Chapter 8 #3
Gently. One arm hooked over her left ear, then the right, the pads of my fingers brushing the damp blue hair at her temples as I settle the frames into position.
The lenses are rectangular, slim, the kind of understated design that exists to be forgotten the moment they’re on—but on Hazel Martinez, they do the opposite.
They frame her eyes in a way that sharpens the hazel-brown irises into focus, adding a dimension of vulnerability to features that are usually too guarded to permit any.
She looks up at me.
And the surprise on her face is so unfiltered, so completely shorn of the professional composure she wears like chain mail, that I feel it land against my sternum with the physical specificity of a hand pressing against my chest.
She wasn’t expecting me to do that.
She was expecting to take care of it herself, the way she takes care of everything herself, because the alternative—letting someone else handle something for her—isn’t in her operational vocabulary.
And you just…did it anyway. And she let you.
When she can see me clearly—when the lenses bring the world into the resolution her brain demands before it can fully engage—the confusion doesn’t decrease.
It increases.
As if seeing Deputy Oakley Torres sitting beside her bed at god-knows-what-hour-of-the-night in a town she didn’t choose with a fever she can’t control is somehow more disorienting than not being able to identify the blurred shape in the chair.
I smirk.
Can’t help it. The expression is as involuntary as breathing, the default response of a face that has never successfully maintained neutrality when the alternative is warmth.
“Alaric came to notify you about an incident at the station,” I explain, keeping my voice low, unhurried, the tempo of someone who has nowhere else to be and no intention of making her feel like she’s behind on the briefing.
“He was at your door. You answered. Then your nose started bleeding, and you passed out before you could get to your uniform.”
I let each sentence settle before offering the next, watching her process the information in real time—the flicker of memory returning in fragments, the slight tightening of her expression as the pieces reassemble into a timeline she’d missed from the inside.
“He caught you,” I add, because the detail matters, even if she won’t acknowledge why. “Alaric paged us. I came over to handle the medical side. Roman’s outside on watch.”
The deliberate relaxation of my posture—leaning back in the chair, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, hands resting in my lap with the easy stillness of someone who is not in crisis and is not going to create one—seems to have the effect I’m aiming for.
She doesn’t tense. Doesn’t reach for the Glock I’d moved to the bathroom counter during the clothing change.
Doesn’t deploy the eucalyptus frost or the sharp tongue or any of the defensive systems that she maintains during daylight hours.
She just…absorbs it.
I don’t rush her. Don’t fill the silence with unnecessary elaboration or the kind of hovering reassurance that people who are used to being in control find suffocating rather than comforting.
I just sit. Present. Available. Unhurried in a way that communicates, louder than words: I’m not going anywhere, and there’s nothing you need to do about that right now.
When she finally speaks, her voice is a croak.
Exhaustion layered over dehydration layered over the raw aftermath of screaming into a towel—though she doesn’t know I know that, and I won’t tell her I do.
“I…passed out.” The words come slowly, each one costing effort, her throat working against the dryness.
Her eyes search my face behind the rectangular frames, looking for…
something. Confirmation. Judgment. The particular expression that people wear when they’ve witnessed someone’s weakness and are deciding how to use it. “And you…stayed?”
The question breaks something in my chest.
Not because it’s dramatic. Not because it’s delivered with theatrical vulnerability or the kind of wide-eyed innocence that some Omegas deploy as a tool.
It breaks something because it’s genuine.
Because the confusion in her voice isn’t about the logistics of the situation—it’s about the concept.
The idea that someone would stay. That unconsciousness wouldn’t be treated as an invitation to leave.
That vulnerability wouldn’t be exploited or archived for later leverage.
Who left you, Hazel? Who walked out when you needed them to stay? Who taught you that passing out means waking up alone?
I frown.
The expression is genuine—not the strategic frown I employ for professional effect, but the unfiltered contraction of a face that has just heard something it finds fundamentally unacceptable.
“Of course I’d stay.” The words come out firmer than I intend—less bedside manner, more personal declaration. I adjust, softening the edges without diluting the conviction. “Why would we leave you alone?”
She doesn’t have an answer for that.
Or rather, she has too many answers, and all of them are worse than silence.
I point toward the door before the moment can curdle into something heavier than she’s equipped to carry right now.
“Roman’s patrolling the perimeter. We don’t know yet if the station fire was a targeted attack or random, so he’s making sure everything’s secure out there.
” I pause, allowing the corner of my mouth to lift in the specific smirk that I deploy when I’m about to say something that is true and entertaining and probably inadvisable.
“Also because he’s having a whole fit about you being unwell.
Don’t know your full history with him, but he doesn’t normally go to the verge of territorial predator mode unless someone either seriously pisses him off or takes something that’s his. ”
She huffs.
Weakly. A shadow of the full-bodied, razor-edged huffs she’d been deploying all week in the bullpen.
But it’s there—the defiance, the stubbornness, the reflexive rejection of any implication that she belongs to anyone, especially an Alpha whose competitive fury she’s been outrunning since they were cadets.
There she is. Even running a fever with blood still drying on her upper lip, the fight is still there.
Her eyes are drooping.
The brief window of consciousness is already narrowing, her body pulling her back toward the sleep it desperately needs with the insistence of a system that has overridden its operator’s objections.
She blinks—heavy, slow, each reopening requiring more effort than the last—and I can see her fighting it.
The jaw tightening. The fingers curling into the sheets.
The warrior refusing to surrender the field even when the field is a mattress and the enemy is rest.
She tries to sit up.
My hand moves.
Not aggressively. Not with the restraining force that her PTSD would flag as threat. Just my palm, flat against her shoulder, applying exactly enough pressure to communicate stay without communicating I’m making you. The distinction matters. With a woman like Hazel, the distinction is everything.
“I don’t think that’s wise, Chief,” I say, and I keep my voice light. Warm. The tone I use when I want someone to feel safe enough to stop fighting without feeling like they’ve lost. “You’ve still got a bit of a fever. Best to rest.”
She holds my gaze for a long moment—the rectangular frames making her eyes sharper, more present, the hazel-brown irises carrying a defiance that the fever hasn’t managed to fully extinguish.
Then she gives up.
The surrender is almost imperceptible—a fractional release of tension in her shoulders, a slight deepening of her exhale, the body accepting what the mind won’t verbalize.
She settles back against the pillow with the reluctant compliance of a woman who has calculated the cost-benefit analysis of resistance and determined, grudgingly, that the numbers don’t support further action.
“The station,” she murmurs, because of course her next thought is the job. Not her own health, not the blood that’s still faintly crusted at her nostril, not the fever or the blackout or the nightmare that preceded all of it. The job. “What’s the report?”
“Not sure yet.” I shake my head gently. “Alaric hasn’t called back with the full details, but he’s handling the scene with the fire department. All you need to worry about right now is resting. We’ve got things covered until you’re up for it.”
She’s losing the battle with consciousness.
I can see it happening—the slow capitulation of a body that has been pushed too far and held together too long. Her eyelids droop. Her breathing deepens. The grip on the sheets loosens, finger by finger, the tension bleeding out of her hands like water from a cracked vessel.
But before sleep reclaims her, she asks one more question.
And this one doesn’t break something in my chest.
It demolishes it.
“Why aren’t you guys throwing me under the bus?”
Her voice is barely above a whisper, the words crumbling at the edges from exhaustion and something deeper—something that sounds like the fossilized remains of every betrayal she’s absorbed since the day she decided to build a career in a system designed to chew up people like her.
“Everyone hates me anyways…”
The sentence trails off into the pillow, and the casual delivery of it—as if the universal hatred of Hazel Martinez is a weather condition she’s simply learned to dress for—makes the anger behind my ribs flare with an intensity that I have to physically manage, my jaw clenching hard enough that the muscles in my neck engage.
“I don’t hate you.”
The words come out quiet but absolute. Bedrock-steady. The kind of statement that doesn’t require volume because its weight is self-evident.