Don’t exert effort on the woman who has six months to live because the investment might not pay off and you’d be better served allocating those resources to a less damaged Omega with a longer warranty period.
She tries to lower her head.
The motion is small—a downward tilt of the chin, the universal gesture of someone retreating behind their own face when the vulnerability becomes too visible. The head-drop that Hazel performs when the walls are cracking and she doesn’t want anyone to see what’s behind them.
I don’t let her.
My hand slides from her cheek to her chin, catching it before the tilt completes. Not roughly. Not with the commanding force of an Alpha asserting dominance. With the steady, non-negotiable firmness of a man who has watched this woman hide behind her own strength for ten years and is done watching.
I guide her face up.
Her eyes meet mine.
And what I see in them—the dark amber swimming with uncertainty, the pupils dilated, the expression carrying the specific, gut-destroying vulnerability of someone who has just handed another person the most devastating piece of information they possess and is waiting to be dropped?—
I’m going to fix this.
I don’t know how yet. I don’t have the medical expertise or the pharmaceutical knowledge or the treatment plan. But I have resources. I have connections. I have a phone full of people who owe me favors and a career’s worth of earned currency that I have never once spent on anything personal because I was saving it for exactly this kind of moment—the moment when something mattered enough to cash in everything.
“Are there treatment options?”
I keep my voice level.
The effort it requires is seismic. Every Alpha instinct in my body is screaming—a full-frequency, fight-or-flight, protect-the-Omega cascade that wants me to put my fist through the wall and find whoever manufactured those pills and whoever prescribed them and whoever allowed this woman to poison herself in slow motion for years while an entire system watched and did nothing. The frozen pine of my own scent is spiking—I can feel it, the chemical surge that makes the peppermint bark go sharp and the smoked oud darken to something volatile and dangerous.
But Hazel doesn’t need my rage right now.
She needs my logic.
She stares at me.
A long moment. The kind of pause that contains a decision being made behind someone’s eyes—the rapid, invisible calculation of a woman weighing how much truth to release and how much to keep in reserve.
“Y-Yes,” she says.
The stutter is small. Barely a hesitation. But it’s there, and from a woman who does not stutter, who delivers testimony and interrogation and cross-examination with the same flawless, unbroken precision she brings to everything she does, that single repeated consonant carries the weight of a confession.
She’s scared.
Hazel Martinez is scared.
And she’s trusting me with it.
I nod.
“Then you’re living longer than six fucking months.”
The words come out with a conviction that surprises even me—not the rehearsed certainty of a commander issuing an order, but the raw, bedrock-level resolve of a man who has just decided something that is not open for negotiation. Not with doctors. Not with biology. Not with the pharmaceutical industry or the criminal organization targeting her or the universe that has spent Hazel’s entire life dealing her cards from the bottom of the deck.
“I don’t care how much it costs.”
And I don’t.
My savings account carries the accumulated weight of fifteen years of a career that paid well and a man who spent nothing. No vacations. No renovations. No impulse purchases beyond the Rosetta Stone subscription that taught me Japanese because learning languages felt less pathetic than admitting I was learning them for her. The money exists specifically because I never found anything worth spending it on.
I’ve found it now.
“I don’t care about the time. All I care about is us getting you better and keeping you safe.”
