I’m about to respond—something professional, something that communicates I am handling this with the composed authority befitting my rank despite the fact that I am standing in a doorway looking like a drowned cat in a V-neck—when Alaric’s expression changes.
The shift is subtle. A fractional tightening around his eyes. The investigator’s focus sharpening from general observation to specific concern, zeroing in on something that his training has flagged as important.
“Do you experience nosebleeds often, Officer Hazel?”
The question arrives like a bullet I didn’t hear fired.
I blink.
Once. Twice. Three times, as if repetitive eyelid movement can somehow rewind the conversation to a version where he didn’t just ask that. My hand rises to my face—slow, disbelieving, the motion of someone checking for evidence they’re not ready to find.
My fingers come away red.
Bright crimson against the olive of my skin, vivid in the porch light, unmistakable.
Not again.
Not now. Not in front of him.
The blood is running from my left nostril in a steady stream, warm against my upper lip, tracing a path down to my chin where it drips—drip drip drip—onto the shirt that’s already soaked with shower water, the red disappearing into black cotton like evidence being destroyed.
Fainting spells. Nosebleeds. Neurological episodes.
Both in their thirties.
Both dead.
Jamie’s voice echoes through my skull with the diagnostic clarity of an autopsy report.
“It’s nothing worrisome,” I say, and the lie tastes like iron and denial and the specific flavor of self-destruction that comes from choosing stubbornness over survival. I press the back of my hand to my nose, smearing blood across my knuckles with the careless efficiency of someone who has done this too many times in too few days. “Um. Just—give me a moment.”
I spin on my heel.
Every intention of retreating into the apartment.
Finding my uniform—wherever it’s been discarded in the chaos of the last week, probably draped over a chair or balled onthe bathroom floor where I’d stripped it after another eighteen-hour day of managing a department that couldn’t find its own case files. Getting dressed. Wiping the blood from my face. Reassembling the mask.
Becoming Chief Martinez again, the version of me that doesn’t scream into towels or bleed from suppressant failure or dream about alleyways where the wordnowas treated as decoration.
The world tilts.
Not slowly. Not with the gradual, nauseating spin that I’ve been managing for days—the low-grade vertigo that I’d attributed to dehydration, stress, the radiator’s assault on the apartment’s air quality. This is sudden. Violent. The floor and the ceiling exchanging positions with the speed of a coin flip, my inner ear sending emergency signals that my legs receive too late.
My vision narrows.
The apartment—the corkboard, the coffee mug, the mattress with its twisted sheets—collapses inward from the edges, the periphery going dark like a camera aperture closing. The center holds for one second. Two.
Then it goes black.
CHAPTER 7
Three Fears
~ALARIC~
I’ve only been frightened three times in my life.
The first was my grandmother’s deathbed. November, nineteen years ago. A hospital room in Albuquerque that smelled like antiseptic and fading gardenias—her scent, the one that had anchored my childhood, dissolving by the hour as her body surrendered what her spirit had been fighting to keep. I’d held her hand and watched the monitors translate the end of her life into a series of declining numbers, and something inside my chest had cracked with the slow, irreversible permanence of foundation damage. I was nineteen. I didn’t know yet that fear was something you could carry in your bones like shrapnel, that it could calcify there and become structural, part of the architecture of who you are.
