“You want me,” I say slowly, each word testing its own weight, “to act like none of this is bothering me. While Istart being more…obvious…with my relationship with my new Alphas.”
Dr. Winters’ grin widens.
“So that whoever is targeting me gets extra mad,” I continue, the tactical implications unfolding with the accelerating logic of a plan that is simultaneously dangerous and brilliant. “And when they’re mad, they’ll fuck up.”
“Exactly.”
I want to argue.
The independent, no-one-tells-me-what-to-do, I-solve-my-own-problems-with-my-own-hands part of my brain is already composing objections. The plan requires performance. Vulnerability. The public display of a relationship dynamic that I have spent my entire career keeping private because private is safe and public is exploitable. It requires me to look like a woman who is building a life in this town rather than investigating one—to trade the armor of professional detachment for the apparent softness of a woman who is, god help her,happy.
But it’s brilliant.
Because it serves every operational need. If I’m visibly embedded in the community—shopping at the local market, eating at the bakery where the kind Omega gives me free donuts, appearing in public with three Alphas who look at me like I’m the center of a gravity they didn’t choose but can’t escape—then my presence becomesnormal. Expected. Part of the town’s fabric rather than a disruption to it.
And if I shift the investigation from the office to the home—building case files from the apartment, making connections from the privacy of a space that isn’t a bombed station with no functional security—then whoever is watching me will have to work harder to monitor my progress. They’ll have to get closer. Take more risks.
And risk creates opportunity.
Risk creates the kind of mistake that investigators wait for with the patient, predatory focus of a woman who has built her career on the principle that everyone gets caught because everyone eventually gets angry enough to be stupid.
“I can do that,” I say.
Dr. Winters nods, the strategic satisfaction in her expression settling into something that looks almost maternal—the pride of a woman who has identified a capable ally and is pleased to be working with her.
“But,” I add, and the word pivots the conversation with the decisive force of a woman who has been managing a medical crisis alongside a criminal one and cannot afford to prioritize the bomb over the biology. “I need to be examined. The pills. The suppressants. I was scheduled for a diagnostic before…well. Before my cruiser became shrapnel.”
I sit up straighter.
“Alaric—Investigator Venezuela—arranged for an Omega specialist to evaluate me. The suppressants I’ve been taking are high-dose, long-term, and they’re producing side effects that are…”
I pause.
The wordsit’s a big dealform in my mouth with the strange, unfamiliar shape of a phrase I’ve only recently learned to say.
“Concerning,” I finish. “Nosebleeds. Syncope. Fever episodes. I need to know what kind of damage we’re looking at.”
Dr. Winters’ expression changes.
The strategic warmth—the community intelligence officer, the small-town navigator, the woman who was building a plan with me over a hospital bed—recedes. In its place, something I recognize from a lifetime of sitting across from professionals who are about to tell you something you don’t want to hear.
Gravity.
The specific, weighted seriousness of a physician who has been waiting for this part of the conversation and has been preparing for it since before I woke up.
“Ah,” she says.
One syllable. Carrying enough mass to alter the atmosphere in the room.
“About that.”
She stands.
The stool wheels backward as she rises, her hands finding the pockets of her white coat with the deliberate motion of a woman who needs to do something with her hands and has chosen the most neutral option available. She walks to the desk. Picks up a file—not the laptop, not a digital readout, but a physical folder with paper inside it, the kind of tangible, holdable document that doctors produce when the results require the patient to have something solid to grip.
She returns.
Sits.
