6 Turner
Tired, I felt the pull to fall back asleep the moment I woke up.
There was a heaviness to them that told me I had been drugged, and that scared me enough to sit up.
A groan left my mouth from the pain, reminding me I had been shot in the shoulder.
The shock of that reminder wasn’t the most unnerving thing right now.
Under the fluorescent lights, I found an angel sitting on the side of my bed.
She looked nearly as perfect as she always did, and a pang settled in my heart from remembering her absence.
“You know, some people believe you have to face the wrongs you did in order to enter heaven, so I’m guessing I have to face you. ”
“Sadly, you’re still alive,” Kit teased like it was the easiest thing to fall from her lips. A small smile brushed over her features, but it disappeared nearly as quickly.
It had been seven years since I saw her, but I’d been stunned this was how we were going to greet each other again. Age had been kind to her beauty, but not to her soul. A hardness and darkness now resided within her instead of the easygoing Omega I once knew.
Reaching my free hand toward her, I was able to take hold of hers that dangled on the top of my bed. At first, she was stupefied by my movement, unprepared for the contact. That bothered me even more because it told me she wasn’t getting affection as an Omega the way she should have been.
“I just came to make sure everything went okay with your surgery. I had my doctor update me the moment you were going to wake up, so I could see for myself that you were okay.” Her admission was everything my heart couldn’t take.
“You have no idea what it means for me to see that you’re okay too.
” Without thinking about it, I pulled her hand toward me for her body to fall sideways against mine on the bed.
Being in a private room, no one was here to see it, so she allowed herself to do so, against instinct for both of us. “I have missed you so much.”
“Then why did you leave me?”
My dark hand stroked over her face as she snuggled into my chest. Her movements were delicate to not hurt the arm that hid in a sling. With me, Kit never had to hide how she truly felt. She gave me a rare glimpse right now, telling me she wanted to rekindle the old compassion we had for each other.
“You know we had to go to our training. That wasn’t something we could just skip out on if we were to become a strong pack. Kit, you must know we would’ve never left had we known someone planned to target you. Seeing you alive… I can’t even put into words how relived I am.”
“Alive,” she scoffed as though that word shouldn’t exist. “I’m alive because I saved myself.”
When she began moving to sit up to get away from me, I coiled my arm around her waist and refused to let her go.
Kit was once everything to us, and part of her blamed us for what happened to her.
Our pack training required us to leave her because the school refused unclaimed Omegas.
She would have made it hard for us to learn anything, so I got it, but I hated it now that we were here.
“For five minutes,” I started before my voice croaked. “Can we both just pretend the last seven years haven’t happened?”
“Turntable,” she began to deny me by using my nickname she gave me. “It’s not that easy, especially because you don’t smell like my future anymore.”
“Our reality isn’t easy, but I just woke up from surgery to find you’re still alive.
Please let me have five minutes of holding you because we both know the second we leave this room, I won’t be able to.
” My mind slowly computed about what happened last night with how we entered the sanctuary that would protect us.
Kit was the first thing we saw, but I’d been wheeled from the room to get to the medical bay. I passed out along the way there.
Right now, her scent was all wrong. She no longer smelled of her sweet lemons like a summer day lemonade.
Her scent bothered my nose, telling me she’d marked by a different Alpha.
Broken, my heart hurt worse than the bullet hole in my shoulder because this was the moment I had to come to terms with. A future I never saw for myself.
Kit couldn’t be mine.
“You’re the only person I’ll ever be truly honest with,” she murmured to me. Nestling her face into the crook of my body, her hand fell over my heated chest that was naked. I loved seeing the pale of her skin against the dark coloring of my own. “I’ve missed you.”
“I don’t dream anymore,” I responded to give her my own honesty. “You were my wildest dream, but I gave you up. I don’t like drifting away at night because I have to live in nightmares instead.”
“Isn’t that the world we’re in now, though? Knotty City has always been a nightmare, and we both inflict a lot of them on other people.” She tried changing the subject, but there were other things I had to know.
“Are you well here? Are you being taken care of?” My voice was hoarse because I feared what she might say. I feared her telling me that she was living in a hell, but I was more terrified for her to tell me she had been happy without me.
“Happiness is an idea. Ideas like that would get us all killed.” It took her a few minutes to answer me, so I wasn’t surprised when she sat up. “Our five minutes of ignorance are up. When I walk out that door, no one can know we shared this moment.”
“I understand,” I replied. It was because I did, and neither of us could have everyone knowing what we had just revealed in this room.
Just like when we were younger, Kit and I didn’t need to say every word to understand each other.
We could sense it in the other from being so close, and I would always understand that she wasn’t truly happy anymore. The years dulled her shine.
There were no words to comprehend how she felt when she found out about Jericho.
The hurt in her stare sat blatant because she felt like she’d been replaced.
She needed to know that there was still room for her in our lives, even if she didn’t believe it at first. “We have a male Omega, but we all have female relations outside of him and our pack. We’ve never brought in another female because she would have no place among us, she would never be you. ”
“I wasn’t enough either,” she whispered through a choke. “I don’t think your pack has ever wanted a female in it. I won’t be delusional enough to believe it’s somehow miraculously changed. I wear another’s mark, and you accepted an Omega that wasn’t me. There’s no undoing what’s happened.”
Kit leaned down before thinking better of it, and gently kissed my lips.
With us being claimed by different packs, I didn’t understand how her contact didn’t bother me.
It was like lightning to the heart, causing it to pound even faster in my chest through the ache that wouldn’t leave.
I didn’t like that her eyes were trying to say goodbye because I had just found her again.
She could see the distraught in my own gaze because I didn’t want it to become real either.
“You’ll always be loved by me, but you’re the only one who could ever know that. Please don’t tell the others. I had to do what I did to save myself, so I belong to someone else. Alpha saved me, so it’s him who gets my loyalty now.”
“But I still have your heart,” I concluded.
“You all do.” Standing, she straightened her dress, leaving me with the one thing I could never tell the others.
It was always me who got put in this type of pickle, but I knew I’d rather know the truth.
Her words made sense that her loyalty was with someone else because we lost it when we gave her up.
Blinking away her tears, she gave me one last watery grin before masking everything completely.
I’d been the only person she trusted with such looks.
Even after all this time, she still trusted me with that.
“Once I’m on the other side of that door, none of this ever happened. I’ve sent the nurse to fetch your pack, but I’ll be gone before they get here.”
“Of course,” I agreed.
“I won’t be this person when you leave this room.”
“This is our secret,” I promised her.
Right before she could leave, she paused and turned her head my way. “And don’t you ever get shot again! Don’t put me through this again…please.”
“You know I can’t promise that.” I hated seeing how undone she was by what happened, but I understood because I would feel the same way if she were in my position.
“I know,” she murmured. “But it was worth a shot.”
Leaving me, it didn’t take long for the others to find me after she sent word for them.
My body wanted more rest from all the drugs pumping through me, but I didn’t want to.
My heart had been zapped by the only woman I ever let into it.
She was alive and well, and we were now being harbored in her Alpha’s home.