a difference, legally.” She helped him up, handed him his own ticket book, which he had apparently dropped at some point during his romantic crisis, and turned back to the Alpha, whose jaw had not relaxed one degree.

“You have ten minutes to disperse this gathering,” she said, “or I escalate to the regional office, and they send people who don’t have my patience. I don’t recommend meeting them. They don’t do paperwork. They do kennels.”

The Alpha looked at her for a long moment, clearly recalculating whatever response he’d planned, the one that usually worked on people whose knees weren’t currently their own.

“You’re not scared of me?” he said, and it came out almost offended.

“I’m an Omega,” Nora said. “Commands don’t work on me. It’s a genetic inconvenience for you and a tremendous professional asset for me. Nine minutes.”

They dispersed in six. She wrote the report standing on the sidewalk, in the cold, balancing the clipboard on her forearm, and did not once look up to watch them go, because watching would have implied she cared whether they obeyed out of fear or out of math. She only cared that they obeyed.

By the time she reached the Department of Supernatural Compliance, the fluorescent lights were doing their usual impression of a migraine, and her supervisor was waiting at her desk with a folder and the specific posture of a man delivering bad news he found secretly entertaining.

“Ashwood,” said Director Coben. “Good timing. We have a new case.”

“I just filed one. There’s a man currently reevaluating his relationship with a Cadillac.”

“This one’s bigger.” He set the folder on her desk like it might bite. “Lucian Blackthorn.”

Nora went still. Everyone at the department knew the name the way everyone in a small town knows the house with the dog that bites. Blackthorn Pack was the oldest and largest in Moonhaven, and its Alpha had a reputation for running his territory like a man who considered the regulatory code a personal insult.

“What did he do?” she asked, already reaching for the folder.

“Nothing, technically. He filed a formal complaint. Against us. Against the department.” Coben said it with the particular relish of a man who had not been the one named in the complaint. “Seventeen alleged regulatory violations on his own property, self-reported, with supporting documentation, demanding an immediate inspection.”

Nora opened the folder and skimmed the first page. The language was precise, almost gleefully thorough, the kind of self-incrimination that read less like a confession and more like a dare.

“That’s unusual,” she said slowly. “Alphas don’t report themselves. Alphas report the inconvenience of being reported.”

“It gets more unusual.” Coben tapped the second page. “He requested an inspector by name.”

She flipped to it, and there, typed in the same clean, clipped font as the rest of the complaint, was her own name.

Requested Inspector: Nora Ashwood.

“I don’t know him,” she said. It came out flatter than she meant it to, a fact stated for the record rather than a feeling. “I’ve never set foot on Blackthorn property. I’ve never worked a case connected to his pack.”

“Called his office to confirm the request wasn’t a clerical error,” Coben said. “Spoke to him myself. Asked if he knew you personally, given the specificity.”

“And?”

“He said, and I’m quoting directly what I wrote, knowing you’d want the exact wording, ‘I have never met Inspector Ashwood in my life.’”

Nora stared at the page. Her name sat there in black ink, requested by a man who claimed to have never heard it spoken aloud, filed against a department she worked for, demanding an inspection he had no legal obligation to invite.

“So he’s never met me,” she said, “but he asked for me specifically, by full name, in a legal document, and insists that’s a coincidence.”

“That’s the file,” Coben said. “You start tomorrow.”

She closed the folder slowly, the way she closed every file she suspected was about to ruin her week, and looked at the name printed on the tab. Blackthorn, Lucian.

“I hate strangers who know my name,” she said, and went to find her car keys.