Maybe it was an odd time to be reminded of the different worlds we lived in. But I’d been thinking about that a lot lately... ever since I’d fallen into bed with Heath. It was my own damned fault, of course. I’d asked for it, and he’d given it to me, and now here I was, unable to get that night out of my head, even weeks later.
I’d known we inhabited different worlds. I wasn’t stupid. I just hadn’t knownhowdifferent until all of our truths came pouring out in the grim attic bedroom where they were keeping Jez. Heath was helping Knox and the others rescue omegas, and he hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me.
I shook my head, trying to clear it. No, that wasn’t true. He’d been trying to protect me. They all had been. For some reason, though, it still stung like a betrayal.
A glance at the clock on the wall showed that it was coming up on dawn. I didn’t plan on leaving until mid-morning, so theothers could both get a meaningful amount of sleep. Alphas were tough, but they weren’t superhuman.
I yawned. I was starting to flag a bit, but I much preferred to see the dawn from this direction. I might not be a morning person, but I could handle them if they were at the tail end of a very long night.
A low grunt came from the bed.
I’d been balancing my chair on its back legs—a habit left over from childhood, now that there was no one left to yell at me about it. At the sound, I nearly overbalanced. The chair clunked hard as the front legs came down. I was up and at Knox’s bedside in an instant.
A muscle in his angular jaw was twitching. His left hand was above the covers, hooked up to an I.V. His fingers clenched and unclenched spasmodically.
“Knox?” I asked. “Knox, can you hear me?”
Knox gave a low moan, although I couldn’t tell if he was responding specifically to my voice. Still, it was something.
“Nurse! Hey,nurse!” I shouted, before remembering that there was a call button on the side of the bed. I grabbed it and shoved my thumb hard against the button.
By the time the nurse came in, Knox’s eyes were open, staring blank and bloodshot at the ceiling.
“He’s awake!” I said, getting out of the man’s way as he hurried over.
“That’s good news,” he said, peeling Knox’s eyelids up one at a time and shining a pen light into them. “Mr. Knockley? Matthew? You’re in the hospital. I need to check you over, and the doctor will be here shortly to do some tests. Can you blink once for me?”
I sidled up close enough to see while still hopefully being out of the way. Knox continued to stare unseeingly at the ceiling, and worry tugged at me.
“That’s all right.” The nurse’s voice was reassuring. “You’ve been unconscious for a while, Matthew, so it may take some time to adjust.”
“He’s going to be okay now, right?” I couldn’t help asking.
The nurse smiled a professional smile. “Well, it’s always better to be awake than in a coma. Vitals look good. Let’s get the on-call doctor in here to get you some better answers. Keep talking to him, okay? That can help.”
I swallowed hard as the nurse left me alone with Knox. Pulling my chair up to the side of the ICU bed, I debated calling Heath and Gage. But what would I say? ‘Hey, sorry to wake you, but Knox opened his eyes and twitched a bit... no, he’s not responding to questions and doesn’t seem to know where he is... we’re just waiting for a doctor to show up and figure out if he’s a mental vegetable or not.’
I decided to wait until I had something more concrete to pass on. And in the meantime, I was supposed to be talking to him. Crap.
“Uh... hi, Knox. It’s Tony. You and me don’t know each other all that well, but I told the others I’d stay with you tonight so they could get some sleep. Things are, um, a bit crazy at the moment. The others are okay though. Well, I mean, they’re super worried about you, obviously.”
This was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Especially since I might as well have been talking to a wall. I couldn’t exactly start spouting my mouth about betrayal and murder plots and scent matches. God,thatwas a thought. Did he already know Jez was his scent match? She’d clearly gotten close to him on the night of the attack.
Thoughts about the scent match led unhelpfully to thoughts about Heath, and what a goddamned messthatwhole thing had turned into. By the time a tired-looking doctor came in clutchinga clipboard, I was babbling nonsensically about sports scores and the weather.
The gray-haired woman saved me from my own awkwardness, thankfully for all of us.
“Good morning, Matthew!” she greeted, her chirpy tone at odds with the exhausted bags under her eyes. “Your friend here says you’ve been showing signs of wakefulness, which is great news. Unfortunately, it also means I need to poke and prod you for a bit. Can you blink your eyes for us, please?”
I held my breath, but there was still no response.
“Ah, well—poking and prodding it is!” said the doctor, pulling out a ball point pen.
She proceeded to press the pen-point into various parts of Knox’s body, hard enough that it looked painful. Sometimes it elicited a small twitch; other times there was nothing. Finally, she tugged the sheet free at the end of the bed and exposed his feet. At the first press of the point into the arch of his right foot, he jerked hard and let out a hoarse curse.
“There we go!” the doctor said cheerfully, stepping nimbly away from accidental kicking range. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
“What thehell?” Knox asked, his voice so raspy it was hardly audible.
