Chapter 41
June
“Idon’t need a doctor,” I say for the tenth time.
Archer is too distracted trying to flag down a doctor to hear me.
Callum is grabbing a clipboard from the front desk for me to fill out my medical history.
And Torin has gone from actively avoiding me to glaring away anyone who wanders too far in my direction, which might explain why Archer is failing in his task.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting in a hard plastic chair in the ER waiting room, and hating every damn minute of being here.
If I’d known this was where they were bringing me, I wouldn’t have gotten out of the car.
By the time I saw where we were, it was too late to fight them on it.
And I was in shock, so I couldn’t even run away. My legs refused to support me.
Torin carried me inside, blind to my struggles to get free.
“Let me see your neck again,” Torin says after he’s glared off the last unfortunate person who wandered to this part of the waiting room.
“My neck is fine,” I say.
“It was bleeding before.” He dips his head to see. I don’t know what he thinks has changed in the ten seconds since he last looked at it.
“Well, it’s stopped now.” I nudge him back into his hard plastic chair when he leans closer. “He just poked me with the needle a bit. He didn’t inject it into me.”
Torin frowns down at me, and from his puckered forehead, it’s clear he doesn’t believe me. “Let me see.”
“No.”
One unexpected benefit of Torin’s smothering is that it’s distracting me from being in a hospital. At least a little.
My nose hasn’t stopped twitching from the sharp bite of antiseptic since Torin carried me into the hospital’s ER waiting room. I don’t like hospitals, and it isn’t even because of all the coughing or the smell or even the people holding towels and bandages to bleeding wounds.
I didn’t mind hospitals before. Now, I actively dislike them. They remind me of how I felt after the bond breaking. Lost and lonely and full of grief. Only Garrison visited me. Not my parents, not my sister, who could be dead for all I know. Not a single person in my life visited me even once.
“I’m going home,” I say, pushing up from the chair. My legs have other ideas, and I immediately topple over.
Torin catches me, sets me down, and drops into a crouch in front of me, his eyes filled with concern. “You need a doctor, Juniper. You had a needle practically in your neck. We need to know you’re okay.”
I open my mouth to complain, but he’s not done yet.
“And you don’t know what was in that needle. It’s a quick checkup, and then we’ll take you home. Please.”
I want to argue, but how do you argue against common sense?
“Okay, fine,” I mutter, settling back into my seat.
Callum returns with the clipboard, which I struggle to fill out. Maybe it’s shock, but trying to remember my medical history makes my head hurt. Archer finally succeeds in flagging down a doctor while Torin is determined to help me fill in my medical history, which he knows nothing about.
“A man was trying to inject her with something,” Archer tells the doctor.
“With what?” he asks, frowning down at me.
“We don’t know,” Archer says. “It’s why we’re here.”
Turns out that when you tell a doctor someone nearly injected you with an unknown drug they said would kill you—and you have the red needle mark on your neck to prove it—doctors like to go heavy with the tests, peeing in cups, and pointing bright flashlights into your eye, blinding you.
The backless, pale blue hospital gowns that tie at the neck and let in every tiny gust of air to every sensitive place aren’t fun either.
Five hours later, I’ve been tested to within an inch of my life. Is it weird to say I feel five pounds lighter with all the blood they took from me?
As I sit on the paper-covered leather bed in one of the ER’s examination rooms, my results slowly trickle in.
My temperature isn’t anything to worry about. My heart rate is fine, but my blood pressure is a little high. Dr. Porter said that likely has more to do with nearly dying from being injected with a mystery drug than because something is wrong with me.
“We won’t get your blood results back for a couple of days,” the doctor says, scanning the metal clipboard he walked in with a few minutes ago.
“Given everything else looks good, I don’t anticipate any nasty surprises.
” He lifts one sheet of paper, scans it and lowers the clipboard to focus on me.
His brow furrows, which, given I’m already wary about being in a hospital, makes me sit up taller and gets my heart rate racing.
“And you have no idea what was in the needle?”
I shake my head. “He just said it would kill me. I believed him.”
Callum, Torin, and Archer are waiting in the hallway, having slipped out to give me privacy when the doctor returned to give me my test results.
When Dr. Porter hesitates, I twist my fingers together, hating hospitals more and more with each passing second. “Is something wrong?”
A line forms between his brows. “I read your medical history. You were suffering from bond sickness the last time you were in the hospital. Have you decided to return to your former mates?”
He must have recognized them not to even bother asking who they are.
My peer over his right shoulder to the partially open door behind him.
Callum has his head bent, fingers flying over his cell phone keypad as he sends someone a text.
Archer is leaning against the wall opposite, eyes closed, head tipped back.
He’d looked exhausted when they brought me here.
Propping up a hallway wall for the last five hours wouldn’t have gotten him the rest he needed.
Torin is watching me.
At no point during my tests and examinations has he stopped endlessly pacing back and forth outside my room, usually with his head angled toward my door, a heavy frown creasing his brow.
I drag my gaze from his and back to the doctor, kicking my feet. “I don’t know.”
“You need to decide,” Dr. Porter says with quiet seriousness.
“From the dates you wrote here, your heat can’t be more than a couple of weeks away.
You need to come back to the hospital immediately if you get symptoms again.
Not wait until you collapse. We can start you on a regimen of drugs to manage the symptoms.”
A regimen of drugs will only delay the inevitable. They might manage the symptoms for a bit, staving off bond sickness before it eventually kills me. He doesn’t tell me that, but I see the truth reflected in his blue gaze.
I need to decide once and for all if I can forgive my scent matches after they crushed my heart. And I need to decide now.
“You were quiet in the car,” Archer says, opening my door outside my apartment building.
“Just thinking,” I say with a smile that doesn’t feel all that real as I take his hand and let him help me out. I’m back in my maid's uniform and sneakers, relieved to be out of the blue hospital gown that I spent hours terrified I would flash everyone.
“About Callum’s dad?”
“Partly.” We haven’t talked about what happened in that mansion. Not that we had that much time to talk at the hospital with nurses and doctors constantly walking in and out of my room.
“Cops discovered he’d killed himself,” Callum says, climbing out of the car and slamming the passenger door shut.
“It’s in the news. That’s what I was furiously texting my attorney about.
Reporters say that he learned he was about to go to jail for a very long time for trafficking omegas and shot himself in the head. ”
“Attorney?” I don’t ask about his dad shooting himself in the head. We were all in that room. We know that isn’t what happened.
Callum gives me a reassuring smile. “It seemed smart to get one before the cops wanted to talk to us. My attorney doesn’t think we have anything to worry about.
Cops were on their way to arrest my dad after a victim walked into a police station with proof of his crimes.
He would have gone to jail for the rest of his life. ”
“Lottie?” I guess.
He nods.
“But the cops will know I was there.” I frown, scanning the streets and hoping the distant scream of a police siren is just in my head. “They’ll know you were there as well.”
“We were there,” Callum says firmly, “but we left an hour before to take you to the hospital after you were attacked. We’re in the clear.”
“And Kylian?” I ask quietly as they lead me into my apartment building.
Inside, I turn toward the staircase automatically.
Archer grasps my hand and tugs me in the other direction, toward the elevator where the yellowing Out-of-Order sign I got so used to seeing is now missing in action.
I widen my eyes. “It’s fixed?”
Archer nods. “Jack texted when the doc was running all those tests. I don’t know about you, but those four flights of stairs every day weren’t fun.”
No, they weren’t.
The elevator is tiny, and it smells of lemon Lysol. It’s probably a little too tiny for four people to squeeze themselves into, especially three big alphas, but they don’t seem to mind the cramped quarters. A part of me doesn’t mind it either.
As we approach my apartment door, I realize I have a problem. I was at work when Wilkes kidnapped me, and my bag is still at work, along with the keys to my apartment. I turn to tell Callum, but Archer fishes a set of keys out of his pockets and passes them to me. “Here.”
I bounce my gaze from the familiar set of keys and back to him. “How?”
“When you were getting tests done, I figured you’d left your stuff at work,” Archer explains. “Your friend Ava was nice enough to grab your bag from the staff locker room when I said you’d forgotten it. I dropped your bag inside your apartment already. Hope you don’t mind.”
No wonder he was so tired at the hospital. He was out running my errands for me.
I smile gratefully at him. “No, I don’t mind. Thanks. And thanks for not telling Ava.” She would have worried about me.
“Come on, let's get you into your apartment,” Callum says with a smile, leading the way.
I’m exhausted. Drained. Literally ready to crawl into bed and sleep for a month, but I don’t move.
Callum turns back around. He takes one look at my face, and his shoulders tense. “Something is wrong, isn’t it?”
“She wants us to go.” Torin is the one to voice the thought that had been circling my mind the entire drive back to the apartment, and his expression is so knowing that he must have heard what the doctor told me and expected this was coming. “Don’t you?”
I nod. “I’m grateful that you came after me, and you saved me, but…”
“But?” Archer softly prompts.
The back of my eyelids burn as I fiddle with my keys, struggling to do something so hard, but I know I need to do it.
If rebuilding my life after it imploded taught me anything, it’s that I’m so much stronger than I think I am.
“I need you to leave. If you don’t, this is how it will stay.
We’ll keep drifting in and out of each other's lives, having half a relationship, because I’ll keep hesitating to make the decision I know I have to.
That isn’t fair to you, and it isn’t fair to me. ”
“How long do you want us to go?” Torin asks quietly.
My vision blurs, his figure hazy with my tears. “I don’t know. Just… give me time to figure out exactly what I want. This isn’t a decision I want to rush.”
“Promise you’ll call us if you need anything, June,” Archer says.
“I will.”
Callum has his hands in his pockets, and his head down. “The work on the building is going on. Speak to Jack if you find more problems. I’ll text you our new address.” His voice is so gravelly and husky that I know exactly why he’s looking down and not at me.
“You moved?” I ask, tears in my throat.
“That house was never a home. It was a cage,” Torin says.
Archer steps forward, lifts my wrist and snaps my bracelet onto me.
My eyes widen. “My bracelet.” I didn’t even realize it was missing.
“Ava found it at the hotel when you… when we didn’t do a good enough job of watching out for you,” Archer says.
“That wasn’t your fault.” I look at them all, repeating, “I don’t blame you for that.”
They look at me, and I want to cry. It feels like my heart is breaking—as if I’m doing something wrong, but I have to walk away, even if it’s just for a little bit, otherwise how will I know if I really need them?
“Thanks for bringing me home. Bye.”
Bye feels so inadequate, but I don’t know what else to say. And before they can say anything back, I turn around and quickly walk away, struggling to see well enough to unlock my front door with the tears filling my eyes.
Finally, I get inside and close the door. I lean my back against it, and slide down it until I’m sitting on the floor. For the second time today, I dissolve into a puddle of tears.