Not the figurative kind—the actual, vestibular kind, where the ceiling and the walls and the shower tiles trade positions with a fluidity that makes my stomach heave. I don’t realize I’ve stopped screaming. Don’t realize I’ve slid from sitting to lying, the shower floor cold and hard beneath my cheek, the water pounding against my side like a pulse counting down something I don’t want to reach.
You’re going to pass out.
You’re on a shower floor in a town that doesn’t know you, and you’re going to pass out, and no one will come because no one knows you’re here because you designed your entire life around not needing anyone and congratulations, Martinez, the architecture is working perfectly.
I don’t know how long I lie there.
Time becomes irrelevant when your body decides that consciousness is a luxury it can no longer afford. Minutes. Maybe longer. The water runs from ice cold to simply cold as the building’s ancient plumbing finds its equilibrium, and the shivers that had been violent enough to rattle my teeth settle into a full-body tremor that is less dramatic but no less miserable.
The vibration reaches me first.
Not the water. Not the residual trembling. Something external—rhythmic, electronic, cutting through the white noise of the shower with enough persistence to register in a brain that has temporarily checked out of active duty. My phone.Somewhere in the apartment. Buzzing with the insistent cadence of a call that hasn’t been answered.
Fuck.
The word kickstarts something. Not recovery—not yet—but the basic motor function required to peel my face off a shower floor and take stock of the situation with whatever cognitive capacity I have remaining.
I’m drenched. Obviously. The black V-neck clings to every line of my torso, the cotton plastered against the lean muscle and the scar tissue and the ink of the raven spanning my shoulder blades. My shorts are soaked through, heavy against my thighs. My icy blue hair has escaped whatever knot I’d slept in and hangs in wet ropes around my face, the dark roots visible where the dye has been betrayed by water.
I kill the shower. Haul myself upright using the towel bar, which groans under my weight but holds. The world sways, stabilizes, sways again—a sea-sick oscillation that tells me the suppressants are staging their latest act of biochemical warfare and my body is losing the negotiation.
The phone buzzes again.
Then the doorbell rings.
“What—”
I glance at the window. Dark. Notearly morningdark.The middle of the goddamn nightdark, the kind of darkness that exists between midnight and dawn when the only people awake are insomniacs, criminals, and apparently whoever is standing on my doorstep.
What fucking time is it?
I don’t check. There isn’t time. My training takes over—the officer replacing the woman who was just screaming into a towel, the switch so practiced it happens in the space between one heartbeat and the next. My hand finds the Glock on the nightstand, fingers closing around the grip with the musclememory of someone who has slept with a weapon in reach since the day she decided to stop being a victim.
I tuck it against the small of my back, hidden by the wet fabric of my shirt, and pad toward the front door on bare feet that leave damp prints on the hardwood.
“Who is it?”
My voice emerges steadier than it has any right to be. Controlled. Professional. Absolutely betraying nothing of the fact that thirty seconds ago I was lying on a shower floor with a towel shoved in my mouth.
Officer Hazel Martinez doesn’t break down. She redirects.
“I know this is completely unprofessional to be at your place, Officer Hazel.”
Alaric.
His voice filters through the door with the measured cadence I’ve already learned to associate with him—unhurried, deliberate, carrying the gravel of a man who has been awake for either too long or not long enough. The burnt vanilla of his scent seeps through the gap beneath the door, faint but detectible, wrapping around my ankles like a vine.
“But the station needs you.”
I frown.
The expression is genuine—not the strategic frown I deploy for professional purposes, but the involuntary contraction of muscles that haven’t finished processing panic and are now being asked to pivot to operational mode without a transition period.
I open the door.
The October night floods in—cold air, distant horse sounds, the particular dark-sky silence of a rural town where three a.m. actually means something. And Alaric Venezuela, standing on my doorstep in the beige coat that apparently doubles as his entire wardrobe, dark hair catching the porch light in waysthat make the silver at his temples look deliberate rather than defeated.
His eyes find mine.
