“… Hospital,” she whimpered.
13
Heart Aches
Ipaced the floor of the waiting room, my hands flexing and then curling into fists over and over.
Thank Ravaric for my Hellfire, because we’d made it to the hospital in Elmaris in less than fifteen minutes. Normally, I’d relish the opportunity to open her up and see what she could do, but appreciating the feeling of the engine coming to life and roaring down the highway hadn’t even crossed my mind as Sage had clutched her chest beside me in the passenger seat, gasping for breath.
She was the only thing that mattered.
I knew she’d had heart problems, but I hadn’t gotten the chance to figure out what they were yet exactly. And when Sage told the triage nurse I was just a friend—ouch—they wouldn’t let me in the ICU with her.
I didn’t even know what they were doing or what was going on.
I gripped my horns in frustration, pulling them and gritting my teeth. I could fight off a whole gang of alpha werewolf bikers, but what could I do about her heart?
I was worse than useless right now.
What would I do if she didn’t make it?
I didn’t even care about the deal or my soul. Just the thought of her no longer being in this world was making me crazy.
“Are you the friend who came in with Sage Hexwood?”
I looked up to see a doctor who had just entered the waiting room, pen and clipboard in hand.
I rushed over, my arms crossed against my chest. “What is it? Is she okay? Can I see her?”
“Whoa, one question at a time, there,” the old alpha elf chuckled.
I was going to kill him.
“First of all, I’m Dorian Fenwick. I’m a cardiologist here.”
Okay, this guy. I knew this guy. Well, knewofthis guy. He was the doctor who’d worked with her before.
“She’s lucky you two were close by and could get here so quickly.”
I couldn’t even blink. I just stared at him, willing him with every ounce of my being to get to the point.
“We’ve been monitoring her closely for the past few hours, and it looks like a case of stress-induced cardiomyopathy. We also call it ‘broken heart syndrome.’ I understand there was some kind of altercation before she experienced her symptoms?”
I nodded, wondering if she’d told him about all the other stress she’d been experiencing recently. Between her years of abuse with the Premier, her escape, and my capture of her, the werewolf fight was probably pretty tame by comparison. Maybe it had just been the tipping point.
“Even for average patients, this would be pretty serious, but given her transplant history, we’ll need to keep her underobservation here for longer. We’ll run some blood tests to check markers, and get her on a round of beta-blockers—”
“But she’s an omega?”
He smiled, giving me a look like I was an idiot. “Not that kind of beta. As I was saying, she’ll probably need to go back on anti-rejection drugs just to be safe, and…”
My mind was fried, and I was taking things in in bits and pieces. So it took a couple moments to register the word “transplant.”
“Wait, back up, doc. Transplant history?”
He stopped, confused by my question. “Yes, her heart transplant. You didn’t know?”
A heart transplant.
