The question breaks something in my chest.
Not because it’s dramatic. Not because it’s delivered with theatrical vulnerability or the kind of wide-eyed innocence that some Omegas deploy as a tool. It breaks something because it’sgenuine. Because the confusion in her voice isn’t about the logistics of the situation—it’s about the concept. The idea that someone would stay. That unconsciousness wouldn’t be treated as an invitation to leave. That vulnerability wouldn’t be exploited or archived for later leverage.
Who left you, Hazel? Who walked out when you needed them to stay? Who taught you that passing out means waking up alone?
I frown.
The expression is genuine—not the strategic frown I employ for professional effect, but the unfiltered contraction of a face that has just heard something it finds fundamentally unacceptable.
“Of course I’d stay.” The words come out firmer than I intend—less bedside manner, more personal declaration. I adjust, softening the edges without diluting the conviction. “Why would we leave you alone?”
She doesn’t have an answer for that.
Or rather, she has too many answers, and all of them are worse than silence.
I point toward the door before the moment can curdle into something heavier than she’s equipped to carry right now.
“Roman’s patrolling the perimeter. We don’t know yet if the station fire was a targeted attack or random, so he’s making sure everything’s secure out there.” I pause, allowing the cornerof my mouth to lift in the specific smirk that I deploy when I’m about to say something that is true and entertaining and probably inadvisable. “Also because he’s having a whole fit about you being unwell. Don’t know your full history with him, but he doesn’t normally go to the verge of territorial predator mode unless someone either seriously pisses him off or takes something that’s his.”
She huffs.
Weakly. A shadow of the full-bodied, razor-edged huffs she’d been deploying all week in the bullpen. But it’s there—the defiance, the stubbornness, the reflexive rejection of any implication that she belongs to anyone, especially an Alpha whose competitive fury she’s been outrunning since they were cadets.
There she is. Even running a fever with blood still drying on her upper lip, the fight is still there.
Her eyes are drooping.
The brief window of consciousness is already narrowing, her body pulling her back toward the sleep it desperately needs with the insistence of a system that has overridden its operator’s objections. She blinks—heavy, slow, each reopening requiring more effort than the last—and I can see her fighting it. The jaw tightening. The fingers curling into the sheets. The warrior refusing to surrender the field even when the field is a mattress and the enemy is rest.
She tries to sit up.
My hand moves.
Not aggressively. Not with the restraining force that her PTSD would flag as threat. Just my palm, flat against her shoulder, applying exactly enough pressure to communicatestaywithout communicatingI’m making you. The distinction matters. With a woman like Hazel, the distinction is everything.
“I don’t think that’s wise, Chief,” I say, and I keep my voice light. Warm. The tone I use when I want someone to feel safe enough to stop fighting without feeling like they’ve lost. “You’ve still got a bit of a fever. Best to rest.”
She holds my gaze for a long moment—the rectangular frames making her eyes sharper, more present, the hazel-brown irises carrying a defiance that the fever hasn’t managed to fully extinguish.
Then she gives up.
The surrender is almost imperceptible—a fractional release of tension in her shoulders, a slight deepening of her exhale, the body accepting what the mind won’t verbalize. She settles back against the pillow with the reluctant compliance of a woman who has calculated the cost-benefit analysis of resistance and determined, grudgingly, that the numbers don’t support further action.
“The station,” she murmurs, because of course her next thought is the job. Not her own health, not the blood that’s still faintly crusted at her nostril, not the fever or the blackout or the nightmare that preceded all of it. Thejob. “What’s the report?”
“Not sure yet.” I shake my head gently. “Alaric hasn’t called back with the full details, but he’s handling the scene with the fire department. All you need to worry about right now is resting. We’ve got things covered until you’re up for it.”
She’s losing the battle with consciousness.
I can see it happening—the slow capitulation of a body that has been pushed too far and held together too long. Her eyelids droop. Her breathing deepens. The grip on the sheets loosens, finger by finger, the tension bleeding out of her hands like water from a cracked vessel.
But before sleep reclaims her, she asks one more question.
And this one doesn’t break something in my chest.
It demolishes it.
“Why aren’t you guys throwing me under the bus?”
