41. Luna #2
“I’m here to help,” she says, offering me a small smile that feels so warm in this cold basement. “I heard you were shot?”
I nod, shifting my position to nod down at Madden’s old t-shirt still tied around my arm.
“Can I take a look at it?” She asks.
“Are—are you allowed to be in here?”
Her jaw clenches and her left eye twitches before she shrugs again.
“That’s not something you’ve gotta worry about, Bambi. Let’s worry about getting that hole in your arm cleaned up.”
“My—my name isn’t Bambi,” I say, my teeth chattering. “My name is Luna.”
“Cute.” She starts unwrapping the t-shirt tied on my arm as gently as she can, but the dried blood still sticks to me, making me cry out. “Shit, I’m sorry about this.”
My hands fist the t-shirt I’m wearing as I clench my jaw shut.
“What’s—what’s your name?” I pant out, trying to make conversation because the silence means all I can focus on is the pain.
“My name is Reyna,” she says, pulling out a professional-looking irrigation bottle that she uses to start washing out the wound.
“Do you—do you wash out bullet wounds often, Reyna?”
She lets out a huff of laughter under her breath. “I’ve done it before, but I’m normally cleaning up the kinds of wounds that come from fistfights. One of the jobs I work is as a ring girl at a fighting ring and some of the guys need some help getting patched up after fights.”
She seems to pick up on my dislike of the silence, which I’m really grateful for because her working on my wound is painful in a way I haven’t experienced before.
She glances up warily at me before sighing. “Okay, I’ve got it all cleaned up now, but the next part is worse. I’m going to have to pack the wound so it drains properly.”
“Pack it?” I ask, my chin wobbling. Whatever that means, the way she’s saying it makes me feel like it’s not going to be good.
“Yeah, pack it. I’ve got some gauze and some antibacterial stuff here with me, but I’ve got to put it in the hole. Sometimes with bullet holes like this, they heal the outside first and it traps a whole bunch of nasty bacteria in your arm. That’s a bad idea in a place like this.”
I feel faint at the idea of it. Pretty sure all the blood drains from my face.
“So you’re going to stick stuff in my arm?”
She winces. “Yeah. It’s gonna be bad. I’m sorry, but I don’t have anything for you to take for the pain. I promise, it’ll be better than you having to lose your arm, later.”
I swallow hard, blinking away my tears. “O—okay.”
She hands me Madden’s old t-shirt, folding it to a clean portion. “You should bite on this. This is gonna suck, but you have to try and stay quiet, the only reason they let me in here is 'cause I know one of the guys guarding you, but if someone comes looking, we might get in trouble.”
I nod my head, swallowing hard.
“Ready?”
“Y—yeah. As ready as I can be,” I say, putting the fabric between my teeth.
I squeeze my eyes shut when I feel her touch. The softness of her hands does nothing to distract me from the pain of whatever she’s doing .
I don’t even know if I can fully describe what it’s like, to have someone shove something into an unnatural hole in your body. All I know is it hurts. And burns.
I let out a startled gasp, every single muscle in my neck tensing with my effort to not scream. My jaw creaks and I see white. I think I forget to breathe.
It’s not until she lets out her own sigh of relief and squeezes my good shoulder that I take a gasping breath, spitting out the t-shirt and turning to my side, heaving from the pain.
Reyna rubs my back, making soft soothing noises from the back of her throat.
“Shhhhh, shhhh, you did so good, Luna. I’m all done. The hard part is over now.”
Tears stream down my cheeks and I let out a sputtering laugh that quickly devolves into coughs. “That—that sucked.”
“Yeah, I bet,” She lets out her own laugh. She pulls out a granola bar and a bottle of water. “You in the mood to eat something?”
“I—I probably should,” I say.
She nods, cracking open the bottle of water and handing it to me.
I take it with my good arm and drink like I’ve been stuck in a desert. I gulp down two-thirds of the bottle before I stop to take a break.
“Eat this while I wrap your arm real quick.”
I pause before taking a bite of the granola bar. “Will—will this part hurt too?”
“No, it shouldn’t hurt too bad, especially compared to what you just put up with,” She offers me a reassuring smile.
I give her a shaky nod, taking a bite of the dry protein bar as she takes some more gauze and wraps it around my arm.
“All done,” she says, sitting back on her heels. “Wait, one last thing.” She grabs the t-shirt that’s resting in my lap and ties it around my arm again. “Just so no one notices that someone checked you out.”
She shifts like she’s going to stand, but my good hand reaches out to grab her. I don’t want her to leave me alone here. Not when I know my fate at the hands of Alpha Niall will probably make her packing my wound look like a playground.
“How—how did you find me?” I ask her.
She bites her bottom lip before shrugging. “I was covering a shift upstairs for a friend when I heard some of the bouncers talk about a hurt omega being kept in the basement.”
“A shift? But—but Alpha Niall said this is a brothel.”
Her gaze sharpens when I mention Alpha Niall’s name.
“Yup, and I work at places like these. Or at least that’s one of the jobs I work.
” She plops herself down on the concrete in front of me.
“Now tell me how a cute little omega like you got in with a douchebag like Niall? Family debt or something? I can’t imagine it was a drug problem. ”
I shake my head. “He—he kidnapped me. I was in the Northside in my pack house when he sent a bunch of mercenaries to kidnap me.” Tears fill my eyes again when I remember how Madden looked, slumped over the driver’s seat.
“What?” Reyna spits, her voice harsher than anything I’ve heard before. “You had a pack? And he kidnapped you?”
I nod, sniffling, wiping at my cheeks and trying to get rid of the evidence of my tears. Sitting in front of a woman like Reyna and crying like a baby makes me feel, well, like a baby.
“We—we’d just made it official that day.”
“Fuck,” She curses under her breath. “You’re from the Northside, too?”
“I—I was raised in the Southside. By people he paid to raise me because he seemed to have an obsession with my mom. They sold me to betas and were going to sell me permanently to Alpha Niall,” I babble, trying to keep Reyna here with me longer.
“But then I ran away and ended up on the Northside and found a really nice pack who took me in.”
Her eyes narrow and she purses her lips.
“This Northside pack… they treat you good? You like them?”
“I love them!” I say, vehemently. “And they love me. I—I want to get back to them.”
“A girl like you doesn’t belong in a place like this. Let alone forced into it.” She nods her head slowly. “Okay, tell me this. What’s the name of your Northside pack?”
My heart starts fluttering in my chest.
“The—the Ward pack! They’ll be looking for me, can you—can you reach out to them? Tell them where I am so they know where to find me?”
She stands abruptly and I feel the cold concrete walls closing in on me as she makes her way to the door.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she says, her voice low.
“Please—please Reyna,” tears fill my eyes again even though I don’t want to cry again. “Maybe—maybe they can help you too! Get you out of here so you don’t have to work in a place like this.”
Her smile is twisted and bitter. So is her sharp laugh. “Some of us choose this life, Bambi. Good luck.”
She knocks on the thick metal door, and just like that, she’s gone.