Chapter 7 #2
No elaboration. No context. Let the urgency communicate what details can’t.
I carry her inside.
The apartment is exactly as depressing as I’d imagined based on the exterior—four hundred square feet of warped hardwood, yellowed walls, and the kind of fluorescent lighting that makes everything look like evidence.
The bed is immediately visible because the space is too small to hide anything.
A mattress against the far wall, sheets twisted and half-pulled from the corners, the blanket crumpled on the floor as if kicked off during a violent exit.
The sheets are damp.
I set her down on the mattress, adjusting the pillow beneath her head with hands that are steadier than my pulse.
The dampness in the bedding confirms what the soaked clothing already suggested—she’d been sweating before the water, the kind of cold sweat that accompanies fever spikes or the particular thermoregulatory chaos of a heat cycle fighting chemical suppression.
She’s close to her heat. Or her body thinks she is. The suppressants are failing and her biology is staging a coup, and the system can’t decide whether to burn or freeze, so it’s doing both.
I press my palm to her forehead.
The heat beneath her skin is immediate and alarming—not the gentle warmth of a low-grade fever but the radiating, structural heat of a body whose internal temperature regulation has gone critically off-script.
Her skin is clammy beneath the fire, the contradiction of cold sweat and hot flesh creating a tactile paradox that my medical training flags as dangerous.
Too hot. She’s running too hot and her body doesn’t have the resources to bring itself down.
My pager buzzes in my coat pocket.
I check the screen. The station. Probably one of the officers—whatever’s left of them after the fire department clears the scene—calling because the chief is required on-site and the chief is currently unconscious in my arms with blood running from her nose like an open faucet.
I ignore it and head for the bathroom.
The medicine cabinet is where it always is in apartments like this—above the sink, behind a mirror that’s developing age spots from moisture damage.
The bathroom itself tells a story I wish I didn’t have the training to read.
The shower floor is wet. A towel lies in a heap inside the glass enclosure, soaked through, positioned where someone who was sitting on the floor would have dropped it.
The rack outside the shower is missing one towel—the one on the floor.
She was in there. On the floor. Before I arrived.
Drenched in cold water by choice, not accident.
I know this pattern.
Know it because Roman does it too, though he’d rather eat his own badge than admit it to anyone except the two men who’ve shared enough late-night operations to witness the aftershocks.
Three a.m. showers. Ice-cold water. The body’s desperate attempt to override whatever the brain is replaying, drowning the sensory memory of trauma beneath a physical stimulus intense enough to break the loop.
PTSD. Nightmares. The kind that don’t end when you open your eyes.
What happened to you, Officer Hazel? What did they do to you that made cold water feel like mercy?
I open the cabinet.
And the contents rearrange my understanding of Hazel Martinez’s situation with the diagnostic clarity of an autopsy report.
Suppressants.
Not the standard, over-the-counter variety that most Omegas in their twenties cycle through—the mild formulations designed for temporary use during professional obligations, the pharmaceutical equivalent of turning down the volume on biology without unplugging the speakers.
These are heavy.
Three separate prescriptions from two different providers—a combination therapy that I recognize because I work with the special division.
The unit that handles Omega cases. Or more accurately, the unit that handles Omega retrieval—the recovery of bodies that have been found in bathrooms, bedrooms, and office floors after the suppressant cocktails that were supposed to manage their heat cycles instead shut down their cardiovascular systems.
They’re dropping like flies.
Omegas across the globe, dying from the side effects of the very chemicals designed to make them functional in a society that treats their biology as an inconvenience.
Cardiac events. Neurological failure. Hemorrhagic episodes that start as nosebleeds and end as cerebral hemorrhages.
The pharmaceutical industry calls them “adverse reactions.” The death certificates call them “complications of hormonal management.” My case files call them what they are.
Casualties.
And the ratio between Alphas and Omegas—already skewed by genetics, already disproportionate enough to make Omega scarcity a genuine societal concern—is getting worse with every body we recover.
Not that the government gives a damn. Omegas are a demographic inconvenience, a biological variable that complicates the workforce metrics and the military enrollment projections and the economic modeling that treats human reproduction as a line item in a budget.
I stare at the bottles in the cabinet.
The dosage on the primary suppressant is higher than any I’ve encountered in a living patient.
Living.
For now.
I grab what I need—not the suppressants but the counter-agents, the specific combination of antihistamines, electrolyte compounds, and beta-blockers that I’ve learned through grim experience can stabilize the acute symptoms of suppressant toxicity without triggering a full withdrawal.
It’s a stopgap. A finger in a dam. It won’t fix the underlying problem, but it will buy her body enough time to stop trying to shut down.
The apartment’s front door creaks open as I’m walking back from the bathroom.
Oakley.
He slips through the gap with the quiet efficiency of a man whose black-belt training has made stealth a default state.
His auburn hair is tousled from sleep, a jacket thrown over what appears to be sweatpants and a T-shirt—the hasty uniform of someone who received an emergency page and didn’t waste time on presentation.
His green eyes find mine first.
Then they find her.
The change in his expression is immediate.
The easy warmth, the perpetual amusement that makes Oakley Torres look like someone who has never experienced a genuine crisis—it drops.
Just…vanishes. Replaced by something tight and focused and older than his thirty years, the kind of expression that surfaces when a person with medical training sees a patient instead of a person.
He crosses the room in four strides and crouches beside the bed.
“Did she get attacked?” His fingers are already on her wrist, checking her pulse with the practiced efficiency of someone who has done this before, in worse conditions, with less time.
His voice carries none of its usual playfulness.
“Something happened. Her scent is—” He pauses, nostrils flaring, processing the unguarded cocktail of cocoa and clove and lavender ash that Hazel’s unconscious body is radiating without restraint.
“—she’s scared. Even out cold, her scent reads as distressed. What happened?”
“No attack.” I toss the pill combination toward him—a controlled throw, because I know his reflexes. He catches it one-handed without looking, fingers closing around the bottles with the muscle memory of someone who’s been on the receiving end of my field tosses for two years.
He glances at the labels. Understands immediately.
“Suppressant crash?”
“Suppressant crash,” I confirm. “Combined with what I suspect is a pre-heat spike, dehydration, and a fever that’s running high enough to cause the nosebleed and the syncope. She needs the counter-agents, fluids, and someone with a medical background monitoring her temperature until it stabilizes.”
I straighten, adjusting the coat that still carries the damp imprint of her body against my chest.
“I’m going back to the station. The fire isn’t going to investigate itself, and if I’m not there coordinating, those officers are going to do what they’ve been doing for months—nothing.
” I hold his gaze, making sure the next instructions land with the weight I intend.
“Stay here with Roman when he arrives. Tame her fever. And change her clothes—she’s been in wet fabric long enough that hypothermia is going to compound the fever if someone doesn’t get her into something dry. ”
Oakley’s eyes flick from the pills to Hazel’s unconscious form and back to me.
“Why is she drenched to begin with?”
I glance at the bathroom. The open door. The wet shower floor and the soaked towel lying like evidence in a case I didn’t sign up to investigate.
“Best guess? PTSD episode. Nightmare that triggered a panic response. She drenched herself in cold water to break the cycle.”
Oakley’s jaw tightens.
“How do you know that’s what—”
“Because Roman does the same thing.”
The statement drops into the apartment like a stone into still water, the ripples spreading across Oakley’s expression as the implication registers.
He knows about Roman’s nights. We both do.
The showers at two a.m. that no one mentions.
The damp towels that appear in the bathroom without explanation.
The mornings where our commander’s scent carries the residual bite of cold water and unprocessed adrenaline, and neither of us asks because asking would require Roman to answer, and Roman would rather swallow his own tongue than verbalize the things that wake him.
Two people. Same ritual. Same method of containing what their bodies remember and their minds refuse to process.
What the hell happened at that academy?
The thought is interrupted by the front door slamming open with enough force to bounce the knob off the wall and leave a dent in the plaster.
Roman.