Total pages in book: 108
Estimated words: 102754 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 514(@200wpm)___ 411(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 102754 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 514(@200wpm)___ 411(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
Sayla was standing by the back door, still barefoot, her cheeks pink from the cold. She turned to me, eyes wide—not with fear but with awe—and pointed outside.
“The snow’s stopped,” she breathed. “And I think there’s less than there was yesterday. Look—there’s the sun.”
I stepped up behind her and looked past her shoulder through the frosted glass. She was right, the clouds had finally broken, spilling golden light across the icy white world like a blessing. A single ray glinted off the icicles hanging from the eaves, and I just stood there for a moment, letting the sight sink in.
It was a small thing, but after days of relentless whiteouts, ice, and bone-deep cold, it felt like the final scene in some disaster movie. Like we’d survived something bigger than we realized, and maybe we had.
It was wild how much I’d taken for granted before this storm. This was the calm after the chaos.
And standing there with Sayla, surrounded by dogs and morning light, I realized something simple but solid. I didn’t want to go back to before. What waited for me at work wasn’t just a mess—it was a metric and imperial shit ton of it, piled high and stinking worse by the day. The daily grind of policing came with its usual share of headaches: everyday criminals doing dumb, destructive shit, victims who actually needed help, cases that needed solving and rarely had clean answers. But then there was the other layer—the thick, festering rot beneath the surface. The kind that didn’t come with ski masks or crowbars but with polished boots, pressed uniforms, and shiny badges.
And we were closing in on them.
The deeper we dug into the corruption infecting Palmerstown P.D., the less likely it seemed I had a future there—at least, not one I’d want. The things I’d learned and the people I’d trusted, it changed how I saw everything. I didn’t know if I could keep serving in a department where half the leadership played with criminals they should’ve been locking up.
Yesterday, Judd called with another update—this one from Ailee, Sayla’s former neighbor and our unexpected informant. What she told him damn near had me braving the tail end of the snowstorm just to knock some crooked heads together.
Right before the storm hit, she’d overheard a phone call between our Chief and someone we now knew was the sheriff of a town over a hundred miles away. They were discussing plans to move another barbershop operation into Palmerstown. Not just any shop, though, a front. Another cog in their well-oiled machine of money laundering and God knows what else.
After I got off the phone, I did my own digging. I looked into the new businesses that had popped up in town over the past few years. Nothing jumped out on paper, but when I put it all together, there were three new laundromats, four nail bars, and eight barbershops.
In a town this size, that didn’t scream “thriving business”, it screamed cover operations. It was right in front of us—hiding in plain sight, and its scale hit me like a sledgehammer. They’d been laying this groundwork slowly, methodically, for years. This wasn’t just some backroom side hustle, it was an organized, multi-town network of criminal enterprises operating under the protection of law enforcement.
My department.
My colleagues.
And I was supposed to show up daily, salute the flag, and pretend everything was okay? Yeah, That wasn’t going to happen.
I didn’t know where this investigation would end or if there’d be anything left of the P.D. when it did. But I did know this—Palmerstown needed to be gutted, rebuilt from the ground up. When that happened, we had to decide if we wanted to be part of it or if we were already too far gone to care. Right now, it was definitely the latter.
The snowstorm was finally letting up, and with it came the quiet reminder that reality would come crashing back in. As much as I wanted to pretend the world could stay paused a little longer, the melted edges of ice on the windows told me that wouldn’t happen. I’d be wading back into the chaos sooner than I wanted—into a job that felt less and less like a calling and more like a minefield I was navigating blind.
Still, for now, we were here—just the two of us, wrapped in our own little bubble.
I walked up behind Sayla as she stood by the window, arms folded, eyes distant as she watched the snow taper off. Sliding my arms around her waist, I pulled her close and rested my chin on her shoulder, breathing her in. She smelled like mint tea and warmth and everything I didn’t realize I’d been needing.
“As shitty as this storm’s been,” I murmured, “I’ve kind of liked having our own little world.”
She sighed softly and leaned back into me, her body relaxing against mine. “I was just thinking the same thing,” she said quietly. “Sadly, bills can’t be paid with snowballs.”