My hand finds the door handle again. I pull.
His hand catches mine.
Not the door. My hand. His fingers closing over my knuckles with a pressure that isn’t restraint but isn’t casual either—the specific, deliberate contact of a man who needs one more moment before the professional world reclaims both of us and the cruiser’s privacy becomes the station’s scrutiny.
I look at him.
His expression has shifted. The grumpy, stone-wall blankness has cracked, and what’s beneath it is the same thing that was beneath it this morning when he’d caught me mid-fall and askedwhat’s wrong with you, health-wise—the concern he can’t quite mask and the vulnerability he’d rather die than name.
“How bad is it?”
I frown.
“What?”
“How bad does it get?” A beat. His thumb moves against my knuckle—unconscious, I think, a micro-gesture that his body is producing without his brain’s authorization. “At night. How bad does it get?”
The PTSD.
He’s asking about the nightmares. The cold showers. The thing Alaric mentioned in the apartment—that Roman does it too, the ice water at three a.m., the same ritual, the same desperate override of a body that can’t stop replaying what the mind refuses to file.
Is his curiosity from last night? From seeing me drenched and unconscious, from sleeping beside a woman whose body shivered through terrors she wouldn’t narrate? Or is he asking because he recognizes it—the way you recognize your own handwriting on someone else’s document, familiar and unsettling in equal measure?
“You mean the whole PTSD thing?” I ask, keeping my voice level, testing whether the clinical terminology will create enough distance to make the answer survivable.
He nods.
Slowly. Carefully. With the visible effort of a man choosing not to put words in his own mouth, not to assume or project or fill the gaps with his own experience. Just waiting. Giving me the space to answer or not.
Alaric asks questions like an investigator. Oakley asks like a medic. Roman asks like someone who already knows the answer and needs to hear it from you anyway.
I shrug.
“It happens every night.”
The admission is flatter than I intend—the emotional equivalent of a shrug translated into sound, the practiced nonchalance of a woman who has been downplaying her own suffering for so long that the downplaying has become her native register.
“To a lesser degree, usually. Panic attacks are regular. Nightmares, same. They’re just…there. Part of the operating system at this point. Like the insomnia. Like the four a.m. alarmthat doesn’t need to be set because my body’s been trained to wake up before it goes off.”
I pause.
“The nosebleed phase—the passing out, the fever shit—that’s new. That’s only been happening recently. So.”
Thesohangs in the air like a sentence that can’t find its period.
“It’s not a big?—”
I stop.
Not because I’ve chosen to. Because his expression stops me. The look on his face—the stern, unflinching, ice-blue severity of a man who has heard me begin this particular sentence enough times to know exactly where it’s going and has decided, silently, absolutely, that it is not going there again.
He doesn’t say a word.
Doesn’t need to.
The look does the talking. It says:finish that sentence and see what happens.
I correct myself.
