“Jamie.”
“Keep up with your vitamins. Eat actual food, not just coffee and spite.” She takes a breath, and when she continues, her voice is lower, weighted with something that sounds disturbingly close to fear. “And please—please—be careful with the heat suppressants. Try to wean off them if you can.”
My eyebrow arches at the wall.
“Why?”
The pause that follows is the kind that rewrites a conversation’s entire temperature.
“Two Omegas died last week.”
The words land in the kitchen like a body hitting concrete. Flat. Final. Irreversible.
I don’t move. Don’t breathe. My hand hovers over the phone, fingers suspended in air that suddenly tastes different—thinner, colder, laced with something my body recognizes before my brain catches up.
“The symptoms,” Jamie continues, and her voice has gone clinical now, the spiritual guru replaced by the woman who processes departmental medical reports and has memorized more health statistics than most physicians. “Fainting spells. Vomiting. Nosebleeds. Neurological episodes. Both were on long-term suppressants. Both in their thirties. The coroner’s reports aren’t finalized, but the preliminary findings are…” She trails off, and I can hear her swallow. “That shit is bad for us, Hazel. Especially once we hit our thirties. The body starts rejecting the chemical override, and the side effects…”
Fainting spells.
Nosebleeds.
Neurological episodes.
My gaze drops to the trash can where three blood-soaked paper towels sit like evidence I’m choosing not to process.
It’s the dry air.
It’s stress.
It’s nothing.
I smirk—a reflex, the facial equivalent of armor plating—and keep my voice even enough to pass any interrogation.
“Sure. I’ll be careful.”
The lie is immaculate. Smooth as polished steel, delivered with the same controlled nonchalance I’d use to assure asuspect that cooperating is entirely optional. Jamie doesn’t push—either she believes me, or she’s choosing her battles with the strategic pragmatism of someone who knows that pressing Hazel Martinez too hard results in walls going up that make Fort Knox look like a screen door.
“I’ll keep you posted on the tea around here,” Jamie says, her tone softening back toward warmth. “But please, Haze. Be safe. For me. For the universe that’s definitely working on your karma situation even if results are pending.”
“Goodbye, Jamie.”
“Namaste!”
The call disconnects, and silence reclaims the apartment with the suffocating completeness of floodwater filling a basement.
I stand motionless in my kitchen for three full seconds, phone dark on the counter, the metallic whisper of my own blood still ghosting through my scent. Then something warm and wet slides from my left nostril, tracing a slow, deliberate path over my upper lip.
Shit.
I lean over the sink—the same sink I just spent twenty minutes conquering—and watch crimson drops fall against white porcelain like evidence I can’t dismiss no matter how many excuses my brain manufactures. This one is heavier than the others. More insistent. The blood doesn’t drip so much as pour, a steady stream that turns the basin pink and sends my heart rate climbing for reasons that have nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the biological reality I’ve been chemically suppressing since I was twenty-seven.
Fainting spells. Vomiting. Nosebleeds.
Both in their thirties.
Both dead.
I close my eyes, letting my head hang over the sink, fingers gripping the edge of the basin hard enough to make the tendons in my forearms stand at attention. The eucalyptus frost of my scent has evaporated entirely, leaving nothing but the raw undertow—dark cocoa, smoked clove, lavender ash—the unguarded smell of an Omega whose body is fighting a war her mind refuses to acknowledge.
