Chapter 48 Xander, Asher, Nitro, Fallon, & Kane #2
“You’re not dying,” I told myself. “You can breathe. There’s air in here. Even though you can’t see it.”
To prove the words to myself, I pulled out my lighter and flicked the metal wheel.
The flame didn’t ignite.
I tried again and again to make the flint strike true and the wick flare.
NITRO.
The memory of the giant tent collapsing with Lucy inside was branded on my brain. I didn’t think I’d ever erase it.
She’d gone in there to save me—her, the one I’d continually mistreated in the most inhumane ways. How could she even think of risking everything for someone like me?
Idiot.
Beautiful fucking idiot.
Sitting in one of the navy-blue chairs in the waiting room, my right knee bounced in sync with my stuttering pulse. From the moment the ambulance doors closed, blocking my sight of Lucy, my heart hadn’t worked right. It was out of rhythm, the organ forgetting how to function.
As my brothers and I followed behind the transport—Xander driving his car, the rest of us on our bikes—every interaction I’d had with Lucy replayed.
I’d treated her like dog, giving her buckets to piss and shit in.
I’d thrown knives at her as if she were fucking disposable.
Hell, I had even filled a trash bag with the worst of our old clothes, knowing they’d be oversized and tattered, just so I could tell her that’s the best she deserved.
Despite everything, Lucy had crawled into danger to save me. Guilt, sharp as any knife I’d ever wielded, cut through me.
I leaned back in my chair, pushing my hand into my jean pocket and wrapping fingers around the folded blade hidden there.
I pulled it out, the cool metal against my palm felt real and grounding.
It was something I could control, unlike everything else happening around me.
Slowly, I unfolded the knife, revealing its sharpness.
First, I ran the razor edge up and down the back of my forearm, shaving the hair.
Next, I gripped the hilt in my first, lifted it above my leg, and slammed it down.
A last second change of angle caused the blade to sink into the seat of the chair, just shy of my thigh.
Yes, I wanted to hurt myself. I wanted to feel the pain I’d caused Lucy.
But me bleeding out in the waiting room wouldn’t help anything.
I wiggled the knife back and forth, making the puncture wound increasingly larger.
Why did you do it, Lucy? You had no damn reason to try and save me.
You might die, and for someone who belittled you, degraded you, harmed you. The shallow cut I’d made on her cheek throwing the blade at her flashed through my mind. She deserved so much better than me and my pack of fucked-up miscreants.
I could admit now that I’d noticed the subtle shifts in my stability with her around.
Yet I’d chosen to ignore everything positive.
Like the way her scent made me feel relaxed.
Like the way the sight of her sent a pang through my heart.
Like the way she’d started consuming my thoughts, even edging out my blades. Why was I so damn stubborn?
I imagined how she’d looked in the moments before risking her life.
Determination in her startling green eyes. Her pink mouth set into a straight line, the same way it looked when she held her ground. That petite body of hers rallying strength, preparing to do something she was ill-equipped to handle.
The weight of what she’d done blanketed over me. It was something that couldn’t be repaid, not in a million lifetimes.
I was still twisting the knife.
Twisting the knife the way my gut was twisting.
The thought of never having a chance to fix things with Lucy, made me feel sick.
She deserved the best life had to offer. It was a cruelty of fate that she was our scent match, a pack that wouldn’t know soft love if it bit us in the ass.
I stood abruptly, leaving the knife embedded in the chair. I walked away from it, like abandoning the blade would make it easier to turn over a new leaf.
For Lucy, I could change.
FALLON.
The surgery was supposed to last one hundred and fifty minutes if everything went smoothly. One hundred and fifty minutes. Two and a half hours. Nine thousand seconds.
But one hundred and eighty-three minutes had gone by, and still no word. Thirty-three minutes past the typical time for this kind of surgery. The longer Lucy remained on that operating table, the more out of control my brain and body felt.
I stood in the waiting room, time warping around me, wondering what had gone wrong.
The feeling compressing my chest and making it hard to think felt like riding on an endless stretch of desert highway, the kind that kisses the horizon impossibly far in the distance, and no matter how fast or far I go, me and my motorcycle never reach the termination point.
Right now, it didn’t matter how fast and far I went, I couldn’t reach Lucy. She might as well be a million miles away.
I fought against the urge to pace a hole into the floor, anxiety surging through me. My gaze kept darting to the double doors, mind screaming at them to open and give us news. The conversation we’d had with the surgeons swirled around my mind.
Risk of hemorrhaging, wound separation, tissue necrosis, post-surgical infections… every horrifying possibility threaded through my consciousness, making me feel sicker by the second.
Lucy was so small—so delicate. How much blood could she lose before it was too much?
Back at the Cirque, the emergency medical techs had kept the flagpole sticking out of her body, packing the area around it with clean bandages to stabilize it and prevent more damage, but her clothes had still been soaked in red by the time they’d loaded her into the ambulance.
I felt powerless, trapped in this waiting purgatory, antiseptic smells stinging my nose.
My pack knew what to do with strength and pain.
We didn’t know how to handle fragility. Not that Lucy was fragile in spirit, only body.
Why would fate bring her to us? Why would destiny send such an angel among demons?
Trying to remember Lucy’s weight from the Eros file, I pulled my phone from my pocket, navigating to a search engine and typing in, “How much blood can a petite woman weighing roughly one hundred and ten pounds lose?” It was a morbid query, but cold, hard data was my security blanket.
When I was on the verge of losing control, facts and figures settled my mind.
There was a reason math was considered a universal language.
It would take a lengthy series of zeros and ones to tell the entire world, crossing every cultural barrier, the words in my heart right now.
She has to live.
She can’t die.
She’s my scent match.
But binary is limited. It lacks context. I’d need symbols.
Happiness. Sadness. Excitement. Grief.
01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101.
Love.
Four letters, requiring thirty-two digits. Yet, compared to the breaking of my heart as I thought of losing Lucy, I knew that my feelings could not be defined by either option—not words, not numbers. The only thing good enough was action.
I tried to absolve myself by thinking, the others treated her worse than I did. There was no absolution though. Because I might not have actively degraded and tortured Lucy, but I watched it all. I didn’t stop it. So, in a way, I’d hurt her just as much.
Focusing on the screen, I forced the terrible thoughts to the back of my mind and clicked the first search result.
After thirty minutes of pouring over every statistic, I shoved the phone into my pocket.
Right now, the facts weren’t comforting me; they were only driving home the very real possibility that Lucy might not survive.
What would I do if she died? What would my pack do?
There wasn’t another Omega out there for us.
Sure, Eros might find a suitable scent match, but they wouldn’t be Lucy.
No one in the whole damn world could replace her.
KANE.
I paced back and forth in front of a bank of windows, watching the sky darken ominously outside. Not just with dusk falling over Nevada, but a storm brewing, like the world outside was echoing the world inside this hospital.
As we’d waited, the air in this place had shifted. No longer medicinal, but heady with Alpha pheromones. Instead of a harmonious mix, my pack brothers’ individual scents clashed right now. We were all on edge, all shaken to our cores.
There was no doubt in my mind that one thought dominated each of us: Lucy couldn’t die.
I closed my eyes, which was a mistake. Every time I did, Otto’s salvage yard came to mind. What I’d done there—forcing Lucy into the pile of mangled cars, then nearly burying her alive beneath the wreckage—haunted me.
Helplessness had seeped into my marrow. I didn’t I’d ever be rid of the feeling. I’d lifted fucking cars one handed, but the weight of possibly losing my Omega could rival a damn semi-truck.
I hated this waiting room.
Hated its sterile, pale walls. Hated the clock above the nurses’ station which kept tick… tick… ticking away minutes. Each movement of the short and long hands reminded me that I had no control over Lucy’s fate.
We’d called her worthless and weak. We’d treated her as lesser.
Yet all along? We were the goddamn wastes of Oxygen. We were the ones that didn’t deserve her; it was never the other way around.
All my life, I had always been the fixer—the one who knew how to put shit back together.
Busted toasters, bike chains, every mangled motorcycle my brothers and I wrecked.
Give me something torn apart? I could mend it with my eyes closed.
I took pride in putting together the pieces of the hardest damn puzzle.
But Lucy was different. She wasn’t a broken machine to be tinkered with. I couldn’t run down to Otto’s at midnight and find Omega spare parts.
I halted, legs no longer willing to move. Turning, I leaned against the window frame, staring blankly at the stormy world beyond the glass.
“What fucking good are my hands if they can’t help her?” I whispered hoarsely, frustration clawing at my chest.
A lifetime of working with nuts and bolts and wires and grease meant nothing.
All I could do was stand around while Lucy lay beneath a knife, her life in the hands of people I’d never met before.
Was she at all aware of what was happening to her?
She’d not regained consciousness before they’d rolled her back to surgery.
I hoped she was blissfully ignorant of the pain and the possibility she wouldn’t wake up.
A tiny part of me was mad at her for doing something so stupid.
But how could I say that out loud? Without a second thought, I jumped into risky situations. The thrill of danger was intoxicating… or it used to be. I knew it was hypocritical to judge Lucy for doing the same shit I’d done all my life.
I turned from the transparent glass as the first rain drops pattered against the building.
My gaze roved over my brothers. Fallon was staring intensely at his phone.
Nitro’s blade stuck upright in a seat cushion.
Asher was nowhere to be seen. Xander stood silently, closer than the rest of us to the surgical hall entrance, his arms crossed and his gaze unwavering.
I found myself gravitating toward him. I moved until we stood shoulder-to-shoulder, and the scent of his anxiety washed over me.
“She’s going to be fine,” I said quietly, sounding wholly unconvinced.
If he heard me, Xander said nothing. He just kept staring ahead.
I clenched my fists and inhaled deeply. If Lucy made it, then I’d spend the rest of my damn life fixing the damage DemonX caused. Broken piece by broken piece, I’d show her what she meant to me.