Chapter 16
MIA
One moment, Nash is standing before Grey, bleeding and expressionless.
The next, he’s on the floor. It happens fast; his knees buckling, then the rest of him folding.
Marcus is already moving but not quite fast enough to catch him fully, and the sound of it, the specific, terrible sound of Nash hitting the floor, does something to my chest that I am going to examine later when I have the privacy to lose my shit.
“Get him off the floor,” I say. It comes out sharper than I intend, and I don’t care. “Dutch. Razor. Now.”
To their credit, neither of them asks a single stupid question. Dutch gets his shoulders, Razor gets his legs, and Marcus is already directing them toward the door with the quiet efficiency of a man who has clearly had contingency plans for this exact situation filed somewhere accessible.
“Wait. Where are you taking him?” I ask, suddenly horrified that Marcus will shove him into an SUV and drive out of town to protect his alpha.
“His room,” Marcus says like he’s asking permission.
I exhale, dizzy with relief. “Right. Go.”
I’m about to follow them into the hall when Grey steps in front of me. I frown at the sight of him blocking my exit. Then of Lexi’s hand on Grey’s arm. Both of them watching me with expressions I don’t have time to catalog.
Grey catches my arm briefly as I pass. “Mia.”
“Don't tell me he’s fine,” I say without stopping.
“He’s fine,” Grey says anyway. “But—”
I’m already through the door.
Nash’s guest room is one of the estate’s nicer ones.
High ceilings, good light, a bed large enough that Dutch and Razor manage to deposit him onto it without the indignity of his feet hanging off the end.
Marcus pulls a chair to the bedside with the practiced calm of someone who has done this before, and I file that away to ask about later because, right now, I’m cataloging the rise and fall of Nash's chest and counting the seconds between each breath and telling myself this is a purely tactical assessment.
“Do you know what’s wrong with him?” I ask.
“Judging from the well of power I felt inside your alpha, I’d say he ventured a little too close to the sun during their little psychic interview,” Marcus says.
“Merda.” The blood drains from my face as I realize the enormity of what Nash must have encountered. “Grey’s alpha power is…more than normal.”
Marcus snorts. “No shit.”
“We need to call the doctor.” I pull out my phone.
Marcus gives me a strange look. “I am a doctor.”
“Seriously?”
“I only practiced for a couple of years before I left to work for Nash, but…” He shrugs. “Yeah. Now I strictly practice for the pack.”
“Well, that’s good for us,” I say, exhaling as relief lightens the lead weight on my chest. I watch as Marcus performs a cursory exam on the still unconscious alpha sprawled across his bed.
“Do you think he’ll be okay?” I ask, the words coming out in a choked whisper.
Marcus glances at Nash. I do the same and note that his color is already returning. “Yeah. He’ll wake up embarrassed.”
“Good,” I say.
Dutch raises an eyebrow at me from across the room.
“I mean, good that he’ll wake up,” I say. “Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Dutch says in a tone that suggests he finds the clarification unnecessary and also telling.
Thankfully, he lets it go—for now. I fully expect a slew of texts about it later.
Grey appears in the doorway behind Dutch. “How is he?”
“Nothing seems to be seriously wrong that I can tell,” Marcus says, stepping back after taking Nash’s pulse.
“He went further than he should have,” Grey says. Regret flashes in his gaze. I know he feels responsible, but my worry for Nash is too much to let him off the hook.
“One alpha called to another. He followed the connection,” Marcus says without looking up from the text he’s typing. “Can’t say my wolf wanted to try it, but I guess I understand Nash doing it. That fucker’s always thought of himself as invincible.”
“Maybe he’s not wrong,” Dutch says. “If the fucker recovers from this, I’d say he’s onto something.”
Marcus snorts.
After a few minutes, Grey takes Razor and Dutch back downstairs, only after Marcus promises to tell them when Nash is awake. When they’re gone, I pace to the wall on the far side of the bed and lean against it, arms crossed.
“You can have the chair,” Marcus offers.
“I’m good.” I remain where I am, and after a moment, he takes the chair for himself.
He finishes whatever he’s typing and pockets his phone. For a moment, we just sit on opposite sides of Nash’s unconscious body like the world’s most uncomfortable vigil.
“You’ve known him a long time,” I say finally. Not a question.
“Since we were teenagers,” Marcus says.
“That’s a long time.”
“Feels longer.” He leans back in his chair with the ease of someone who has waited in rooms like this before and learned not to fight it.
“Has he always been this reckless?”
“Nah.” He grins. “Back then, he was worse.”
I shake my head, and we fall back into silence.
His phone dings. He texts someone back and then pockets it again.
We wait some more.
“He doesn’t do this, you know,” he says a while later.
I look at him. “Pass out?”
“Bring women into his orbit.” He says it simply. No judgment in it. Just fact. “And I have never once seen him look at anyone the way he looks at you.”
Butterflies dance against my stomach. I keep my expression neutral with some effort. “We’re colleagues. Allies working the same problem.”
“Sure.”
“The situation created proximity. That’s all.”
“Mm.”
My eyes narrow. “What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
"You’re saying a lot without saying anything.” Without meaning to, my tone takes on the hard, sarcastic quality I use with my family, and I realize with a specific tired irony that I said almost this exact thing to Lexi three days ago.
Marcus smiles. “I can see why he likes you.”
I look at Nash. His color is fully back now. His face in sleep is younger than his face awake; the controlled watchfulness gone, just the person underneath it. The one who followed an alpha’s consciousness further than was safe because he’d decided integrity mattered more than self-preservation.
The one who said I’ve thought about it every day since in a car on a mountain road like it was the simplest true thing in the world.
Stop, I tell myself.
“He’s a good man,” Marcus says finally. Not pushing. Just putting it on the table. “One of the best I’ve known. And I don’t say that because he signs my checks.”
I snort at that.
He glances at me. “He doesn’t compromise on what matters.”
“I know,” I say. And I do. That’s the problem. That’s been the problem since the first night.
“Then you know he’s not going to stop,” Marcus says. Simply. Without apology. “Whatever this is, he’s decided. He’s not built for halfway.”
I look down at my hands. “Neither am I.”
Which is why I swore to never begin in the first place. But the truth is, we began two years ago at that party.
“No,” Marcus agrees. “I didn’t think you were.”
We sit with that for a moment.
Then Nash makes a sound, and we both look at him.
His eyes flutter open. Find the ceiling. Do a quick, efficient sweep of the room.
He lands on Marcus first, and his neutral expression turns into a scowl. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” Marcus asks.
“Whatever you’re about to say.”
Marcus grins. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You have that look in your eye.”
“This is just how my eye looks.”
Nash grunts, and then his gaze lands on me. Something in his expression shifts. Not surprise, just taking in the fact that I’m here beside his bed, which tells him something he’s too perceptive not to read correctly.
He doesn’t say anything about it.
“What’s your assessment, doc?” he asks Marcus.
“You’re fine,” Marcus says, standing and pulling out his phone, which has just dinged again. "Embarrassingly so, given the dramatics.”
“Is that Lovaro?” Nash asks, nodding at the phone.
“I’ll handle him.” Marcus picks up his jacket from the back of the chair.
“Drink water. Don’t follow any more alpha consciousness connections into the abyss today.
” He looks at Nash steadily for one moment, something passing between them in the shorthand of people who have known each other long enough that they don’t need words anymore.
Then he nods once and looks at me. “Good to meet you properly, Mia.”
“You too,” I say.
He leaves.
The door clicks shut behind him.
Nash sits up and looks at me across the space.
His color is fully back. His expression is the controlled version he wears when he’s feeling something he’s decided not to lead with.
But I know that expression now. I’ve learned the difference between Nash being closed off and Nash choosing his moment, and I’m not sure when that knowledge happened.
“You stayed with me,” he says, and more than the words, it’s the softness they’re wrapped in that flusters me.
He’s right. I stayed. And that means something. It probably means way too much, actually. And now I need to find a way to make it mean less. Fast.
“Marcus needed someone to—I mean, I was coordinating the interview structure with him. There’s a lot to—”
“Mia.”
I stop talking.
He’s watching me with that expression. The one that bypasses every defense I have, not because it’s forceful but because it’s patient.
I push off the wall. Take a step toward the bed.
“You scared the hell out of me,” I say. Quiet. Against my better judgment and the direct instruction of approximately every self-protective instinct I have. “When you went down. I—” I stop.
Something in his face softens in a way that makes the thing in my chest worse rather than better. “I'm sorry.”
“Don't apologize. Just—” I stand because the chair has become a trap. “Don’t do it again.”
His brows lift. “Offer a blood oath to prove my loyalty to a pack I believe in?”
“Any of it.” I turn to face him. “The volunteering. The going too far. The passing out and letting me think you were dying. All of it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I glare at him. “Prepotente.”
His mouth curves faintly. “You keep calling me that.”
“You keep earning it.”
“What does it mean?”