What’s your story, Hazel Martinez?
The question unfolds in my mind with the patience of an investigation that doesn’t have a deadline. PTSD is common enough in law enforcement that its presence alone wouldn’t warrant this level of concern. Every officer I’ve worked with carries some version of it—the accumulated scar tissue of a career spent walking into rooms that contain the worst things humans do to each other. I have my own collection. Moments that surface uninvited during the quiet hours, faces I couldn’t save, decisions that replay with the obsessive precision of a training simulation I can’t pass.
But Hazel’s response hadn’t been the standard-issue variety.
Cold showers at two a.m. aren’t a casual coping mechanism. They’re a last resort. The body’s emergency brake, pulled when the nightmare is so vivid and so consuming that the only way to break the loop is to overwhelm the nervous system with a physical stimulus intense enough to override the sensory memory.
Roman does it too.
Alaric’s observation echoes through my thoughts with the weight of a connection I’m not sure I’m qualified to draw. Two people from the same academy, carrying the same nocturnal rituals, deploying the same desperate countermeasures against whatever their sleeping minds refuse to stop replaying.
What happened at that academy that marked both of them?
And does Roman know that she carries it too?
The medical question is easier. Cleaner. I’m trained for medical questions—two years of field medic certification supplementing my law enforcement training, enough pharmaceutical knowledge to recognize the difference between a manageable prescription and a chemical time bomb.
I get up.
The chair protests my departure with the same creak it announced my arrival, and I cross the apartment’s minimal square footage in the five steps it takes to reach the bathroom. The medicine cabinet is still open from Alaric’s earlier raid, the mirrored door reflecting the single bulb’s anemic light back into a space that smells like cold water and whatever industrial soap the building’s plumbing deigns to provide.
I pull each bottle from the shelf.
One by one. Reading labels with the focused attention of someone who understands that the difference between medicine and poison is often nothing more than dosage and duration.
The primary suppressant is a third-generation compound—the kind that hit the market six years ago with FDA approval and pharmaceutical marketing budgets designed to make Omegas feel empowered by their decision to chemically override the biological systems that society finds inconvenient. The dosage printed on Hazel’s label is sixty percent higher than the manufacturer’s recommended maximum.
Sixty percent.
The secondary is an adjunct—designed to manage the breakthrough symptoms that occur when the primary starts losing efficacy, which it always does, because the body adapts and the chemicals escalate and the cycle continues until either the Omega stops taking them or the Omega stops breathing.
The third is a neural stabilizer. The kind prescribed when the suppressant cocktail starts producing neurological side effects—tremors, cognitive fog, the insomnia that Hazel wears beneath her eyes like a second pair of shadows. It’s the pharmaceutical equivalent of putting a Band-Aid on a building that’s structurally compromised: it covers the visible damage without addressing the fact that the foundation is cracking.
I write them all down.
Every name, every dosage, every prescribing physician listed on the labels—two different providers, which means she’s either doctor-shopping or one physician identified the danger and another was willing to ignore it. The pen moves across the small notepad I keep in my jacket pocket with the practiced efficiency of someone who has documented evidence in less cooperative environments than a bathroom.
Research all of them. Side effects. Interaction profiles. Long-term outcomes in Omegas over thirty.
Find alternatives. Quickly. Before the next nosebleed isn’t just a nosebleed.
The problem crystallizes with the uncomfortable clarity of a diagnosis I’m not authorized to make but can’t ignore. She needs a medical evaluation. Bloodwork. An assessment of whatever damage five-plus years of high-dose suppressants have inflicted on her cardiovascular system, her neurological function, the delicate hormonal architecture that her body has been chemically silencing since her late twenties.
And she can’t get it.
Because the medical system in a town like Sweetwater Falls—in most towns, in most cities, in the vast majority of the infrastructure that governs Omega healthcare—requires pack authorization for treatment. A signature. A phone call. A verified pack representative who can consent to procedures, access results, authorize the expenditure of medical resources on an Omega who has been deemed, by the beautiful logic of a system designed by people who’ve never experienced a heat cycle, incapable of making those decisions for herself.
She’s packless.
Which means, in the eyes of the system that’s supposed to protect her, she doesn’t fully exist.
The anger arrives without invitation, settling into the space between my ribs with a heat that has nothing to do with Alpha biology and everything to do with the fundamental obscenity of a world that would let a woman die of treatable symptoms because she doesn’t have a man’s name on her medical consent form.
Pure stupidity. Bureaucratic, institutional, breathtakingly cruel stupidity.
I close the cabinet.
Return to the chair.
