53. Bram
Bram
Victor’s sitting in a chair outside Clara’s room when Dagan, Jack, and I run up the hall.
Jack heads straight inside, but I grab the lapels of Victor’s jacket and slam him back against the wall.
“What the fuck happened?” I snarl. He’d called to say Clara was “fine” but in the hospital, nothing else. I’d been too busy panicking to demand answers then. But now? Now that I see him looking guilty as hell, my alpha rage has nowhere else to go.
Victor doesn’t fight me. He just hangs there, limp in my grip, eyes avoiding mine.
“She has asthma,” he says, so low I have to strain to hear.
Asthma. The way she always cringed from his cigarettes. It wasn’t just about the scent or the general health hazard. They were hurting her. Not in some slow, distant way. Immediately.
I let him go, stepping back before I do something that can’t be undone. “But… she never used an inhaler. I never saw—”
“She was hiding it,” he cuts in.
And that makes far too much sense. Clara had been trying so damn hard with Victor.
She’d once told me she’d hate to be treated differently, like when she’d been helping Cali through her pregnancy.
She wouldn’t have wanted Victor to change the way he acted toward her because of something like that.
She'd been trying to get him to come to her naturally. On his own.
“Bram, I’m so—”
My growl rips through the hallway, loud enough that he flinches back into the wall.
“I don’t want to hear how sorry you are.
I get why you’re afraid of bonding an omega.
I get it. But your hang-ups just risked our omega’s life.
Your omega’s life. Your refusal to get close to her, to even talk to her, made it impossible for her to tell you your smoking was killing her.
And what would you have done if she had? Laughed? Told her to deal with it?”
My hands are fists, the urge to smash them into his face dangerously close to winning. I take another step back. “Go home. We don’t need you here.”
His expression twists, stricken, but I turn away.
When I step into the room, Jack’s holding Clara’s hand while Dagan sits beside her on the bed, gently running his fingers through her hair. She’s pale, her hair limp, her lips still lacking color. My heart squeezes, and I draw a deep breath to keep myself together.
My little Ghost came far too close to becoming a real one today.