Chapter 17 The Countdown #2
She holds my gaze for a long, weighted moment.
“I don’t know who’s after you. I don’t know why. But thanks to fate, you avoided death by the tip of a margin that most people don’t get. And this isn’t a gamble anymore, Hazel.”
My first name.
Not Chief Martinez. Not Officer. Hazel. Spoken by a woman who has decided that this moment requires the intimacy of names rather than the distance of titles.
“This is a countdown,” she says. “As to whether you’re happy with this life—this version, this trajectory, this path that was paved by everyone else’s expectations and maintained by your own refusal to stop running—or whether you want to change it.
For your benefit. Not the benefit of those sitting in top hats, using you for their own game. ”
She lets go.
Steps back.
And smiles.
Not the strategic smile or the clinical smile or the physician’s professional warmth.
A real one. The kind that carries sadness and hope in equal measure, the expression of a woman who has delivered the worst news of someone’s life and is now handing them the only thing that makes the news survivable: the agency to respond.
“You can rest as long as you need to,” she says, her tone transitioning back to the competent, practical warmth of a physician who has said what needed saying and is now managing the logistics of keeping her patient alive.
“I’ll ensure all the medications you need are available at the pharmacy.
The treatment protocol is aggressive but manageable—counter-agents for the suppressant damage, cardiac support, hepatic repair compounds. ”
She begins counting on her fingers with the domestic authority of a mother listing chores.
“Increase your daily water intake. Double it from whatever you’re currently not drinking.
Protein at every meal. And eat regularly—these new meds are harsh on the gut, so skipping meals isn’t an option anymore.
Three meals minimum. Snacks between. If that cream custard pastry is available, I’d recommend it as a supplemental caloric source. ”
She knows about the cream custard.
Small-town gossip is faster than fiber optics.
“We’ll go through your full treatment options at the next appointment.
There are pathways, Hazel. Genuine, evidence-supported pathways that can extend the timeline significantly—potentially reverse the damage entirely, depending on how your body responds.
But it requires compliance, which I suspect is going to be your least favorite word. ”
She moves to the desk and produces a sealed envelope.
“I’ve written a letter ensuring you’re on paid medical leave for the next two weeks. If you need more, don’t hesitate to ask. Your body needs rest the way it needs oxygen right now—not as a luxury but as a survival requirement.”
She sets the envelope on the side table.
Looks at me one more time.
And leaves.
The door closes behind her with a soft click that sounds, in the silence of this room, like the closing of a chapter.
And I sit.
In a sage-green room that smells like lavender, in a bed with an IV in my hand and a monitoring system tracking the cardiac function of a heart that has been chemically compromised for years, in a body that has been telling me it was dying and that I dismissed as “not a big deal” because admitting the deal’s size would have required stopping the work and the work was all I had.
Six months.
What do you do with six months?
What does a woman who has spent her entire adult life running toward justice do when the road she’s been running on has a visible end?
Does she run faster? Does she stop? Does she look around for the first time and notice the scenery she’s been sprinting past—the sunsets she never watched, the meals she never cooked, the kitchen she fantasized about but never built, the connections she severed because connections are vulnerabilities and vulnerabilities are how you get cornered in alleys?
Does she think about the three men who cooked her breakfast and registered as her pack and caught her when she fell and asked permission to kiss her cheek?
Does she think about what it would mean to have six months with people like that?
Or does she guard her heart, the way she’s been guarding it, because the heart is all she has left and six months isn’t enough time to survive another betrayal?
I don’t know how long I sit there.
Time has lost its urgency—not because I have excess but because the concept of time management feels absurd when the supply has been quantified.
The monitoring equipment chirps its steady rhythm.
The IV drips its transparent contribution to my survival.
The October light shifts against the window, the angle changing incrementally enough that only a woman with nothing to do but stare at a wall would notice.
The door opens.
And the sound pulls my gaze from the distance it’s been occupying—the unfocused, middle-space stare of someone whose eyes are open but whose attention is elsewhere, processing information that the visual field can’t contain.
Roman.
He stands in the doorway.
And the first thing I register—the very first data point that my exhausted, overwhelmed, recently — neurotoxin brain produces—is that he looks like a mess.
This is remarkable.
Because Roman Kade does not do mess. Roman Kade does pristine.
Does regulation. Does the kind of meticulous, almost vain attention to personal presentation that makes him look like he stepped off the cover of a law enforcement recruitment magazine—hair styled with the geometric precision of a man who considers dishevelment a moral failing, uniform pressed and aligned to a standard that most officers don’t achieve on their best day, the overall effect communicating I am in control of every controllable variable, including the angle of my collar.
Not now.
Now his platinum hair is wrecked. Not disheveled—wrecked.
The careful style destroyed by hours of running his hands through it, the bleached strands standing at angles that suggest multiple fingers applied in multiple directions during multiple moments of escalating distress.
His tactical jacket is torn at the left shoulder—the fabric ripped along the seam, exposing the base layer beneath, the damage consistent with a man who hit a brick wall at speed and didn’t bother changing because changing would have required leaving the hallway outside my door.
Scratches line his forearms. Thin, parallel abrasions from the ornamental bushes that had broken their fall, the dried blood sitting in the shallow wounds like rust in the grooves of the Norse runes they cross.
His jaw is bruised—a deep, developing purple along the right side where bone met something harder than bone during the impact.
And his eyes.
His eyes are what stop me.
Red-rimmed. Not from crying—Roman Kade would rather eat his own badge than cry where anyone could see—but from the specific, capillary-bursting strain of a man who has been awake for too many consecutive hours, processing too much adrenaline, screaming through too many phone calls, and refusing to sleep because sleep would require closing his eyes and closing his eyes would mean not watching the door behind which the woman he almost lost is lying unconscious.
He looks like a man who almost lost his world.
The thought arrives with a clarity that surprises me.
Not because it’s new—Alaric told me as much in the kitchen.
That man clearly still loves the shit out of you.
Oakley hinted at it with his commentary about Roman’s territorial predator mode.
Even Dr. Winters, a woman who has known us for approximately twelve hours, identified it from the other side of a closed door through the medium of aggressive pacing.
But seeing it.
Seeing it in the torn jacket and the wrecked hair and the bruised jaw and the red-rimmed eyes of a man who is standing in a doorway looking at me like I am simultaneously the most important thing in his field of vision and the thing he is most afraid to approach—
That’s different from being told.
He could have lost me.
And I would have never confronted him.
The realization unfolds with the slow, irreversible weight of something that has been true for a long time and is only now being acknowledged—a debt finally tallied, a letter finally opened, a conversation deferred so many times that the deferral itself became the relationship.
I would have died without asking him about Maggie.
Without understanding why the academy separated us with the surgical precision of people dismantling something they found threatening.
Without knowing whether the on-and-off thing we called rivalry and competition and mutual antagonism was ever what we actually called it, or whether it was always the other thing—the thing that doesn’t have a name because naming it would have required admitting that two people who built their identities on independence had accidentally built something together.
I would have let that connection drift and perish, thinking it was okay.
Thinking it was just another sacrifice the career demanded.
It wasn’t okay.
He closes the door.
Slowly. The motion deliberate, the mechanism engaging with the controlled precision of a man who is managing his own entry into a space that requires care he’s not sure he knows how to provide.
The frozen pine of his scent fills the room immediately—agitated, volatile, the peppermint bark undertones sharp with residual adrenaline that his body hasn’t finished processing.
But beneath it—beneath the tactical surface, beneath the commander’s chemical signature of operational stress—something softer.
Warmer.