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 beenluckyto last the remaining six months.”
The wordluckylands 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 tacticalresponse. 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.”
