Chapter 8 Doc
EIGHT
Doc
Novak had connections.
Not the kind that came with money or power, but he had…
people. Invisible strings I’d never seen him use before.
Whispers. Favors. Quiet nods that shifted the room in ways I didn’t like, but meant he had a track on the surgeon who’d purchased Rourke from Rufus.
The surgeon who’d bought the body—Alex Dryden-Wells—had gone missing.
Well, not missing exactly, but he’d taken a vacation, and no one knew where.
I hadn’t asked Novak to look into the other thing twisting up my thoughts—the cartel Levi had mentioned, and that goddamn name that kept scraping at old scars.
águilas. I didn’t know if Levi was right or intent on stirring up ghosts, but it was enough to pull me back into memories I’d spent years trying to bury.
Every time it surfaced, it dragged up flashes of memories I didn’t want—noise, fists, orders shouted in the dark.
Stay still. Don’t fight. Breathe when you’re told.
I was tired of the loop—of waking with my heart in my throat, the same dread tightening around my ribs no matter how far I thought I’d run from it.
My shoulders tensed as if I were already bracing for the next blow, and digging into it now wasn’t a door I wasn’t ready to open—not with everything else already burning around me.
I researched a little, making sure my office door was shut, because no one needed to see the shit I was digging through.
My águilas research was thin—too thin. No clear hierarchy on the new iteration of the old Hell, no confirmed leader, just scraps collected by cops, feds, and anyone who thought they could make sense of a ghost. Whoever ran the cartel stayed so deeply buried that every report I found on the dark web contradicted the last. Some said it wasn’t a cartel like it used to be, but a front for something bigger, but no one knew what.
Others claimed it was nothing but a name people used when they needed fear on their side.
And Raven and the rest of them? Nothing.
Not a whisper. The only mention was the fifteen-year-old footnote marking them all as massacre victims. Dead.
Gone. Raven had been burned with the rest. I told myself that meant it was over—that whatever hell I’d crawled out of wasn’t coming back.
Would I ever feel safe? The thought hit hard, dragging up a wave of self-pity so familiar it made my teeth clench. I wasn’t proud of it. It was the kind of thinking that crept in when I was tired, hungry, stretched too thin. Useless. Circular. The type of weakness that used to hurt kids like me.
I knew better. I’d built a life on knowing better.
But there it was anyway—that quiet, pathetic question about safety, about whether I’d ever outrun the things that made me.
I hated how easy it was to slip into that mindset, like muscle memory, like falling back into an old stance I swore I’d outgrown.
I saw it for what it was immediately: self-indulgent, corrosive, a luxury I didn’t deserve.
I shut it down. Cold. Efficient. I wasn’t a kid anymore. No one was coming to save me, and I didn’t need saving anyway. I had work to do. People were depending on me. I couldn’t afford to fall apart, not even in the privacy of my own head.
So, I cycled right on to thinking about Levi Rosen.
His name sat there on the public police site, neat and official, while the memory of kissing him replayed in my mind like a loop I couldn’t break.
Why the hell did I kiss him? I’d never kissed anyone before because a kiss had always been a test, a claim, a way to take something from you.
Letting someone that close was a fast way to lose control, and I’d learned young to keep my mouth and my choices to myself.
It wasn’t innocence. It was a strategy. The people who hurt me never wanted to kiss, and people like me didn’t get soft moments.
Not without paying for them. Wanting anything made you a target, and I’d watched kids get torn apart for less.
I built walls, shut every door, and made sure no one could reach me.
Leaning into Levi was stupid. Exposure. A breach in protocol I shouldn’t have allowed, and it dragged up a version of me I’d stripped down to the studs years ago.
Wanting anything was a liability. Wanting someone was a threat vector.
I identified the feeling, classified it as compromised judgment, and shut it down.
And for a second, that old shame tried to rise—the pathetic kind, the kind that whispered I wanted a kiss, I wanted affection.
I shut it down immediately. No hesitation.
No indulgence. I wasn’t weak. I wasn’t that kid anymore.
I hadn’t survived this long to start craving things that could get me killed.
But it didn’t change the truth sitting like a stone in my gut: I’d kissed him because I’d wanted to.
And that was dangerous.
The numbers on the spreadsheet I’d opened blurred, my concentration slipping each time the thought of him surfaced—his breath on my lips, the tension between us, the way he’d leaned in as if he didn’t realize he was doing it.
I told myself to pull it together. To focus on the money transfers, on keeping the supply lines I had open, to move money into the dozens of accounts I had. But nothing stuck. The moment I recalled the ghost of that kiss, the rest of my world slid sideways.
“This is bullshit,” I muttered after typing the same account number for the third time.
A more intelligent man would have listened to Novak, who’d made it clear that Levi was a problem to be handled, cleaned, erased.
But whenever I tried to picture it—the distance I should’ve kept, the coldness I’d lived by for years—it was replaced by that one breathless moment when we’d kissed.
I had crossed the line first, and I couldn’t pretend otherwise.
And the worst part? I wanted to do it again.
Obsession.
Lust and want were bleeding into parts of me I didn’t want touched. Levi wasn’t only a distraction; he was a disruption, the kind that loosened the screws holding the rest of my life together. And the worst part was knowing exactly how dangerous that made him.
“Fuck!”
I closed the financial window and switched to a different tool—a backdoor exploit I’d paid for that gave me access to the LAPD’s outdated GPS.
It didn’t take long to find Levi’s unmarked unit pinging from a lot in Silver Lake.
One call to Novak and I had an address, and extracted a promise that Levi was mine and not to be touched.
Novak growled.
I was used to it.
I needed to know whether that kiss had wrecked him the same way it had me. I needed to see it on his face. It wasn’t smart—it was reckless, dangerous—but the need chewed through my restraint. Before I could shut it down, I grabbed my keys and left.
The hallway outside what I assumed was his apartment smelled of old carpet and stale heating, with a faint hint of citrus from someone having cleaned earlier.
It was the kind of place where people kept to themselves and didn’t ask questions, and I’d expected a detective to live somewhere more modern and put-together, not tucked away in the middle of a rundown, forgotten stretch of the neighborhood.
I tried the handle. It turned easily.
Levi didn’t leave his door unlocked, not by accident.
He knows I’m here.
I stepped inside, letting the warm air enfold me as a strange tightness took hold in my chest. This was heavier than fear, a pull low in my gut, my nerves too alert and too aware of why I’d come.
A part of me wondered whether I was here because I wanted answers…
or because I wanted him to make my head go quiet again.
His apartment smelled of coffee grounds, gun oil, soap, and something distinctly him.
The darkness was absolute; not a single lamp was on, no standby lights, nothing.
The blackout was so complete it felt deliberate; the room was swallowed in darkness until the faint spill of streetlight through the blinds slowly revealed Levi’s apartment.
The door clicked shut behind me.
Someone seized my shirt, slamming me back against the wood.
My breath caught hard.
Levi’s face was half in shadows. His eyes were wide, dark, hungry, and something else—something torn.
“What do you want?” he bit out.
“I don’t fucking know,” I shot back before I could control it.
His face was inches from mine; his expression twisted with anger and suspicion. “Are you here to kill me?” he asked, grabbing my wrist where the hypodermic usually lay capped. My wrist was empty, and he frowned, then dropped his hold to grip my shirt instead, dragging me even closer.
“Why didn’t you call in what you saw?” I asked. “Why did you watch a man die and not intervene?” I tried to keep my voice level, but the truth was he was too close, too much, pushing into every crack I’d been ignoring. “What kind of cop are you?”
I couldn’t suppress the flicker of unwelcome disappointment that hit me.
I didn’t want Levi to be one of the bad ones, the kind of man who stood by and let ugly things happen.
I knew men like that. I’d worked with them, bled because of them.
I’d spent years stepping over the mess they made.
I needed Levi to be different, to be the kind of person who didn’t belong anywhere near my world.
Someone untouched by the rot I’d grown up in. Someone clean. Because if he wasn’t…
My breath caught as his following words were a rough whisper in the dark.
“A good cop,” he snarled. There was heat in his voice, and something that felt as if he’d been holding himself together for too long. I didn’t get it. He’d seen Novak kill Rufus; he’d seen me watching. What the fuck was wrong with this picture?
“You’re not scared of me,” I said, but a small part of me hoped he was. Fear kept people predictable. Fear made them easier to manage. Levi didn’t react with fear—he responded with fire, and I never had a good plan for people like that.
“I’m pissed about what you do to people,” he shot back.
That hit deeper than anything else could have. For a heartbeat, I felt something buckle inside me—an uncomfortable awareness I wasn’t just complicating my life; I was handing someone the leverage to hurt me. And the strangest thing was that some buried part of me didn’t care.
“I save lives, and people pay me,” I summarized. “How the fuck does that piss you off?”
“Did money make you watch that man kill Rufus?”
“Respect made me watch,” I snapped. His body pressed against mine, pushing me back to the wall. In the darkness, every point of contact was heightened—the warmth of his breath, the tension in his shoulders, the way his thighs brushed mine.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing,” he whispered.
There it was. His crack. His truth.
“You’re shaking,” I murmured.
“Don’t.” His voice fractured. “We shouldn’t…”
“That isn’t no.”
His breath stilled, then released in a quiet, broken exhale. I saw the moment he lost control—the subtle drop of his shoulders, the way his hand shifted from gripping my shirt to holding me.
In the next heartbeat, he dragged my mouth to his.
It wasn’t a kiss so much as a collision—our teeth knocking, heat spilling between us, the sheer force of him swallowing my breath. I pushed him back into the wall beside the door, and he gasped, not from pain but from the shock of wanting more.
“You’re tracking me,” he said again, his lips brushing mine, his breath shaking.
“And you’re tracking me.”
“What do you want?”
“This,” I said, and kissed him again.
I tore at him, desperation fueling my every movement, then I got his jeans open and wrapped my hand around him—hot, hard, ready.
He reached for his ear, took out a small coms receiver, and pushed it into his pocket. Then he groaned, head tipping back against the wall.
“Fuck—Doc—”
“Alejandro,” I whispered.
The second it left my mouth, something punched through my chest hard enough to steal my breath. Why the hell had I given him my name? At least I hadn’t given him my real name, but in that moment—his hand on me, his breath against my cheek—my new name clawed its way free.
Why was that so fucking important? Why did I need him to know part of me when no one else, other than Marisol and the twins, did?
His hand found me, sliding under my waistband with a roughness that made my breath falter. He stroked me again, more confident now, his breath landing warm on my cheek.
“I need something that isn’t guilt,” he whispered, his forehead pressing to mine.
“I need something that isn’t your fear,” I answered before I could stop myself.
He made a low sound, relief breaking open inside pain, and kissed me hard enough to bruise.
We moved together, fast and messy, our hands working each other in frantic rhythm. Heat built quickly, the dark turning every sound into something intimate and dangerous—the hitch of his breath, the scrape of fabric, the soft, involuntary noises he couldn’t swallow.
“Levi,” I managed, my voice rough. “Look at me.”
He did. Barely. His pupils were blown wide, his mouth parted, sweat beading his hairline.
“Alejandro… don’t stop,” he said, his voice cracking.
I didn’t.
He came first, shuddering hard, clutching my shoulders as if he needed something to anchor him. The heat of him spilled over my hand, and his whole body shook with it.
He went slack, and the noise he made dragged me over the edge, my hips jerking as pleasure tore through me.
For a few long seconds, the world was just breath and warmth and the thudding of our hearts.
Then he pulled back, fast, as if realization hit him all at once. The smell of sweat and sex hung between us. His chest rose and fell in quick, uneven breaths.
“This never happened,” he said, his voice raw and unsteady.
I lied because it was the only thing he’d take. “Sure.”
He gestured for me to leave, slamming the door behind me as if he could draw a line under what we’d done.
He was wrong. He’d been waiting for me—braced for this collision long before I stepped inside.
I’d walked straight into him, into whatever was building between us, and the truth hit hard: this thing between us wasn’t over. Not even close.