Chapter 17 The Countdown
The Countdown
~HAZEL~
Six months.
The words sit in the air between us—between me and Dr. Winters, between me and the monitoring equipment, between me and the October morning light that is still filtering through the window as if nothing has changed when everything has changed.
Six months.
To live.
I stare at her.
The expression on my face must be something remarkable, because Dr. Winters doesn’t move.
Doesn’t rush to fill the silence with caveats or treatment plans or the kind of reassuring medical commentary that physicians deploy when the news is bad but manageable.
She just holds the space, her dark eyes steady on mine, the file closed in her hands, the lavender-scented room doing nothing to soften the six words that have just restructured the remaining architecture of my existence.
Six months.
One hundred and eighty days. Give or take.
The approximate span of time between this October morning and some future date in spring when my body will stop performing the functions it was designed to perform because I pumped it full of chemicals that were supposed to keep me free and instead built a countdown clock in my organs.
I don’t know how to feel.
That’s the truth—the raw, unprocessed, un-strategized truth that sits beneath the shock like sediment beneath disturbed water.
I don’t know how to feel because the emotional processing system that Hazel Martinez has spent thirty-two years developing—the system that converts grief into determination and fear into fuel and heartbreak into professional performance—has just encountered an input it wasn’t designed to handle.
Mortality.
Not the theoretical kind. Not the occupational hazard that every officer signs their name beside during orientation—the acknowledgment that the job carries risk, that any shift could be the last one, that the badge comes with a statistical probability of not making it to retirement.
That’s abstract. That’s institutional. That’s a number on a form that you process with the same detached pragmatism you apply to insurance premiums.
This is specific.
This is a doctor sitting three feet from your bed telling you that the vehicle has a fixed amount of fuel and the gauge is already below empty and the body you’ve been driving like a stolen car since you were twenty-two is about to stop running.
And the thing that settles in—the thing that moves through the shock like a blade through water, silent and devastating and so sharp I don’t feel the cut until I’m already bleeding—is the accounting.
All this time.
All this time I’ve been working. Slaving.
Pouring every ounce of energy and intelligence and stubborn, incandescent will into a career that demanded everything and returned nothing except the satisfaction of knowing that justice was served and the people who couldn’t fight for themselves had someone fighting on their behalf.
Eighteen-hour shifts. Missed meals. Cold showers at three a.m. Morning briefings on bruised legs. Cases solved, departments rebuilt, crime rates halved—all of it powered by a body that I treated like a machine and maintained like an afterthought.
Seeking justice for those who didn’t have a voice.
Whether they were too vulnerable to speak or six feet under and silenced forever.
And now here I am.
Less than six months away from being just like them.
Voiceless. Silent. Another body that someone will process and file and close within forty-eight hours, another disappearance from a world that never noticed me enough to miss me.
For what?
The question detonates in my chest with a force that the car bomb couldn’t match.
For what?
To avoid being continuously raped by men who thought of me as a toy? Who treated my body like shared infrastructure and my heat cycles like scheduled maintenance and my consent like a suggestion that biology overruled?
Men who didn’t value my passion for a career that jeopardized my life every day and every night. Who mocked me for eating a second plate of food. Who cornered me in alleys and called it “helping.” Who replaced me with a newer model the moment the suppressants made me inconvenient.
I took those pills to survive them.
And the pills are what’s killing me.
So now I’m going to die. Not in the line of duty.
Not in some heroic, badge-polished, flag-on-the-coffin narrative that the department would use for recruitment materials.
I’m going to die because I chose chemical castration over sexual assault and the chemicals turned out to be a slower, quieter version of the same violence—just one that the pharmaceutical companies can bill for.
For what.
Dr. Winters’ hand lands on mine.
The contact is warm, grounding, pulling me out of the spiral with the practiced precision of a physician who knows exactly when a patient’s internal monologue has crossed from processing into drowning.
“But,” she says.
One word.
Placed with the deliberate, load-bearing weight of a structural support beam being inserted into a building that’s started to collapse.
“There are things that can be done.”
Her fingers squeeze mine—lightly, briefly, the physical equivalent of an anchor being deployed.
“Especially now that you have a pack and can receive treatment. The registration that Commander Kade filed gives you full access to Omega-specialized medical intervention—therapies, medications, monitoring protocols that are significantly more advanced than what the standard system provides. There are treatment paths that can address the cardiomyopathy, that can support the hepatic recovery, that can slow and potentially reverse the neurological deterioration.”
She holds my gaze.
“But I need you to understand the baseline. If you had remained on those suppressants—if you’d continued at the dosage and duration you were operating on—you would have been lucky to last the remaining six months.”
The word lucky lands like a slap delivered with clinical precision.
“The nosebleeds were signs of internal strain. Vascular pressure exceeding what your system could regulate. Left untreated, the progression would have been nosebleeds to seizures—which would have been the late-stage indicators—and from seizures to organ failure.”
She lets the sequence sit.
Each stage a door closing behind me on a corridor I’d been walking without knowing it had an end.
Nosebleeds.
I’d had three in the last week. Dismissed every one.
Wiped the blood on the back of my hand, told Jamie it was nothing, told Alaric it wasn’t worrisome, told myself that the iron taste in the back of my throat was just another operational inconvenience of being an Omega in a world that treats my biology as an engineering problem to be solved with chemistry.
I was dying.
I’ve been dying.
And I called it “not a big deal.”
I sit there.
Speechless.
Not the professional speechlessness that I sometimes deploy strategically—the silence that lets a suspect fill the void with incriminating details.
This is the genuine, structural speechlessness of a woman whose vocabulary has been emptied by the weight of what it’s been asked to carry.
There are no words in my catalogue that fit this moment.
No tactical response. No competitive deflection.
No “that’s just life” to smooth over the fact that life has just informed me of its expiration date.
Dr. Winters puts her hands on my shoulders.
Lightly. The way Oakley does—the way people touch me when they’ve learned that my body interprets contact as potential threat unless it’s telegraphed with enough care to override the programming.
She draws my attention upward.
And when she speaks, her voice is no longer clinical. No longer the physician delivering results. It’s the voice of a woman who has been in this room before—maybe not this specific room, but this conversation, this moment, this exact intersection of diagnosis and devastation.
“It’s scary, isn’t it?” she whispers.
The question is not rhetorical.
“To be so caught up in our professions. Caught up in life. Working and thriving and thinking we’re doing so much for this world.
” Her thumbs press into my shoulders with the gentle, grounding pressure of someone who is physically tethering another person to the present. “And doing so little for ourselves.”
I look at her.
“Until one day you’re thrown out of the constant loop,” she continues, “and you realize that we sometimes aren’t blessed with years upon years.
We’re given days. Months, if we’re fortunate.
All because we put the world ahead of ourselves.
Goals that should catapult us to the early retirement.
To the fulfilling promotion. To everything we dream of. ”
Her grip tightens.
A small squeeze. The physical punctuation of someone about to deliver the sentence that matters most.
“Only to realize what we dream of is never obtained. That the acknowledgment of our hard work means nothing to the people sitting in high chairs, enjoying the bliss that our labor brings to their corporations. Their departments. Their institutions.” Her dark eyes hold mine with a depth that suggests she is speaking from a place beyond medical expertise—from lived experience, from a reckoning she’s already had.
“You realize that all our sacrifices only hurt us. That they ruin the happiness we envisioned. And you finally understand why they always say life isn’t fair. ”
She squeezes once more.
“I don’t know what you’ve sacrificed to be in your position, Chief Martinez.
” Her voice drops to something intimate, something shared between two Omega women in a lavender-scented room where the truth doesn’t have to compete with protocol.
“But I can tell that the man out there loves the shit out of you. I can tell that the other two men—the ones who pulled every string to get you this slot at my facility—also seem to care about you enough to clearly want you to live past six months.”