Chapter 8 #2
But Hazel’s response hadn’t been the standard-issue variety.
Cold showers at two a.m. aren’t a casual coping mechanism.
They’re a last resort. The body’s emergency brake, pulled when the nightmare is so vivid and so consuming that the only way to break the loop is to overwhelm the nervous system with a physical stimulus intense enough to override the sensory memory.
Roman does it too.
Alaric’s observation echoes through my thoughts with the weight of a connection I’m not sure I’m qualified to draw. Two people from the same academy, carrying the same nocturnal rituals, deploying the same desperate countermeasures against whatever their sleeping minds refuse to stop replaying.
What happened at that academy that marked both of them?
And does Roman know that she carries it too?
The medical question is easier. Cleaner. I’m trained for medical questions—two years of field medic certification supplementing my law enforcement training, enough pharmaceutical knowledge to recognize the difference between a manageable prescription and a chemical time bomb.
I get up.
The chair protests my departure with the same creak it announced my arrival, and I cross the apartment’s minimal square footage in the five steps it takes to reach the bathroom.
The medicine cabinet is still open from Alaric’s earlier raid, the mirrored door reflecting the single bulb’s anemic light back into a space that smells like cold water and whatever industrial soap the building’s plumbing deigns to provide.
I pull each bottle from the shelf.
One by one. Reading labels with the focused attention of someone who understands that the difference between medicine and poison is often nothing more than dosage and duration.
The primary suppressant is a third-generation compound—the kind that hit the market six years ago with FDA approval and pharmaceutical marketing budgets designed to make Omegas feel empowered by their decision to chemically override the biological systems that society finds inconvenient.
The dosage printed on Hazel’s label is sixty percent higher than the manufacturer’s recommended maximum.
Sixty percent.
The secondary is an adjunct—designed to manage the breakthrough symptoms that occur when the primary starts losing efficacy, which it always does, because the body adapts and the chemicals escalate and the cycle continues until either the Omega stops taking them or the Omega stops breathing.
The third is a neural stabilizer. The kind prescribed when the suppressant cocktail starts producing neurological side effects—tremors, cognitive fog, the insomnia that Hazel wears beneath her eyes like a second pair of shadows.
It’s the pharmaceutical equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a building that’s structurally compromised: it covers the visible damage without addressing the fact that the foundation is cracking.
I write them all down.
Every name, every dosage, every prescribing physician listed on the labels—two different providers, which means she’s either doctor-shopping or one physician identified the danger and another was willing to ignore it.
The pen moves across the small notepad I keep in my jacket pocket with the practiced efficiency of someone who has documented evidence in less cooperative environments than a bathroom.
Research all of them. Side effects. Interaction profiles. Long-term outcomes in Omegas over thirty.
Find alternatives. Quickly. Before the next nosebleed isn’t just a nosebleed.
The problem crystallizes with the uncomfortable clarity of a diagnosis I’m not authorized to make but can’t ignore.
She needs a medical evaluation. Bloodwork.
An assessment of whatever damage five-plus years of high-dose suppressants have inflicted on her cardiovascular system, her neurological function, the delicate hormonal architecture that her body has been chemically silencing since her late twenties.
And she can’t get it.
Because the medical system in a town like Sweetwater Falls—in most towns, in most cities, in the vast majority of the infrastructure that governs Omega healthcare—requires pack authorization for treatment.
A signature. A phone call. A verified pack representative who can consent to procedures, access results, authorize the expenditure of medical resources on an Omega who has been deemed, by the beautiful logic of a system designed by people who’ve never experienced a heat cycle, incapable of making those decisions for herself.
She’s packless.
Which means, in the eyes of the system that’s supposed to protect her, she doesn’t fully exist.
The anger arrives without invitation, settling into the space between my ribs with a heat that has nothing to do with Alpha biology and everything to do with the fundamental obscenity of a world that would let a woman die of treatable symptoms because she doesn’t have a man’s name on her medical consent form.
Pure stupidity. Bureaucratic, institutional, breathtakingly cruel stupidity.
I close the cabinet.
Return to the chair.
And resume the vigil that I didn’t sign up for but have no intention of abandoning.
Hazel stirs.
The motion is small at first—a shift in the position of her head on the pillow, the faintest contraction of her fingers against the sheets, the kind of pre-waking movements that the body produces when consciousness is approaching from a distance but hasn’t yet committed to arrival.
My attention sharpens instantly, the field-medic protocols activating with the reflexive focus of training that doesn’t differentiate between professional obligation and personal investment.
Her eyes open.
Slowly. The lids rising with the heavy, drugged quality of someone who is surfacing from a depth that didn’t want to release her.
Her hazel-brown irises are glazed, unfocused, the pupils dilated in a way that tells me the fever hasn’t fully broken even if the worst has passed.
She blinks—once, twice—and I watch confusion scroll across her features like text loading on a slow screen.
Where am I.
What happened.
Why is there someone in my apartment.
I can read each question as it arrives, her eyes doing the work her voice hasn’t managed yet. They drift through the apartment’s dim interior—the corkboard on the far wall, briefly, before the feverish haze makes the details impossible to process—and then they find me.
The confusion deepens.
She squints.
The expression is so human, so stripped of the professional armor she maintains during every waking moment, that it catches me off guard.
She’s squinting at me the way you squint at something you can’t quite bring into focus—not with suspicion or hostility, but with the genuine optical struggle of someone who is trying to identify a shape that her eyes aren’t cooperating enough to resolve.
She can’t see me clearly.
She’s not just disoriented. She actually can’t see.
“Do you wear glasses?”
The question leaves my mouth before the filter catches it, driven by the same impulse that makes me ask things other people think and discard—the reflexive curiosity that Roman calls “insubordinate” and Alaric calls “endearing, in a clinically annoying way.”
She blinks.
Several times, rapid-fire, the processing speed of her usually formidable brain visibly reduced to dial-up by the combination of fever, medication, and the disorientation of waking up in your own bed with no memory of how you got there.
Then she nods.
Just slightly. The smallest possible acknowledgment, delivered with the reluctance of a woman for whom admitting to any form of vulnerability—even something as mundane as corrective lenses—requires an override of deeply embedded pride.
I check the nightstand.
Top drawer. The instinct is partly training—glasses kept within reaching distance of the bed suggest someone who needs them immediately upon waking—and partly the practical deduction that a four-hundred-square-foot apartment doesn’t offer many storage options.
The drawer slides open.
I find the glasses case immediately. Black, practical, unembellished—exactly the kind of case that Hazel Martinez would own, the functional simplicity of a woman who treats every object in her life as a tool rather than an accessory.
Sitting next to it is—
Oh.
My eyebrow arches.
Slowly.
With the specific, disciplined control of a man who has just discovered something in his temporary chief’s nightstand that is emphatically not a glasses case, and who must now navigate the next thirty seconds of his life without allowing any part of his facial expression to communicate what his eyes have just processed.
A toy.
A very intentional, very generously proportioned toy.
Sitting right next to her reading glasses like the two items share a nighttime routine that I am absolutely, categorically not going to think about.
Is it also a vibrator? Because the shape suggests—
STOP.
She is your patient. She is your chief. She is semi-unconscious with a fever and a nosebleed and you are NOT going to catalogue the specifications of her personal pleasure devices while she’s lying three feet away in YOUR shirt.
Get the glasses. Close the drawer. Maintain the shred of professionalism you have left, Torres.
I extract the glasses case with surgical precision, close the drawer with enough control that the contents don’t shift audibly, and stand with an expression that I have forcibly calibrated to neutral medical professional despite the fact that my brain is now running a background process I cannot terminate.
She’s reaching for them.
Halfway through the motion—her hand extended, fingers outstretched toward the case in my grip with the automatic expectation that I’ll hand them over because that’s how transactions between independent adults work.
But I’m already moving, stepping forward and unfolding the frames with a fluidity that bypasses the handoff entirely.
I put them on her face.