Chapter 16 Six Months
Six Months
~HAZEL~
Light.
Not the ambient, apologetic glow of my apartment’s single lamp or the anemic fluorescence of the station’s overhead panels.
This light is clinical. Precise. A small, concentrated beam moving across my vision with the practiced, methodical rhythm of someone who has done this thousands of times and is checking for something specific.
My pupil contracts.
The reflex is involuntary—my body responding to the stimulus before my brain has organized itself enough to identify the stimulus, let alone the person administering it.
My eyelids flutter against the brightness, the muscles working in the sluggish, uncoordinated pattern of someone surfacing from a depth they didn’t choose.
The light withdraws.
And in its place: a face.
Female. Mid-forties, maybe, though the kind of face that wears age like a credential rather than a decline.
Warm brown skin. Dark coils of hair pinned back from a forehead that radiates the specific, competent calm of someone whose profession requires delivering bad news with precision and good news with restraint.
Her eyes are sharp—nearly black, framed by the kind of fine laugh lines that suggest she smiles often and means it.
And she’s smiling now.
Beaming, actually. The full, sunrise-bright expression of a woman who has been watching monitors and checking vitals and waiting for exactly this moment—the moment her patient’s eyes decide to rejoin the conversation.
“Dr. Sylvie Winters,” she announces, extending a hand that I don’t have the motor coordination to shake.
Her voice is warm. Musical, even—carrying the particular cadence of someone who has spent years calibrating their tone to make hospitals feel less like institutions and more like places where human beings are tended to by other human beings.
“Welcome back, Chief Martinez. You had us in suspense.”
I blink.
The motion requires more effort than it should, my eyelids operating on a delay that makes every visual input arrive approximately one second after my brain expects it.
The room resolves in stages—white ceiling, curtain rail, an IV stand to my left with a clear line running to the back of my hand, monitoring equipment producing the rhythmic chirp of metrics I can’t read from this angle.
Hospital.
No. Not a hospital. Smaller. The ceiling is residential height, the walls painted a sage green that no public institution would choose, and the air smells like—
Lavender.
Real lavender, not the synthetic approximation that cleaning supply companies stamp on their products. The genuine, botanical scent of the herb, probably growing somewhere nearby, infusing the space with an aroma that my Omega physiology recognizes at a cellular level as safe.
“Where…”
My voice emerges as a rasp. Sandpaper on stone. The vocal cords protesting their reactivation with the specific, scratchy resistance of tissue that has been dry for too long.
“You’re at my private medical center,” Dr. Winters answers, producing a cup of water from the side table with the seamless efficiency of a woman who anticipated the question and its prerequisite.
She guides the straw to my lips with a gentleness that feels practiced but not impersonal.
“Small operation. Just me and two nurses. But we’re the only Omega-specialty facility within a hundred miles, so we tend to get interesting patients. ”
I drink.
The water hits my throat like rain on parched earth, and the relief is so immediate that my eyes close involuntarily for the two seconds it takes the liquid to remind my body what hydration feels like.
“You were brought in by emergency transport,” she continues, setting the cup down and pulling a rolling stool into position beside the bed with the fluid motion of someone whose workspace is an extension of her body. “Due to the explosion at the station.”
I frown.
The word explosion enters my brain and finds no corresponding file. My memory offers fragments—the parking lot, gravel, October air, the smell of smoke from the station’s damaged wall. Roman’s face. A hug. A blush.
A key fob in my hand.
A click.
And then—
Nothing.
“Explosion?” I repeat, the word feeling wrong in my mouth, too large for the gap in my memory it’s supposed to fill. “I…no. My cruiser. My cruiser exploded.”
The fragments reassemble as I speak them, the act of narration triggering the reconstruction—the parking lot, the key fob, the sound that wasn’t a sound but a force, Roman’s arm around my waist, the world going sideways and then going black.
“That’s right.” Dr. Winters nods, her expression calibrating from warm to clinical with the seamless transition of a professional who knows when to comfort and when to inform.
“Your department cruiser was rigged with an incendiary device that detonated when the key fob signal was received. You probably don’t remember the details because the blast contained an unusual toxic substance—an aerosolized compound that was dispersed upon detonation. ”
She leans forward slightly, the stool’s wheels adjusting beneath her.
“It doesn’t affect Alphas much. Their olfactory receptors process it as an irritant—some coughing, temporary dizziness, nothing that persists beyond a few hours.
But for Omegas?” She shakes her head, the motion carrying the specific gravity of someone who understands the biochemical disparity between designations and has spent her career treating its consequences.
“Our scent receptors are orders of magnitude more sensitive than the average Alpha’s.
What registers as an irritant in their systems hits ours like a neurotoxin.
The compound essentially overloaded your olfactory-limbic pathway, which triggered a systemic shutdown.
Your brain pulled the plug to protect itself. ”
My brain pulled the plug.
That’s one way to describe losing consciousness in a gravel parking lot while a car bomb converts your department vehicle into shrapnel.
“How long have I been out?”
“The explosion was last night.”
I stare at her.
Last night.
I’ve been unconscious for—what—fourteen hours? Sixteen? The explosion happened in the late afternoon. If it’s morning now, that’s—
Dr. Winters presses a button on the bed’s side panel, and the mattress adjusts beneath me with a smooth, mechanical hum, tilting my upper body to a seated position that my muscles definitely did not authorize but my spine grudgingly appreciates.
The room broadens with the new angle—I can see the sage-green walls fully now, a window showing weak October morning light, a small desk with files and a laptop, and the door.
The door, which is closed.
And beyond which, if my residual scent detection can be trusted despite the neurotoxin hangover, an Alpha is pacing.
The frozen pine is unmistakable. Agitated. The peppermint bark undertones sharp and volatile, the scent signature of a man who is moving back and forth with the compulsive, repetitive urgency of a caged animal who has been told to wait and considers waiting a form of punishment.
“I’m so glad you’re awake,” Dr. Winters says, and the warmth returns to her voice, the clinical precision softening into something that feels like genuine relief. “The pacing Alpha outside will be very pleased, even though he should be resting since he was caught in the blast too.”
My eyes widen.
“Wait.” The word comes out louder than the rasp should allow, adrenaline doing for my vocal cords what water alone couldn’t. “I was with Roman. Roman Kade. Is he okay? He was—right there, he grabbed me before—is he—”
“Commander Kade is fine.” Dr. Winters raises a calming palm, the gesture of a woman who has intercepted many panicked inquiries about loved ones and understands that the answer needs to arrive before the anxiety peaks.
“A few scratches. Some bruising along his posterior thoracic region from what I can tell was a fairly spectacular impact with a brick wall. And he’s probably going to give himself a concussion with how much screaming he’s been doing through a phone for the last six hours, but other than that, he’s good. ”
She smirks.
The expression is knowing—the look of a woman who has been observing the dynamics between the pacing Alpha and the unconscious Omega through the lens of professional experience and personal amusement.
“Clearly your Alpha loves you to bits, since he’s so protective.
” She tilts her head, the smirk settling into something warmer.
“Wouldn’t let those FBI or CSI agents come anywhere near you.
Planted himself outside that door like a Norse sentinel and informed anyone who tried to enter that they’d be ‘physically relocated’ if they crossed the threshold without authorization. ”
Her Alpha.
She called him my Alpha.
Don’t correct her. Don’t explain. Don’t unpack the complicated, decade-spanning, rivalry-to-fling-to-estrangement-to-whatever-the-fuck-this-is dynamic that defines your relationship with Roman Kade while lying in a hospital bed with an IV in your hand and a neurotoxin hangover in your brain.
But the rest of her sentence catches up.
“I guess he has connections,” she continues, “because they backed off. Federal agents. Backed off. In my twenty years of practice, I’ve never seen federal officers defer to a local commander on a case that’s clearly crossed jurisdictional boundaries.”
I gawk.
The expression is unbecoming of a police chief and I cannot currently bring myself to care.
“FBI and CSI?” My voice pitches upward with the incredulity of a woman whose Tuesday afternoon parking lot errand has apparently escalated into a federal investigation. “W-Why would they be here?”
Dr. Winters wheels the stool slightly closer, crossing one leg over the other with the settled posture of a woman preparing to deliver information she considers important.