Chapter 6 #2
The hyperventilation has me now—short, stacking gasps that don’t provide oxygen so much as simulate the motion of breathing without the actual function.
My chest heaves. My ribs expand and contract in rapid-fire spasms that make the scar tissue along my torso pull with each cycle.
The room is dark—the apartment’s single lamp isn’t on, the only illumination the blue-white glow of a streetlight filtering through cheap blinds—and the darkness feeds the disorientation, making it impossible to anchor myself in the present when my senses are still trapped in the past.
I roll.
Onto my hands and knees, gripping the sheets with fists that tremble hard enough to make the fabric shake.
The position is grounding by necessity—four points of contact with a surface that is cotton and mattress and now, not rain-slicked concrete and brick wall and then.
My forehead drops to the sheets. My breath fogs the fabric with each failed inhale.
But I can’t see.
Tears—actual tears, the kind I don’t allow, the kind that no one in any department or jurisdiction or life has ever been permitted to witness—are flooding my vision, pouring down my face with the same relentless insistence as the rain in the dream, hot and humiliating and completely beyond my control.
I fall off the bed.
Not gracefully. Not with the controlled descent of someone who intends to use the floor.
I simply…go over the edge. Knees connecting with hardwood, palms catching the impact a half-second too late, the jolt traveling through my wrists and up my forearms. The pain barely registers.
Pain requires processing capacity that my brain has entirely allocated to surviving the next thirty seconds.
The bathroom.
The thought surfaces with the clarity of a survival directive—singular, bright, cutting through the storm of panic with the precision of something my body has learned through repetition.
Not the first time. Not the tenth. A ritual worn smooth by use, the same way a river wears stone: slowly, relentlessly, until the path is too deep to deviate from.
I scramble.
Hands and knees across hardwood that is cold enough to feel through the haze, then upright against the bathroom doorframe, my shoulder slamming into the wood as I overcompensate for legs that have forgotten how to balance.
The shower handle turns beneath my palm—all the way to the left, maximum cold, a setting that exists for exactly this purpose.
Water hits my body like a punishment.
Ice cold. Immediate. So shocking that my lungs seize on impact, the hyperventilation interrupted by the biological override of water that the body interprets as life-threatening.
The gasp that follows is involuntary, enormous, the first real breath I’ve taken since waking—dragged into my lungs by the primal urgency of a system that has been jolted from one emergency into another.
I’m still in my clothes. Black V-neck shirt, cotton shorts—whatever I’d been sleeping in before the nightmare detonated through my rest and launched me into this particular circle of hell.
The fabric plasters to my skin like a second layer, heavy with water, the cold seeping through the cotton and into the tissue beneath until my teeth start chattering with a violence that makes my jaw ache.
But the panic hasn’t left.
It’s still there—crouching behind the shock of the cold water, waiting for the body to acclimate so it can resurface and continue its systematic destruction of everything I’ve built to contain it.
The fear. The agony. The fucking pain that has nothing to do with the water’s temperature and everything to do with the memory of a man’s voice whispering I wasn’t giving you an option while rain blurred the line between his face and the darkness.
My hand shoots out of the shower.
Fingers closing around the towel hanging on the rack outside the glass door, yanking it from the bar with enough force that the rod clangs against the wall.
I press the fabric to my mouth—both hands, shoving the towel against my lips with the desperate pressure of someone trying to contain an explosion.
And I scream.
Into the towel. Into the fabric that tastes like detergent and cotton and the mundane reality of a life that operates normally when its occupant isn’t disintegrating in a shower at whatever ungodly hour the clock has decided to assign to this particular breakdown.
I scream again.
And again.
Each one ripping from somewhere deeper than my throat—from my chest, my stomach, the locked vault behind my ribs where I keep every moment of violation and betrayal and the particular, corrosive rage of a woman who has been told by the system, by her pack, by the world that her body is not entirely her own.
The towel absorbs the sound the way it’s supposed to.
Muffles the screams into something that doesn’t carry through the thin walls of this apartment, doesn’t alert the neighbors, doesn’t generate a noise complaint that would require explanation.
Professional considerations, even now. Even on the shower floor at three a.m. with my body in revolt and my mind in pieces, the officer in me is managing the optics of her own collapse.
The world spins.
Not the figurative kind—the actual, vestibular kind, where the ceiling and the walls and the shower tiles trade positions with a fluidity that makes my stomach heave.
I don’t realize I’ve stopped screaming. Don’t realize I’ve slid from sitting to lying, the shower floor cold and hard beneath my cheek, the water pounding against my side like a pulse counting down something I don’t want to reach.
You’re going to pass out.
You’re on a shower floor in a town that doesn’t know you, and you’re going to pass out, and no one will come because no one knows you’re here because you designed your entire life around not needing anyone and congratulations, Martinez, the architecture is working perfectly.
I don’t know how long I lie there.
Time becomes irrelevant when your body decides that consciousness is a luxury it can no longer afford.
Minutes. Maybe longer. The water runs from ice cold to simply cold as the building’s ancient plumbing finds its equilibrium, and the shivers that had been violent enough to rattle my teeth settle into a full-body tremor that is less dramatic but no less miserable.
The vibration reaches me first.
Not the water. Not the residual trembling.
Something external—rhythmic, electronic, cutting through the white noise of the shower with enough persistence to register in a brain that has temporarily checked out of active duty.
My phone. Somewhere in the apartment. Buzzing with the insistent cadence of a call that hasn’t been answered.
Fuck.
The word kickstarts something. Not recovery—not yet—but the basic motor function required to peel my face off a shower floor and take stock of the situation with whatever cognitive capacity I have remaining.
I’m drenched. Obviously. The black V-neck clings to every line of my torso, the cotton plastered against the lean muscle and the scar tissue and the ink of the raven spanning my shoulder blades.
My shorts are soaked through, heavy against my thighs.
My icy blue hair has escaped whatever knot I’d slept in and hangs in wet ropes around my face, the dark roots visible where the dye has been betrayed by water.
I kill the shower. Haul myself upright using the towel bar, which groans under my weight but holds. The world sways, stabilizes, sways again—a sea-sick oscillation that tells me the suppressants are staging their latest act of biochemical warfare and my body is losing the negotiation.
The phone buzzes again.
Then the doorbell rings.
“What—”
I glance at the window. Dark. Not early morning dark. The middle of the goddamn night dark, the kind of darkness that exists between midnight and dawn when the only people awake are insomniacs, criminals, and apparently whoever is standing on my doorstep.
What fucking time is it?
I don’t check. There isn’t time. My training takes over—the officer replacing the woman who was just screaming into a towel, the switch so practiced it happens in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
My hand finds the Glock on the nightstand, fingers closing around the grip with the muscle memory of someone who has slept with a weapon in reach since the day she decided to stop being a victim.
I tuck it against the small of my back, hidden by the wet fabric of my shirt, and pad toward the front door on bare feet that leave damp prints on the hardwood.
“Who is it?”
My voice emerges steadier than it has any right to be. Controlled. Professional. Absolutely betraying nothing of the fact that thirty seconds ago I was lying on a shower floor with a towel shoved in my mouth.
Officer Hazel Martinez doesn’t break down. She redirects.
“I know this is completely unprofessional to be at your place, Officer Hazel.”
Alaric.
His voice filters through the door with the measured cadence I’ve already learned to associate with him—unhurried, deliberate, carrying the gravel of a man who has been awake for either too long or not long enough.
The burnt vanilla of his scent seeps through the gap beneath the door, faint but detectible, wrapping around my ankles like a vine.
“But the station needs you.”
I frown.
The expression is genuine—not the strategic frown I deploy for professional purposes, but the involuntary contraction of muscles that haven’t finished processing panic and are now being asked to pivot to operational mode without a transition period.
I open the door.