Chapter Thirty Eight
Walter Reed Medical Center — Just outside of Washington D.C.
One day until the Election…
“We’ll take good care of him!” the surgeon promised as they wheeled Brooks out of sight and into surgery, leaving us standing dazedly on the helipad of Walter Reed as a light rain began to pour above us.
Dawn was just breaking and I was exhausted.
“We need to go see Dallas,” Maverick urged me gently, his hand on my elbow.
“I can’t see him like this,” I said, gesturing to my bloodstained hands, face, and clothes.
I hadn’t even been able to think about the man who I’d bludgeoned to death with that pipe. Every time I got close to it my brain seemed to screech to a halt and reload like it was protecting itself.
“Go and shower first and get those wrists looked at, we’ll tell Dallas about Brooks,” Zeke said, pressing a kiss to my forehead that was so gentle that my lips started to wobble again.
“Thank you for coming to get me. If Brooks dies…” I trailed off, not even able to verbalize such a horrible thought.
Maverick wrapped his arms around me. “Brooks is far too stubborn to go anywhere. Especially with the promise of Little Red Riding Hood on the line.”
I laughed weakly against his chest.
We parted ways once we were back in the hospital, a kind nurse letting me use an empty room to shower and change into a pair of hospital sweats and a sweatshirt.
Once I was clean I felt more human and less feral than I had back in that place. I combed and braided my hair, pulling my battered boots back on since there was nothing the nurse could do about that and stepped back into the room, unsurprised when I found my mother already waiting for me.
“Hi Mom,” I said, wondering which Athena Holloway I was going to get tonight.
The last time I’d seen her I had been flinging expensive objects at her and her cabinet secretaries and she had been livid.
But that had been pre-kidnapping, so I was hoping that had given her some time to cool off.
“So, I wanted to let you know, before you say anything, that I’m not going to be separate from my pack anymore. I love them and they are going to be around a lot more and—”
She cut me off mid-rant, her arms wrapping around me tightly as she held me in a shuddering hug.
“I was so worried, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.”
I held myself stiff for a moment, remembering the hell that she had put me through for the past three weeks, but then I found myself melting into her hug and letting myself cry.
We sat together on the hospital bed and she let me cry my eyes out until they were puffy and swollen.
“Your wrists are pretty raw,” she said after a while as she looked at both of them.
“They had me zip tied, so I had to break them.”
“Lesson number three,” my mother said with a nostalgic chuckle. “Ash was always convinced you’d be kidnapped one day. He’s probably in the ether somewhere telling me he ‘told me so.’”
“The lessons worked better than I ever thought they would. I even set a distraction fire. Set the whole place ablaze.”
My mother’s brows lifted.
“Good, serves those bastards right for messing with my daughter,” she said, sounding impressed.
We sat comfortably for a moment and I almost hated to ruin it by bringing up my words from earlier. “And I was serious about the guys earlier, Mom. They’re my pack. So you’re sort of stuck with them whether you like it or not.”
“I’ve come to terms with it,” my mother said with a shrug as if she hadn’t put us through the ringer over the past three weeks.
“What?” I asked, reeling back away from her. “Just like that?”
“They saved you, Lennon. Ran right into hell for you—not to mention the only reason we got you back was because of this.”
My mother lifted the gold locket that was hanging around my neck up for me to see. “That Zeke of yours is very paranoid but in this case rightly so.”
She opened the locket, and inside of it was a tiny black, blinking object.
“A tracker?” I asked, staring at it.
“Yep, though I will be having it deactivated once all of this is over. They’ll be with you all of the time anyway, so no need to track your every move with illegal technology,” my mother said brightly. “But in this case, it helped.”
“Then why were you so against it in the first place?” I asked, feeling off-balance from her sudden switch up.
My mother’s cheerful expression shuttered a bit. “I wasn’t against it per se, Lennon, I was just worried you were making a rash decision.”
“When have you ever known me to make decisions like that, Mom? I’m like you and our motto is to—”
“Always tread with caution,” we finished together in tandem.
“I know, Lennon, but what else was I supposed to think? One day you’re looking at me like I hung the moon in the sky and the next you’re hiding things from me and suddenly I’m enemy number one. It was like that time again and I just…”
I frowned. “What time?”
My mother blinked as if she realized she’d said too much.
“Mom…” I warned. “You’re hiding something from me. You, Grandma, Grandpa, and even Carter. He said something weird the last time I saw him.”
My mother shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “What did he say?”
“He said you have demons that you’ve been ignoring for a long time.”
She flinched at the words.
“Carter had no right…” she began but sighed, putting her face in her hands. “No, that’s not right. I told myself I would be better at this if I got you back.”
I reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze.
My mother put her other hand over mine and looked into my eyes, her face looking more vulnerable than I’d seen it in a long time. “Promise me you won’t hate me, Lennon? It’s been really hard being hated by you these past few weeks.”
“I didn’t hate you. I don’t think I could ever really hate you,” I told her honestly.
She was my everything, the woman I’d grown up looking up to, the person I wanted to impress the most, the one I always wanted to help.
It was why I had stayed so long at a detriment to myself. “But I was angry at you.”
Now we just needed to figure out what our new normal looked like now that I found another thing I wanted in life.
My mother nodded, letting out a shaky breath. “I have been grieving for your father, that part is true. He’s the only man I’ve ever loved and will probably ever love… but the night before his heart attack he, uh, he asked me for a separation.”
I blinked at her, the information not computing in my brain.
I had never seen two people more compatible with each other than my parents.
They just understood each other in ways that I would never understand without the ease of a designation click.
It was pure hard work and communication between them and here my mother was telling me he wanted to leave her?
“Why?” I asked, disbelievingly.
“He told me that he was worried I was losing myself in the presidency,” my mother said, her tone a bit sardonic. “And that the woman he married wasn’t this robotic.”
“Ouch,” I hissed because… well… he wasn’t completely wrong either.
“Yeah, and before I could try to fix anything he had a heart attack which, you can imagine, hasn’t really helped me cope,” my mother finished her voice shaky.
“Oh, Mom,” I said, pulling her in for a hug. “That’s not something you can control.”
“I could have. He’d been asking me to come back to him for months before that, but I was so busy with everything that I ignored him until it was too late. It feels like I stressed him into that heart attack, sweetheart.”
“Mom, Dad had a penchant for sneaking greasy cheeseburgers and large cokes when you weren’t looking too. Are you going to shoot missiles at every fast food restaurant in the country?”
“I might,” she grumbled darkly.
I shot her a quelling look.
“I’m kidding, Lennon,” she said, holding her hands up defensively. “The joint chiefs wouldn’t let me anyway.”
“Maybe you can start by talking to someone? Like a professional?” I asked.
My mother made a face. “Like a therapist? The president can’t have a therapist.”
“You ran a campaign on being pro-mental health,” I pointed out, rubbing at the headache between my eyebrows. “Besides, it’ll probably be good for you. Carter’s in therapy, I’m in therapy. Hells we can probably make it a family bonding time thing or something.”
That had her perking up.
“Like something on the books that we can do together?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“I’d like that very much, and maybe McDaniels can spin the whole therapy thing in our favor too…”
I didn’t care how they spun it as long as she was getting the help she needed to let go of her guilt and learn how to cope with her grief.
“Come on,” I said, getting up from the bed. “The guys are waiting for me back in Dallas’s room and I’m sure they’d like to see you too.”
“I doubt that,” my mother shot back her expression turning sheepish. “They all seem scared of me.”
“They probably still think you’re going to send them to the Arctic or something. Maybe you can order food. They like food. And you know,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper. “With them here, your chances for a very cute grandbaby have just increased exponentially.”
That stopped my mother in her tracks.
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Uh-huh. I’ve seen some of their baby pictures, courtesy of Brooks, and some of them were quite fat babies.”
Her gasp was full of delight. “Oh, you know I love a fat baby. You and your brother were so thin, I was worried that you weren’t getting enough from my breast milk and we were going to have to use formula, which I always say, fed is best, but I really wanted to…”
As she rambled on about my brother and me as babies, I felt myself smile a real smile for the first time in hours. I was pretty sure my mother was finally sold on the idea of the alphas who were a few floors down now.
“He’s out of surgery,” Maverick said, entering the new hospital room they had moved us into when my mother insisted they put Brooks into the same room once he was out of surgery. It was twice as large as Dallas’s old one and would be able to accommodate Brooks’ bed.
“And?” I asked from where I was perched next to Dallas, a plate of Italian food in my hand and a forkful of shrimp scampi halfway up to my mouth.
My mother had to return to the White House after ordering us food as promised and we were all watching pre-election news coverage as the country geared up to vote for their next president.
Normally I would be right there next to her, but she’d told me that there was nowhere else I should be other than right here with my pack, helping them recover.
“He’s going to be all right. The bullet nicked his spleen, so that’s gone now and he’s lost quite a bit of blood, so it’s good he’s got a twin brother in the house to donate…”
“Always happy to be of service,” Dallas said, giving a mock bow before melting into my side with relief.
“But he should make a full recovery.”
We cheered and I finally released the breath I’d been holding since Brooks began to bleed out after we took his vest off.
He was going to be okay and we were going to be okay.
And I was going to cry again, damn it, right into my shrimp scampi.
“Hey,” Dallas said, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. “It’s all going to be all right. We’re going to make it through all of this. Don’t cry into your food, it’s already salty enough.”
Despite the rush of emotions already washing through me, I laughed at his bad joke and speared a shrimp, shoving it into his mouth.
“Delicious,” he mumbled while chewing.
“When are they supposed to bring him in?” I asked Maverick as I continued to feed Dallas shrimp, not caring about how full his cheeks were becoming.
“An hour or so once he starts to wake up from the anesthesia,” Maverick said as he came over and opened his mouth for a shrimp of his own.
“So what should we do with our free time?” Zeke said, wagging his eyebrows suggestively.
An hour later, the nurses wheeled Brooks in, finding all of us snoring lightly after eating our weight in pasta. Me in the bed with Dallas, Maverick on the pull out couch and Zeke awkwardly between two chairs.
I stirred amongst their snores, sitting up as soon as I heard the nurses chuckle amongst themselves.
“Hey,” I whispered when I saw his groggy smile. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I’m floating,” he told me with a little giggle.
“I see they gave you the good stuff,” I said, glancing up at the nurses who nodded with a pair of smirks.
“Is it all right if I lie with him?”
“Yes as long as it’s not the side with the stitches,” the older nurse said as she lifted his arm, creating a spot for me. “Try not to jostle him too much, but it’ll be good for his recovery to have his omega close.”
“Isn’t that an old wives’ tale?” the younger nurse asked, her brows furrowing with disbelief.
“I’ve seen miracles happen with omegas and their alphas, young lady, and he’s already out of the woods,” the older nurse quipped as she pulled the blanket up around us and handed me the call button. “Just give this a press if you need anything, honey.”
Then they were gone and I was laying with my very loopy alpha.
“You smell so good,” Brooks said, giving me a silly smile.
“You smell like a hospital,” I told him honestly, scrunching my nose as I tried to find any of his honey mead scent.
“Hmmm,” he hummed, clumsily pressing a kiss to the top of my head. “You know I looove you and I can’t wait to chase you around in that hood.”
I laughed, laying my head on his chest, trying to be mindful of not putting my full weight on him. “I love you too, though the chasing will have to come after you’ve fully recovered. Now go to sleep.”
“I don’t wanna,” Brooks said stubbornly. “What if you’re gone when I wake up?”
“I won’t be.”
“Do you promise?” he said and when I looked up into his eyes I found them full of fear.
I lifted my head and pressed a soft kiss to his lips. “I promise. Besides, I actually can’t go anywhere, your tubes have me trapped here with you unless the nurses come and free me.”
That seemed to calm him down because soon the alpha went limp underneath me and his heavily lidded eyes drooped as he fell asleep.
I snuggled in close as the soft sounds of the news anchors on the television lulled me off into a dreamless sleep.