She falls against my chest.
Dead weight. Completely unconscious, her body surrendering its vertical authority with the total, unconditional capitulation of a system that has been pushed beyond its operational limits and has simply…shut down. Her head drops against my shoulder, the wet blue hair bleeding cold water into the fabric of my coat, and her scent?—
Christ.
Without the frost. Without the defensive architecture she maintains during every waking moment. Her scent unguarded is…
The eucalyptus is still there, but it’s soft. Muted. The sharp crystalline edges dissolved into something gentler—not the weapon she wields in the bullpen, but the foundation beneath it. And the cocoa isn’t hidden anymore. It’s everywhere, pouring off her skin with the uninhibited warmth of someone whose body has abandoned pretense, the smoked clove threading through it in waves that make my arms tighten around her involuntarily.
Lavender ash.
Faint. Almost imperceptible. The ghost note, surfacing because she’s unconscious and the gates are unmanned.
This is what she smells like when she isn’t fighting.
This is what she smells like when there’s nothing left to defend against.
And her nose is still bleeding.
Crimson running in a steady stream from her left nostril, tracking across her upper lip, pooling at the corner of her mouth before dripping onto my coat sleeve. The blood is warm against my skin through the fabric, and the metallic tang of it cuts through her pheromones with the clinical urgency of a symptom that can’t be ignored.
Shit.
Shit shit shit.
I scoop her up.
One arm beneath her knees, the other supporting her shoulders, lifting her from the doorway with the careful urgency of someone handling evidence that’s simultaneously fragile and critical. She weighs less than she should—the lean muscle and sharp angles of her frame registering as lighter than my calculations predicted, which means she hasn’t been eating, orhasn’t been eating enough, or has been running her body at a caloric deficit that her metabolism can’t sustain.
When did you last have a proper meal, Officer Hazel? When did you last sleep through the night? When did you last let someone take care of something—anything—so you didn’t have to carry it alone?
My pager is in my coat pocket.
Yes, I carry a pager. In the year of our Lord, while the rest of the civilized world has moved on to smartphones and encrypted messaging apps, Alaric Venezuela communicates mission-critical information through a device that peaked technologically during the Clinton administration. Roman has mocked me for it. Oakley has offered, repeatedly, to buy me “something from this century.” The department’s IT support refuses to service it on principle.
I don’t care. Pagers don’t get hacked. Pagers don’t have tracking software. Pagers deliver information without demanding a data plan, and in a career spent investigating people who exploit digital vulnerabilities, there’s a particular security in technology that the modern world considers obsolete.
I thumb the message with my right hand while cradling her with my left, her body balanced against my chest with the precarious stability of something I’m not willing to set down.
BOTH OF YOU. HERE. NOW.
Oakley’s response buzzes back within eight seconds, because the kid sleeps with his phone on his chest like a security blanket.
Coming. Why? Did Officer Hazel kick your balls for disturbing her slumber?
Roman’s arrives four seconds later.
Please. She probably didn’t even answer the door. That woman sleeps like a log if she can actually get to sleep with how her mind runs like a live-wire circuit.
The familiar fondness buried beneath his dismissal tells me more about Roman Kade’s unresolved feelings than any conversation we’ve had since arriving in Sweetwater Falls. He knows how she sleeps. Knows the architecture of her insomnia. The kind of knowledge that doesn’t come from background checks—it comes from proximity. From nights spent close enough to learn someone’s patterns.
Academy nights. The ones he doesn’t talk about.
I shut both of them down.
She’s unconscious and bleeding. Get your asses here. NOW.
No elaboration. No context. Let the urgency communicate what details can’t.
