I stare at the ceiling, water stains mapping continents I’ll never visit.
“…it’s surely dead now. Because I was replaced so fast, I’m probably the paint drying on the wall to them. Barely noticeable. Already forgotten.”
“That’s so unfair,” Jamie whispers, and there’s real anger in it now, the kind she usually reserves for horoscope skeptics and people who don’t tip. “You deserved better than that, Hazel. You deserved?—”
“Life is unfair, isn’t it.”
The sentence lands flat as a slammed door. No self-pity. No dramatic inflection. Just the stripped-down truth of a woman who stopped expecting fairness around the same time someone stubbed cigarettes out on her sixteen-year-old skin and called it discipline.
Something drips.
For one disorienting second, I think the pipe has resumed its campaign of psychological warfare, and my head whips toward the sink with the kind of fury usually reserved for armed suspects. But the sink is dry. The faucet is silent.
The drip is coming from me.
Specifically, from my nose.
A single drop of blood lands on the laminate counter—bright crimson against the beige, vivid as evidence at a crime scene. I lift my hand to my upper lip and my fingers come away red, the warm metallic scent of it cutting through my eucalyptus frost like a knife through smoke.
Fuck.
I frown, tilting my head forward slightly to keep the blood from tracking down my chin, and reach for the paper towels with the kind of practiced efficiency that suggests this isn’t the first time. It’s the third nosebleed in four days. Each one a little heavier. Each one lasting a little longer.
Nothing. It’s nothing. Dry air. Stress. The radiator turning this apartment into a dehydration chamber.
It’s not the suppressants.
It’s not.
“—but they were helping you during your heats, weren’t they?”
Jamie’s question filters through the blood and the denial, and I realize I’ve missed the first half of whatever she said. The topic shift hits a nerve I didn’t know was exposed—heat cycles, the biological vulnerability I’ve spent my entire career trying to engineer around. The suppressants. The schedules. The careful, clinical management of a body that insists on reminding me I’m an Omega no matter how many Alpha-dominated rooms I’ve commanded.
I press the paper towel harder against my nose, watching the white fiber bloom crimson.
Don’t answer. Deflect. Change the subject.
But Jamie knows my silences the way Callahan knows my expressions. And this one is answering for me.
“They were there when I needed it,” I say finally, the words carefully stripped of anything that could be mistaken for sentiment. “But I’d never rely on men I can’t feel one hundred percent safe with. So.”
I shrug, the motion aimed at no one, since Jamie can’t see me through the phone and the apartment doesn’t contain so much as a houseplant to witness my performative nonchalance. The tissue in my hand is soaked through now, requiringreplacement, and I switch to fresh paper towels while my free hand adjusts the phone’s position on the dish rack.
The bleeding is slowing. Good.
You’re fine. It’s nothing.
I lift my head, catching my reflection again in the window glass. The woman staring back looks thinner than she did a week ago—cheekbones more prominent, the olive skin stretched tighter across the jaw, the shadows beneath her eyes deeper. The icy blue hair, usually meticulously maintained, has faint dark roots showing at the temples where the stress-induced greying is staging its slow coup.
Thirty-two years old and falling apart at the seams.
Your body is a crime scene, Martinez, and you’re the worst detective on the case.
“Listen,” I say, straightening as I toss the bloody paper towels into the trash with a precision that borders on aggressive. “I’ll check in later. Something else in this house is probably broken. The radiator’s been making sounds that suggest it’s either haunted or about to become a pipe bomb, and I haven’t confirmed which yet.”
“Wait—” Jamie’s voice sharpens, shifting from casual to urgent with the speed of someone who’s been waiting for the right moment to drop something heavy. “Before you go. I need you to listen to me, okay? Not roll your eyes, not dismiss it, not give me that tone you give when you think I’m being dramatic.”
My hand pauses over the phone.
