3. Amara
CHAPTER 3
AMARA
Was I dying?
It certainly fucking felt like I was. The twelve-hour flight home was a nightmare of sweating, squirming, and so much horniness I was surprised I didn’t simply burst into flame. It wasn’t a heat—I’d have been completely lost in the sauce if it was—but I didn’t know what the fuck this was. The whole way home I curled into a ball in my blessedly empty row of economy seats, draped my coat over my head, and simply tried to sleep. I was pretty sure I hadn’t actually slept a wink, and I didn’t miss the concerned glances the flight attendants gave me when I rejected every meal and drink offering. I just needed to get home and climb into my nest and let whatever the fuck this was run its course.
I stumbled through the airport and nearly toppled when I tried to hook my bag onto my back. An omega-only taxi service took me home and I felt no better when I’d gotten inside my apartment. The air was stale but I didn’t dare open the windows with my scent this strong. I wrestled through my cabinets until I found what I wanted—a container of allspice and a bottle of amaretto.
Stupid. I huffed them both, and the combination helped clear my brain fog but set my body on fire again. With a whimper I grabbed both of them and a bottle of water and disappeared into the depths of my nest.
I had so many missed calls and over a hundred text messages, but I wasn’t in any state of mind to deal with them. I needed sleep and food and—no. I needed that fucking alpha. He was across the ocean and I didn’t know his name. Even if I felt brave enough to try to find him, I wouldn’t be able to.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Good job, Amara. Not even getting the names of the people we fuck now, apparently.
I squirmed with misery in my nest. Ordinarily, it was a source of comfort, but now it felt empty and wrong.
I slipped away, woken only by what sounded like a battering ram against my front door. I was too tired to move to investigate. A few moments after the pounding stopped, the blankets covering me were ripped away and I stared up in a daze at the face of my father.
“Jesus Christ, kid. The fuck have you been doing?”
I blinked at him, trying to figure out what he was doing here. “What?”
“Your friends have been losing their fucking minds. You’ve been missing for three days. Why are you here and not in Italy?”
“I…” I curled into myself.
“Fuck. I’m calling the paramedics.”
I stopped listening, curling around my little jar of spice and bottle of amaretto until there were bright lights shining in my eyes and hands poking me. They dragged me out of my nest and onto a gurney, loading me into the ambulance.
I slipped in and out of consciousness, and when I emerged again, I was in a sterile looking room, the steady beat of a heart monitor breaking the silence.
My father sat on a chair nearby and glanced up when I shifted. “Did you go into heat in Italy?”
I shook my head.
“What the fuck were you doing there?”
“Traveling,” I croaked.
He leaned back with a sigh, looking a lot older than he should have in the two years since I had last seen him. His hair was more salt than pepper, exhausted lines etched into his face and marring the tattoos there.
Had my friends reached out to him? They had his contact for emergencies, but they all knew I wasn’t speaking to him.
“Did someone hurt you?”
“No, I—they tried but I…got away.”
Thinking felt like I was slogging through waist-deep mud. Why did he have to keep asking questions when all I wanted to do was sleep?
“Don’t fucking lie to me, Amara. The doctor told me you have signs of a recent bonding, not to mention the dehydration and dangerously low blood sugar.”
What was I supposed to tell him? The latter two were my own fault, but the first… It took a moment for the words to break through the fog, and I choked out, “Bonding?”
“They found the mark when they checked you over and your labs are consistent with a recent heat. So I’ll ask you again, what happened?”
“I don’t know! God, just give me a fucking second.”
Who was I kidding? My father had never been good at that. He barreled forward. “Give me a name and I’ll cut off his balls and feed them to him.”
I swallowed the rise of bile in my throat. “No! Can you shut up for two seconds?”
He growled, but he sat back down, fixing me with a glare.
“Go.”
“Amara, I’m not fucking leaving while you’re in the hospital.”
“Get. Out.” I growled, my heart rate monitor going haywire and summoning a pair of nurses to rush in.
“Sir, please step outside,” one of the nurses said, ushering him toward the door and closing it behind him.
They checked me over and once they were satisfied I wasn’t going to kick the bucket in the next few seconds, they stepped back to talk to me.
“Do you remember what happened? How you got in this condition?”
I gave them a vague explanation. Met a foreign alpha, fucked the afternoon away, with no mention of the attempted abduction and us fleeing from Naples to Rome.
“How are you feeling?” one of them asked.
“Like ass,” I replied.
“Hopefully a few good meals and the IV will get you feeling better. Do you have the contact information for your mate? We should let them know you’re here.”
“Uh, yeah, I don’t exactly know his name.”
The nurses exchanged a glance. “We’ll consult with the doctors for some medication to mitigate your symptoms, but if it’s at all possible, we should get in contact with your mate. That’s the simplest way to calm down your body’s reaction to being apart.”
I sighed and wiggled against the pillows. “I’ll just get used to suffering. There’s no way in hell I’m gonna be able to find him again.”
“Never say never.” One of them patted my hand.
I didn’t bother to reply. I had no choice but to say never. It wasn’t like my mystery mate was going to show up on my doorstep. God, I was so fucked. This was a million times worse than getting drunk-married in Vegas. Did I still have to register as mated if I had no one’s name to put down?
“Would you like us to keep your father out of here?”
“Please. Tell him I’ll text when I’m out of here.”
The nurses bustled off to get rid of him for me, and I knew they had succeeded from the rise of shouting that went silent a moment later.
I stared up at the ceiling. Would rubbing one out set off the heart monitors again? Now that I was on my way to healing, my body was ratcheting up other issues and raising even more questions.
How the fucking fuck did I get bonded when I didn’t go through a heat? Whatever the hell had happened in Rome wasn’t that, as close as some of the symptoms might’ve been. That wasn’t how things worked.
I should’ve at least gotten his first name out of him so I could go full Internet stalker. But alas, I hadn’t asked and I was just going to have to fucking regret that for the rest of my goddamn life.
By the time dinner rolled around, I was bored out of my skull. I hadn’t thought to ask my dad to get my phone from the apartment so I had nothing to occupy myself with. The nurses were run off their feet, so I couldn’t even bother any of them to hang out with me.
My night shift nurse checked in before I fell asleep. “We got your most recent lab results. Your levels are much more reasonable and you’ll be allowed to go home in the morning after breakfast, provided your next set of labs is consistent with this.”
“Sweet. Thanks.”
That was a relief at least. I still didn’t feel fabulous, but I was definitely a million times better than when I had woken up here. That ever-present neediness still rumbled under my skin, my body doing its best to order me back into proximity with the alpha who had apparently bonded me.
I squirmed petulantly when I was left alone again. “Stop it, for the love of god. We can’t go back to Italy.” Saying it out loud didn’t work any better than screaming it internally.
Trying to keep my mind occupied, I counted the holes in the ceiling tiles: 4,684.
If I did go back to Italy, the alpha would probably think I’d lost my goddamn mind after I’d fled Naples in a panic, but I felt like I was likely to do that anyway eventually. This was probably why they had all those tragic stories of omegas tossing themselves into the sea after the death of their mates. Having to deal with this bodily bullshit on top of grief like that would be a nightmare.
I slept fitfully, waking a dozen times whenever I heard someone walk by, my sleeping brain bursting with hope that it might be my alpha showing up. Each time I grumbled and pulled the blankets up to my chin, holding them tightly to resist the urge to get my fingers on my pussy and relieve some of the burn urging me to touch. I guessed technically it was urging me to get him to touch.
I dragged one of the pillows over my face and screamed into it just to relieve some of the pressure.
My morning labs were good enough that they let me go home. Of course it was at that moment I realized that not only was my phone still at the apartment, but so were my keys and wallet, which left me with no way home. With an exhausted sigh, I asked one of the nurses to call my dad, and within half an hour I was tucked into his passenger seat, the darkly tinted windows blocking the sun from blinding me as he drove me home.
“Are you going to ignore me the whole time?” he asked.
“I mean, I did that for two years. I would hate to break the pattern now.”
He huffed, his fingers flexing against the steering wheel. “I know I’m a shitty parent. You don’t have to rub it in my face.”
I only shrugged. “You rubbed it in mine my whole life.”
“So you’re just never gonna let it go?”
“Generally an apology is required before that happens.”
“You’re really ruining my groove of sweeping in to be the hero so you’ll forgive me.”
“Good to know that my illness was very convenient timing for you to try to manipulate me.”
“Jesus fuck, Amara. You take everything the wrong way.”
“I take it the way you say it.”
He lapsed into silence and I was grateful for it. At least he didn’t try to stay. Once he’d gotten me back into my apartment, I plugged in my phone and waited for it to come back to life so I could text my landlord to get the locks replaced.
I was tempted to just delete my messages without reading them. I didn’t, though. I took a painstaking amount of time to reassure my friends that I was safe and message back all the people who had been looking for me, which granted, were not that many, but the ones who did were very chatty people.
Before I collapsed face-first into my nest, I ate a bowl of instant noodles and drank some water, imagining the disapproving faces of my nurses when I had contemplated skipping the food altogether to guilt me into consumption.
At least here I could masturbate in peace and pretend my alpha was here. That couldn’t be nearly as depressing as the reality, could it?