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 packdo? 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.
