Her voice is barely above a whisper, the words crumbling at the edges from exhaustion and something deeper—something that sounds like the fossilized remains of every betrayal she’s absorbed since the day she decided to build a career in a system designed to chew up people like her.
“Everyone hates me anyways…”
The sentence trails off into the pillow, and the casual delivery of it—as if the universal hatred of Hazel Martinez is a weather condition she’s simply learned to dress for—makes the anger behind my ribs flare with an intensity that I have to physically manage, my jaw clenching hard enough that the muscles in my neck engage.
“I don’t hate you.”
The words come out quiet but absolute. Bedrock-steady. The kind of statement that doesn’t require volume because its weight is self-evident.
“I don’t really know you yet, sadly.” I hold her gaze, watching the frames catch the dim light as her lids fight to stay open. “But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t mind getting to.”
A beat.
Then a wink.
Because I am, at my core, constitutionally incapable of letting sincerity exist without companionship.
Then—immediately, the course correction, because timing is everything and the line between charming and terminated is thinner than most people appreciate?—
“Oh. Maybe not in a flirtatious way if that’s going to get me fired.”
She smirks.
Just slightly. The barest lift at the corner of her mouth, the ghost of an expression that her conscious self would neverpermit in the presence of a subordinate officer and her sleeping self apparently can’t suppress.
My heart skips.
Actually, physically skips—the cardiac equivalent of tripping over a crack in the sidewalk. One beat missed, then a compensatory double-beat, then the slow, damning realization that Deputy Oakley Torres has just experienced an involuntary cardiovascular response to the micro-expression of a woman who threatened to dissolve his workplace two days ago.
You’re in trouble, Torres.
Deep, structural, foundation-level trouble.
Her eyes close.
She sighs—the deep, full-body kind that carries the weight of everything she’s holding and nowhere near enough of it out.
I lean forward in the chair, elbows on my knees, my voice dropping to barely above a whisper.
“Why would anyone hate you, Hazel?”
I don’t expect an answer.
Her eyes are closed, her breathing deepening toward sleep, and the question is more for the room than for her—a thought released into the quiet because keeping it inside felt like holding something too hot to contain.
But she answers.
Quietly. Her voice barely more than breath shaped into words, the consonants soft, the vowels drowsy, the sentence delivered from the threshold between wakefulness and surrender.
“When you’re good in this world…you’ll never experience the warmth of gratitude in comparison to the praise you receive for being cunning.”
The words settle into the apartment like snowfall.
She sighs again. The lines of exhaustion are carved into her face even with her eyes closed—the dark hollows, the tensionheld in the jaw, the faint crease between her brows that suggests her body has forgotten how to fully relax even when sleep is actively reclaiming it.
“I bet everyone at the station hates me.” A pause. A breath. “You’ll probably hate me too. Easy to hate someone who doesn’t submit to the manipulation.”
Another breath, and this one shakes at the edges.
