Living.
For now.
I grab what I need—not the suppressants but the counter-agents, the specific combination of antihistamines, electrolyte compounds, and beta-blockers that I’ve learned through grim experience can stabilize the acute symptoms of suppressant toxicity without triggering a full withdrawal. It’s a stopgap. A finger in a dam. It won’t fix the underlying problem, but it will buy her body enough time to stop trying to shut down.
The apartment’s front door creaks open as I’m walking back from the bathroom.
Oakley.
He slips through the gap with the quiet efficiency of a man whose black-belt training has made stealth a default state. His auburn hair is tousled from sleep, a jacket thrown over what appears to be sweatpants and a T-shirt—the hasty uniform of someone who received an emergency page and didn’t waste time on presentation.
His green eyes find mine first.
Then they find her.
The change in his expression is immediate. The easy warmth, the perpetual amusement that makes Oakley Torres look like someone who has never experienced a genuine crisis—it drops. Just…vanishes. Replaced by something tight and focused and older than his thirty years, the kind of expression that surfaces when a person with medical training sees a patient instead of a person.
He crosses the room in four strides and crouches beside the bed.
“Did she get attacked?” His fingers are already on her wrist, checking her pulse with the practiced efficiency of someone who has done this before, in worse conditions, with less time. His voice carries none of its usual playfulness. “Something happened. Her scent is—” He pauses, nostrils flaring, processing the unguarded cocktail of cocoa and clove and lavender ash that Hazel’s unconscious body is radiating without restraint. “—she’s scared. Even out cold, her scent reads as distressed. What happened?”
“No attack.” I toss the pill combination toward him—a controlled throw, because I know his reflexes. He catches it one-handed without looking, fingers closing around the bottles with the muscle memory of someone who’s been on the receiving end of my field tosses for two years.
He glances at the labels. Understands immediately.
“Suppressant crash?”
“Suppressant crash,” I confirm. “Combined with what I suspect is a pre-heat spike, dehydration, and a fever that’s running high enough to cause the nosebleed and the syncope. She needs the counter-agents, fluids, and someone with a medical background monitoring her temperature until it stabilizes.”
I straighten, adjusting the coat that still carries the damp imprint of her body against my chest.
“I’m going back to the station. The fire isn’t going to investigate itself, and if I’m not there coordinating, those officers are going to do what they’ve been doing for months—nothing.” I hold his gaze, making sure the next instructions land with the weight I intend. “Stay here with Roman when he arrives. Tame her fever. And change her clothes—she’s been in wet fabric long enough that hypothermia is going to compound the fever if someone doesn’t get her into something dry.”
Oakley’s eyes flick from the pills to Hazel’s unconscious form and back to me.
“Why is she drenched to begin with?”
I glance at the bathroom. The open door. The wet shower floor and the soaked towel lying like evidence in a case I didn’t sign up to investigate.
“Best guess? PTSD episode. Nightmare that triggered a panic response. She drenched herself in cold water to break the cycle.”
Oakley’s jaw tightens.
“How do you know that’s what?—”
“Because Roman does the same thing.”
The statement drops into the apartment like a stone into still water, the ripples spreading across Oakley’s expression as the implication registers. He knows about Roman’s nights. We both do. The showers at two a.m. that no one mentions. The damp towels that appear in the bathroom without explanation. The mornings where our commander’s scent carries the residual bite of cold water and unprocessed adrenaline, and neither of us asks because asking would require Roman to answer, and Roman would rather swallow his own tongue than verbalize the things that wake him.
Two people. Same ritual. Same method of containing what their bodies remember and their minds refuse to process.
What the hell happened at that academy?
The thought is interrupted by the front door slamming open with enough force to bounce the knob off the wall and leave a dent in the plaster.
Roman.
He fills the doorway the way he fills every doorway—completely, his six-four frame and broad shoulders occupying the space with the territorial authority of a man who considers closed doors a personal offense. His platinum-blonde hair is disheveled, his tactical jacket half-zipped over a T-shirt, and his breathing is elevated in a way that suggests he ran the distance from their housing unit rather than drove.
