Hold Your Breath (Part 3)

By Holly Glass

Detective Rozek Smith might have a strange name, but she’s also the sharpest homicide expert in the Southeast. The pursuit of justice leads her to the tiny town of Carthage, Georgia, where a collection of squeaky-clean crime scenes and bizarre corpses have the local police at a loss. As the culprit breaks out of his routine and the body count jumps, Rozek has to chase her instincts and her desires in order to crack the case.
Without a shred of evidence to lead her investigation, Rozek has no choice but to provoke her culprit and catch him flat-footed. Although her relationship with the local police becomes even more heated, Rozek’s new love affair throws a few sparks of its own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Shorts
• Release date: Jan 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781094405261

Holly Glass

Holly Glass uses romance to explore the complexities of gender identity, the joys of sexual fluidity, and the possibility of personal liberation in a highly gendered world. Her goal is to cultivate intimacy and health by telling stories that are authentic to life and love outside of the hetero-norm.

Book preview

Hold Your Breath

Whenever I’m working a case, it’s the dreams that really get to me. Usually they’re a grotesque mash-up of personal memories and professional horrors. Tonight, the terror takes the shape of smiling faces: pageant girls and their batons, nannies who can sing, and wives who spend their days sitting very still. One of them looks like my mother. She wears a button-down dress and a man’s leather sandals, the ones my father left behind, and she has flowers twisted into her drooping ponytail. All of the women are like her, the kind who can laugh even when something isn’t funny, whose first instinct is to put you at ease.

She will put her hand on your shoulder and say something like, "Think nothing of it. Of course I don’t mind."

At some point in the dream, the mood tips. Disembodied hands wrap around each fragile throat, and, though they are dying, the women keep smiling. "Don’t worry about a thing. Why should I be angry?"

I want to shout, to warn them, but every time the dreamy version of me tries to speak, no sound arrives. Instead, I, too,