Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
Jez
I STARED OPEN-MOUTHED at the ghost sitting in the far corner of the unfamiliar room. Everything was wrong, wrong, wrong. My body ached. My brain ached, flooded with unfamiliar thoughts and feelings that didn’t make any sense.
I would never think things like this. Things like how amazing I was, and how important it was that I be protected at all costs. What the hell was wrong with me? I wasn’t amazing. I wasn’t important. And why did everything hurt so bad?
I screwed my eyes shut, trying to ignore the hallucination sitting in the corner.
There had to be an explanation. I felt a bit like I’d been beaten up.
.. and a bit like when I’d taken drugs early on, before I’d decided properly whether I wanted to live or die after getting free from the omega traffickers.
Could that be it? Had I tried to escape reality with drugs again, and someone had taken advantage of me while I was off my head?
The alien feelings of protectiveness inside my mind sharpened. An alpha purr vibrated next to me, but it had a worried edge. As though it was bad that I was freaking out like this.
“You might as well open your eyes,” said the ghost in the corner. “This conversation isn’t going to get any easier, no matter how long you avoid it.”
I reluctantly pried my eyelids open, but I still avoided looking in the direction of the voice. The glance I’d caught before had been bad enough. The innocent alpha I’d killed... now a talking corpse with dark-smudged eyes, gaunt cheeks, and pasty gray skin.
Instead, I looked toward the source of the purr.
Heath Dawson lay naked in bed with me. He was covered in dirt and blood, and... other bodily fluids. Scabby, half-healed wounds like claw marks decorated his face and neck. Some of them looked infected.
My gaze caught and held on his forest-green eyes. In the same instant, the alien feelings in my head spiked. One particular physical ache cut through my body’s general clamoring—centered at the top of my right shoulder, over the juncture of my neck.
A horrible, sick realization washed through me. With a gasp, I scrabbled backward across the soft surface I’d been lying on... and promptly fell off the edge of the bed.
I landed with a thud, tangled in the blanket I’d dragged down with me. The presence in my head radiated worry, and Heath crawled to the edge of the mattress as though he might follow me.
“Don’t.” It wasn’t an alpha bark, but Heath paused anyway, looking up. “Leave her be for now,” said the ghost of Matthew Knockley, sounding closer than before. “She and I are talking, Heath.”
Heath gave a low growl, but he made no further move toward me. The mental presence subsided into watchful silence.
Heart pounding frantically, I looked up at the corpse. Guilt pierced me, and I crab-crawled backward, dragging the blanket with me like a fleecy shield, until my shoulders jammed up in a corner.
The ghost halted a few paces in front of me and sank smoothly into a crouch, his elbows resting loosely on his knees as he brought himself down to my pathetic level. I couldn’t keep from looking at him now. I couldn’t help scenting him, either, through the cloud of my own filthy stink.
I frowned. Since I killed him, shouldn’t he smell like death, instead of a welcoming campfire in a forest of green cedar?
“A few things to start off with,” he said, pinning me with soulful brown eyes that hadn’t clouded over and faded to gray dullness.
“Number one—yes, I’m alive and out of the hospital.
Number two—yes, you’re back at the pack house.
This is Heath’s room. And number three—you and he were kidnapped by whoever hired you to murder me.
They injected you with heat stim and Heath with rut-stim.
Heath had already mated you by the time Gage and Tony showed up to get you out. ”
My thoughts crashed to a standstill. Heath’s worried growl rumbled deeper.
“Wh-what?” I rasped.
“You’ll need a pregnancy test as soon as it’s feasible,” Knox went on.
“But—” I began.
“And I’d like you both to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases,” Knox continued.
“But I—”
“There are options for dealing with the mating itself.”
The words slid straight past me.
“But I tried—”
“A glandectomy being the most obvious one,” he said, as though I hadn’t spoken.
“But I tried to kill you!” I half-shouted.
He paused for a beat.
“Yes,” he agreed steadily. “You did.”
I opened my mouth, only for my throat to close up before any words could get out. Air caught and dragged against the constriction, the sound like an ugly, gasping sob. I tried again, with the same result, and before I could get control of my breathing, I collapsed into hysterical tears.
I couldn’t be mated.
I couldn’t be pregnant.
And I absolutely could not be someone who’d tried to murder an innocent man!
Bits and flashes of images—memories?—glitched across my hazy vision.
My teeth buried in an alpha’s wrist, blood blooming across my tongue.
A knife in my hand, stabbing into a neck.
Red fountaining out, splattering across my cheek.
My fingernails scratching at a terrified face.
.. gouging eyeballs...ripping open skin.
I stared down at my hands, blinking past the blur of tears. My nails were crusted with flaky reddish brown. A scream lodged in my throat, stuck behind the thick obstruction that was already strangling my air.
Heath made a noise of distress and jerked toward me, even as I cringed further back into the corner.
“Heath. Stop.” It was Knox again. Still not a bark. And again, Heath froze in place, trembling like a hunting dog straining to be let off the leash.
I wheezed, feeling lightheaded.
“Look at me, Jez.” The alpha’s tone was devoid of anger... of pity.
Unable to help myself, I looked into those brown eyes—trying to focus past the gray swirl of fog gathering at the edges of my vision.
Knox was alive. I hadn’t killed him, even if he was pale and hollowed out by days spent in the hospital, fighting to survive.
He was keeping Heath away from me, as though he knew that I’d shatter at the first touch from the red-haired alpha who had bitten me while we’d both been out of our minds with lust.
“Where’s Gage?” It wasn’t even a proper whisper. I didn’t have enough air for that.
“Sleeping,” Knox said, still without judgment. “He was in here watching over things—making sure you were both safe—for almost three days straight.”
The band around my chest snapped, but I could still only breathe in harsh sobs.
I curled forward, hugging myself with both arms. I cried.
.. I wasn’t sure for how long. My own distress mixed and swirled with Heath’s distress at not being able to jump off the bed and magically fix me with the power of his goddamned alpha purr.
But I was also exhausted. And eventually, my body couldn’t sustain any more tears. I slumped in the corner, feeling scraped out and empty despite having a second person jammed inside my head with me. Cautiously, I peeked up at Knox through my thick pall of humiliation.
He’d moved to a more comfortable position, sitting propped against the side of the bed. This also allowed him to place a quelling hand on Heath’s wrist, wordlessly keeping the other alpha from leaping up and coming to me.
“If you can talk now, then let’s talk,” Knox said. “Tony said you ran off so you could find out who’d been lying to you, and who was telling the truth. Did you find your answer?”
Why was he acting like this? Like he wasn’t furious at me? Like what I had to say mattered?
I nodded wordlessly.
“And what answer was that?” he pressed.
I swallowed. Now my throat and sinuses hurt, along with everything else.
“Adrian lied to me,” I rasped. “You don’t hurt omegas. You try to help them. And I almost killed you.”
Knox rubbed at the back of his neck with his free hand. “Yes. Well. Thankfully, you didn’t. At this point, I’m more concerned with this Adrian character, in that regard.”
“But—” I stammered, because he couldn’t really be letting it go, just like that?
“But nothing.” He let out a slow breath. “Gage thinks the Vozzina gang is behind the attempted hit. He doesn’t have any real proof, though.”
The presence in my head jolted.
“I don’t know that name,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Knox said. “We’ll see if Heath learned anything useful before he got himself kidnapped. But until then—”
The mental presence twisted awkwardly, like a newly awakened sleeper trying to get their bearings. I held my breath.
“V’zzina?” Heath slurred, raising a hand to his forehead as though it ached.
On cue, a second headache throbbed in counterpoint to the one I’d already been nursing. A fresh sense of dread settled over me.
“Heath?” Knox asked, still holding his wrist. “Are you coming out of it, finally?”
I bit my lip, wincing as my teeth closed over a spot that had already been bitten repeatedly over the past few days. Heath’s silent presence shifted imperceptibly inside me, becoming less animalistic. More human.
Blind protectiveness gave way to confusion... then worry... and then distress.
Against my will, my eyes slid up the length of the alpha’s dirty, battered body until I met a wide-eyed green gaze. Shell-shocked and blindsided by the awareness of what the two of us had done under the influence of our captors’ drugs, Heath stared at me in utter horror.