Chapter 8 #4
“I don’t really know you yet, sadly.” I hold her gaze, watching the frames catch the dim light as her lids fight to stay open. “But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t mind getting to.”
A beat.
Then a wink.
Because I am, at my core, constitutionally incapable of letting sincerity exist without companionship.
Then—immediately, the course correction, because timing is everything and the line between charming and terminated is thinner than most people appreciate—
“Oh. Maybe not in a flirtatious way if that’s going to get me fired.”
She smirks.
Just slightly. The barest lift at the corner of her mouth, the ghost of an expression that her conscious self would never permit in the presence of a subordinate officer and her sleeping self apparently can’t suppress.
My heart skips.
Actually, physically skips—the cardiac equivalent of tripping over a crack in the sidewalk.
One beat missed, then a compensatory double-beat, then the slow, damning realization that Deputy Oakley Torres has just experienced an involuntary cardiovascular response to the micro-expression of a woman who threatened to dissolve his workplace two days ago.
You’re in trouble, Torres.
Deep, structural, foundation-level trouble.
Her eyes close.
She sighs—the deep, full-body kind that carries the weight of everything she’s holding and nowhere near enough of it out.
I lean forward in the chair, elbows on my knees, my voice dropping to barely above a whisper.
“Why would anyone hate you, Hazel?”
I don’t expect an answer.
Her eyes are closed, her breathing deepening toward sleep, and the question is more for the room than for her—a thought released into the quiet because keeping it inside felt like holding something too hot to contain.
But she answers.
Quietly. Her voice barely more than breath shaped into words, the consonants soft, the vowels drowsy, the sentence delivered from the threshold between wakefulness and surrender.
“When you’re good in this world…you’ll never experience the warmth of gratitude in comparison to the praise you receive for being cunning.”
The words settle into the apartment like snowfall.
She sighs again. The lines of exhaustion are carved into her face even with her eyes closed—the dark hollows, the tension held in the jaw, the faint crease between her brows that suggests her body has forgotten how to fully relax even when sleep is actively reclaiming it.
“I bet everyone at the station hates me.” A pause. A breath. “You’ll probably hate me too. Easy to hate someone who doesn’t submit to the manipulation.”
Another breath, and this one shakes at the edges.
“Justice is only respected in law books. Reality is…no one gives a damn about justice.” Her voice cracks on the last word—not dramatically, not with the theatrical fragility of someone performing vulnerability, but with the quiet structural failure of someone whose defenses have been so thoroughly exhausted by fever and fear and years of fighting alone that the truth leaks through the gaps.
“And that’s exactly what’s wrong in this world. ”
I reach out.
My hand moves before my brain authorizes it—the same involuntary response that caught a pill bottle mid-air, that puts glasses on a stranger’s face, that stays beside a bed when leaving would be easier and less complicated.
My palm finds her cheek, cupping the curve of it, my thumb resting against the warm skin just below the dark shadow of her lower lashes.
Her eyes open.
Just slightly. Barely. The lids lifting just enough to reveal the hazel-brown beneath the rectangular frames, and what I see there—behind the fever, behind the exhaustion, behind every wall she’s built and reinforced and electrified—is a question she doesn’t have the energy to ask.
Why are you touching me?
Why is this gentle?
Why doesn’t it feel like a trap?
“I don’t hate you, Hazel,” I say, and my voice carries the kind of quiet conviction that doesn’t need volume or repetition or evidence. It just is. “And those who fear justice are simply afraid of acknowledging the lack of courage they carry to do good in the world.”
She doesn’t respond.
But she doesn’t pull away from my hand.
And from Hazel Martinez, that’s practically an embrace.
I rise from the chair.
Slowly. Carefully. The motion deliberate enough that it doesn’t startle, doesn’t disrupt the fragile equilibrium we’ve built in this dim room between a woman who trusts nothing and a man who is asking for nothing except the chance to be trusted.
I take the glasses off her face.
Folding them with the same care I’d used to put them on, sliding them back into the case, placing the case on the nightstand where she can reach it. The drawer stays closed.
Then I lean down.
And press a kiss to her cheek.
Light. Brief. The barest contact of lips against skin that’s still running warm from the fever, placed at the soft juncture where her cheekbone meets the hollow beneath her eye. It’s not a romantic gesture. Not exactly. It’s…
Something she needed.
Something I think she’s never received.
A touch that asks for nothing. That takes nothing. That exists solely to communicate, in the language that words can’t quite reach: you are not alone in this room, and the person beside you chose to be here.
She looks confused.
The expression is small, hazy, filtered through fever and frames she’s no longer wearing. And deep down, buried beneath the charm and the winks and the carefully maintained performance of easy confidence that I deploy like camouflage over the serious man beneath—I’m confused too.
Because I’ve known this woman for forty-eight hours and I just kissed her cheek like it was the most natural thing I’ve ever done.
Maybe it was.
Maybe some things don’t need time to be right. Maybe they just need the moment to be honest.
“Rest, Chief.” I reach for the nightstand lamp—the apartment’s only remaining light source—and dim it until the room softens into something close to darkness, the October night reclaiming the space through the thin blinds. “We got you.”
Her eyes want to defy.
I can see it—the flicker of resistance, the reflex to push back, to insist she doesn’t need anyone to “get” her because she’s been getting herself for thirty-two years and the system works fine, thank you very much, even when it doesn’t, even when she’s bleeding and burning and held together by nothing but stubbornness and icy blue hair dye.
But her eyes drop.
Close.
As if my permission—not my command, not my authority, just the quiet assurance that it’s okay to stop fighting for the night—is the thing her body has been waiting for.
The thing that tells her exhausted, hyper-vigilant nervous system that someone else is watching the door, so the sentinel can finally stand down.
Her breathing deepens.
Steadies.
Settles into the slow, measured rhythm of genuine, unguarded sleep.
I sit back in the chair.
The creak is familiar now. The sound of my post. My chosen station for however many hours remain until morning, or until Alaric calls with an update, or until Roman gets tired of patrolling and starts lurking beneath windows again.
The apartment is quiet.
The radiator ticks. The wind whispers against the glass. The corkboard on the far wall holds its web of red strings and pinned photographs in patient silence, the investigation waiting for its investigator to wake.
And I sit beside Hazel Martinez’s bed in a borrowed chair in a town I’ve known for less than a week, watching a woman I’ve known for less than three days sleep with my shirt on her body and my kiss still warming her cheek, and I think—
Not everyone is going to leave, Hazel.
Not everyone is going to use what they see against you.
Not everyone who stays does it because they want something from you.
The October wind shifts outside, and somewhere in the distance, Roman’s patrol carries him past the window where I can hear the measured cadence of his boots on gravel—steady, vigilant, the footsteps of a man who is guarding something he won’t admit he cares about.
All I can hope for is that we can prove to her that not everyone is a manipulative prick in this cruel world.