Chapter 20 - Elijah #2
Jabari’s jaw clenched. Fresh blood seeped.
“We need you to slow your breathing,” I told her, forcing my voice into something steady and neutral. “Your omega is trying to fix this the only way it knows how, and it is making it worse.”
She shook her head hard, tears streaking down her face. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” I said. “You are a numbers woman. You are a pattern woman, and numbers do not sweet talk you the way men do. Count with me. Odd numbers only.”
Her brow furrowed, confusion cutting through panic. “Why?”
“Because I said so,” I replied calmly. “Because if you don’t, his heart rate stays high and the bleeding does not slow. Because you do not get to punish yourself by letting him die.”
Her eyes locked on mine. She took it with a kind of ugly discipline I respected. It was not trust. It was survival deciding to use the closest tool in reach.
“One,” she whispered.
“Three,” I said.
“Five.”
Her breath hitched, then steadied a fraction. The scent in the room shifted slightly, not calmer, but more focused. She was still afraid, but fear had a direction now.
Jabari growled low as his alpha resisted the loss of control. Even he could feel the change. I kept counting silently. Twenty-seven. Twenty-nine. Thirty-one.
I crossed the nest boundary then because I had to. It was not tenderness. It was triage. I did not look at her thighs. I did not look at her mouth. I looked at blood, at breathing, at the angle of Jabari’s shoulders, at the door gap where another problem might walk in.
“Hands,” I ordered the room, more for myself than for either of them. “I am going to touch you. Do not fight me. If you flinch, you tell me first.”
Nyx’s hands trembled, but she did not pull away. She held herself very still. Her eyes stayed on my hands as if she expected them to become weapons.
Jabari watched me.
He was not wrong, and it did not matter.
I pressed gauze hard against his chest, right over the wound, and he jerked with pain. Blood soaked into the fabric almost immediately.
“Pressure stays here,” I said, planting my palm with firm control. “Jabari, you do not move, and you keep talking if she freaks out. If she slips, you bring her back.”
Nyx’s throat worked. She swallowed hard and kept counting, lips barely moving.
“And it’s loud,” I added under my breath. “If the Council is sniffing, they’ll smell this and assume Meridian is bleeding. They will come to collect proof.”
That was the mafia truth, the part civilians never understood. Injury was not only injury. It was optics. It was an invitation. It was a weakness turned into currency.
My phone buzzed in my palm, and the screen lit the hard line of my mouth. The message was short and ugly: Council runner at the front desk, two escorts, asking questions. They were not here to help. They were here to measure.
“They already know,” I said quietly.
Nyx’s eyes widened further. “What?”
“Not now,” I said, because she did not get to fall apart in the middle of a hemorrhage. “Do you want to count or do you want to breathe with me. Pick.”
“Count,” she rasped.
“Good,” I said. “Stay in the numbers. Do not look at anybody but me.”
The elevator chimed somewhere down the hall. It was not loud, but it landed in my chest. Walls, hallway, bodies, a corridor that could fill too fast. The familiar flare of claustrophobia licked at the edge of my control and I shut it down with math.
“Lock the corridor,” I murmured into my comm, voice low. “Maintenance tone. Clear civilians.”
I heard the calm alarm hum once. The tower’s polite voice came over the speakers outside, firm and casual, the kind that made staff obey without thinking.
“Security,” I added into the comm, lower. “Pull the corridor feeds and loop the last five minutes. Keep cameras off this door until I say otherwise.”
I kept my hand pressed to Jabari’s chest. “Stay with us,” I ordered him. “Don’t you dare check out on her. Don’t you dare leave her holding that.”
His eyelids fluttered. His breath hitched.
“Nyx,” he tried to say, the name coming out thin. His eyes stayed on her anyway, stubborn as he was.
Her hands slid to his shoulders. It was instinct, not romance. It was an omega trying to keep the world from taking another thing.
“I’m here,” she whispered. “I’m right here.”
The medics burst in, two of them, both betas. They froze for half a second, because anyone would.
An omega in full heat. An alpha knotted. Active hemorrhage. A nest shredded with panic.
I did not give them time to process. “Compression on the wound,” I said. “Monitor vitals. No sedatives for her. No pheromone blockers. No bites. If you lose control, you are out of this room and off this shift.”
One of them blinked, then moved immediately, training overriding instinct. The other medic hesitated with that split-second human fear, eyes flicking to Nyx’s thighs.
Nyx’s gaze snapped toward him and went cold. Her voice came out brittle. “Do not look at me like that.”
The medic flushed, chastened, and moved his attention to Jabari’s chest instead. He did not apologize. He did not need to. She was not here for comfort.
“But we need to,” the second started.
“No,” I said. “Sedate her and you spike the heat. Spike the heat and he clamps harder. He clamps harder and he bleeds out.”
They moved faster, hands switching from hesitation to procedure. Meridian paid for competence. Meridian punished weakness. That simple.
The walls pressed in on me again as more bodies entered the room. My lungs burned. I counted through it. Thirty-three. Thirty-five. Thirty-seven.
Nyx’s breath sped up at the medic’s hands near her thighs, her omega screaming intrusion. Her body tried to react, to clamp, to anchor, and her eyes flashed with that same bitter warning she carried for every man in this building who was not Kairo.
“Seven,” she gasped, then snapped without lifting her head. “Do not touch me like you know me.”
“Good,” I said, because it was cold and it was control. “Stay with me. Nine.”
“Eleven.”
Blood soaked through the compression pack, staining gloves and sheets alike. It smelled sharp and iron-heavy under the overlay of peaches and panic.
“Pressure isn’t enough,” one medic muttered. “We need to stitch, but he can’t move.”
The other medic’s eyes flicked to the knot, then to Nyx’s face. “And we can’t force release.”
“I know,” I said. My voice stayed steady because it had to. If I cracked, the room cracked.
I assessed the room in a single sweep. The bed was too soft. The nest was too restrictive. The walls were too close. Nyx was too close to a full panic crash and Jabari was too close to slipping.
Claustrophobia flared hard enough that my fingers twitched against the gauze. I counted again. Thirty-nine. Forty-one. Forty-three.
“We cut the nest,” I said.
Nyx’s head snapped up. “What?”
“We remove everything causing external pressure,” I explained. “Blankets. Pillows. All of it. You need room to breathe, and he needs less friction. Your omega built this to keep you safe, but right now it is trapping you both.”
Jabari’s jaw tightened. “She needs her nest.”
“She needs you alive,” I said. “Her nest can be rebuilt. Your blood cannot.”
I did not wait for agreement. I grabbed the edge of the nearest blanket and ripped it free.
Fabric tore loudly as the nest unraveled piece by piece, the sound sharp and violent in the confined space. The air shifted almost immediately, less saturated, less oppressive. Space mattered. Space was oxygen.
Nyx sobbed once as the structure collapsed, grief flashing through her because omegas did not build nests lightly. Then her face hardened. Her breathing eased a fraction anyway.
“Listen carefully,” I said to her. “The knot will soften when his alpha believes the threat has passed. That requires calm from both of you. That does not mean sweet. That does not mean forgiving. It means your body does not get to run the room.”
The medics worked faster now, hands slick with blood, gauze piling up in stained heaps. They threaded a needle and stitched what they could reach without jarring the knot. It was ugly work, limited angles and high stakes.
Jabari’s face was gray under the sweat. His alpha still refused to let go. His eyes stayed on Nyx like she was the only thing worth enduring this for.
“You hear me, sweetheart,” he rasped, forcing the words out through clenched teeth. “You don’t let nobody put hands on you. Not even if I’m laid out.”
Nyx’s eyes squeezed shut, fresh tears spilling. Her voice came out wrecked and angry. “Stop talking like you’re leaving.”
He huffed a broken laugh that ended in a hiss. “Ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
He was lying or he was praying. Either way, I refused to let it be true.
“His vitals are dipping,” a medic warned.
“I know,” I said, and the answer came out colder than I felt. “Push fluids. Keep pressure. Give him the clotting agent now.”
The medic nodded and moved, snapping a vial and pressing it into the line.
I shifted closer without touching Nyx, letting my presence register as an anchor but not another point of pressure. “Listen carefully,” I said to her again. “The knot will soften when his alpha believes the threat has passed. That requires calm. From both of you.”
Jabari’s eyes flashed. “Tell me how.”
“You stop fighting it,” I said. “You let go of the idea that control equals protection. You trust your pack to handle the corridor, and you trust her to breathe.”
“That’s not how I work,” he snarled.
“It is now,” I said.
Silence stretched while the medics stitched and packed and monitored. Jabari’s numbers stabilized slowly and dangerously, hovering just on the acceptable side of catastrophic. The line between living and dying can be thinner than paper.
Nyx kept counting under her breath, voice shaking but steadying with each number. “Twenty-one. Twenty-three. Twenty-five.”