CHAPTER NINE
Kenyon woke with a start, knowing there was someone in the room with them, sensing the danger all around even before he opened his eyes. His head was foggy like he’d just woken from a week’s slumber, but he knew that was impossible. He hadn’t slept in two days. The chair in the clinic was as comfortable as possible, but there was no way he was going to sleep soundly until Sage woke up. From the looks of the concussion, it could take days or weeks. That, combined with the infection made it difficult to say exactly what was taking place inside her body, or how long it would take for her to come back to him.
He knew he shouldn’t have allowed her to go through with the rescue mission. Everything inside him had screamed it was wrong for her to go along with them, but she’d just smiled and told him everything would be okay. She was born into this, to rescue those in need, to place herself in danger for the greater good. But she was his mate, and he loved her, had confessed it to her and heard her confession. And now, he wasn’t sure how he could live with what he had allowed to happen.
A movement across the room caught his attention. All the lights had been turned down for the night and there was only a small glow from the machines monitoring her heart and brain waves. Still, he knew someone else was there with them.
“What do you want?” It wasn’t one of the nurses. This person smelled different, like some blend of ice and pine trees, a foreign scent moving on the air. He tried to sit up and it hit him. “Himani,” he grumbled out his mother’s name as if it were a curse. What the hell was she doing here after all this time? She hadn’t moved to help her first born, but now she was here and nothing good could come of her presence.
“My son. It’s so good to see you. Don’t sit up on my account.” She switched on the lamp near Sage’s bed, and seeing her standing next to the woman he loved was almost his undoing.
He struggled against the fog in his head, attempting to sit up, but his legs refused to work. A sharp pain ran down from the base of his skull all the way to his waist, shooting down his back. “Fuck. What did you do to me?”
She grinned. “Only what needed to be done. Your brother is a wild card. He is not allowed to return, so you are the next in line. You will be the new leader of the Maddux clan. But there’s only one complication.”
His heart lodged into his throat when she glanced at Sage. He would kill the bitch before he let her harm his mate. “If you fucking touch her—”
“You can’t stop me, dear. That pounding in your head? Tranquilizers. By the time you are able to move, it will be too late. I am renouncing your bond to this cur and you will be mated with one of our kind, one from the Lenox tribe, a woman of my choosing and my blood. And you will do what your brother was too much of a coward to do.”
The Lenox tribe was the whole reason Nik had been caught and placed behind bars. He had refused his mother’s order to marry a distant cousin and renew the bond with the Lenox tribe, making the Canadians’ presence in Louisiana even more palpable than it already was. The last thing Nik had wanted was to bring in another slew of shifters who didn’t know the landscape or the traditions of Louisiana. It had been part of his mother’s plan to control both clans through blood, tradition and legality. Nik had balked at the plan, knowing so much power for someone like Himani would only lead to danger. And the more tigers that roamed the swamps in Louisiana, the more likely they were to get caught.
The Canadians were not known for their subtlety, something their mother carried from her time growing up in Saskatchewan. If the two tribes were joined, Nik swore it would be under his order and by his conditions, not by those imposed thanks to his mother’s need for power. Now Himani was telling him there was another way, another plan in her long line of schemes, and he and Sage were part of it.
His head spun with her words, with the full implication of what she was telling him. It was her intention to break the bond between Sage and himself, to render the tradition null and void. That was when it hit him...what was happening, why she was holding a knife in her hand. If she hurt Sage…
“It’s too late for whatever you plan to say. Your head is spinning so much by now that you can’t make rhyme or reason of anything anyway. Rest assured, I am not going to kill your precious pup. I am just going to break the bond you two share. You are no longer obligated to her.”
When the knife came into contact with Sage’s wrist, Kenyon wanted to scream, wanted to bolt from the chair and tackle his mother, drive the knife into her chest. His head was spinning and his legs were still refusing to work. He felt his fingers elongate, then begin to shrink again, the bones changing their structure. He felt the fur as it pushed through his skin, coating his body. Then he felt emptiness and darkness and he knew he had lost her. Knew she was gone.
* * * * *
The world was slow to reappear before her eyes, and when it did, it was through the flutter of eyelashes at first. She felt like she had slept for days, but she wasn’t refreshed. Instead, she was so groggy that when her eyes did finally open, it took a few seconds for the world around her to come into view. When everything was still blurry, she tried to sit up, but the pain in her shoulder halted any progress.
Shit. What happened?
She tried to move her left arm, to get a sense of the source of the pain, but even the slightest movement set off a wave of nausea and a throbbing like she’d never felt before.
Her eyes opened. The stark, white walls greeted her, and she was afraid for a second that she had died and gone to some sterilized version of hell. She smelled the ammonia of the afterlife, and the bile rose in her throat again at the unnaturally clean scent. Why did people seem to think that such a strong chemical smell equaled clean and germ free?
“Easy, there.” Strong hands were on her, steadying her, and Kenyon’s scent surrounded her.
“Where am I?” Her voice was weak, and she realized she was thirsty and her throat was dry.
“Hospital. Well, medical clinic to be exact. Don’t try to sit up. If you want to sit, I can raise the bed for you.” The grave tone of his voice worried her. She had never heard him sound so serious, his voice so hollow. “You’re going to be fine, but you’ve got an infection, so that’s why you’re hooked up.”
Kenyon pointed to the IV line running into her arm, something she hadn’t even noticed until now. She pressed her lips together tightly. “Can I have some water?” she finally asked.
“You scared the hell out of me, you know?” He reached for a pitcher and poured a glass of water, then handed it to her.
“Scared the hell out of myself. What happened?” She drank the cool liquid, feeling it all the way down to her toes.
“You’ve got a pretty good gash in your shoulder, which is why it’s stabilized. No broken bones, but every time you move, it reopens the wound. We’ve stitched you up three times.”
What kind of wound would keep reopening like that? It took a few seconds for her to put everything together. The tigers. That feeling of something standing on her chest. The heat that coursed through her body and erupted into mind numbing pain. She had been bitten. Knowing the way tigers killed their prey, it was probably aiming for her throat but satisfied itself with her shoulder. “What happened?” She emptied the water and held out the glass, indicating another one.
As Kenyon poured the second glass, she noticed how drawn his face looked, how his eyes were dark and heavy, how new lines marred his skin. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to brush away the errant strands of hair which never seemed to stay pulled back, to erase the misery he so clearly wore. His left wrist was covered with gauze and medical tape and it took a second to register that her left wrist was also covered. Their tattoos. The mark they had been given in their sixteenth year. The thing that proclaimed their bond. What had happened to the tattoos?
“In all the chaos, Nik became confused and scratched you.”
“Doesn’t feel like a scratch.” She drained the second glass of water and wished she hadn’t. Her stomach twisted into a knot. “And what about my wrist? What about your wrist? What happened out there?”
“You have to take it easy. You’ve been sedated. The medication will sometimes do that to you.”
She waved off his attempts to coddle her. “Sedated? For how long?”
“Three days. Time enough to let your shoulder rest and get the antibiotics into you. You still need at least two more days on heavy meds before you can be switched to an oral.” His words were so clinical, his mouth so tight as he spoke, she knew there was more going on than what he’d told her. Three days? Had he been here the whole time?
“Yes,” he answered as if he had heard her thoughts. “I’ve been here the whole time.”
“Why?”
“If you have to ask that, then I obviously made the wrong decision.” This was not the same man who had confessed his love to her—how many nights ago? This man was a volatile ball of nerves, the ticking of his jaw, the stark tone of his voice, revealing so much while telling her absolutely nothing.
“Thank you for staying with me.”
“I needed to be here when you woke up.” He sank down into the chair next to her, then leaned in with his elbows on his knees, his feet tapping nervously against the linoleum floor, the sound echoing.
“If you need to be somewhere else—”
“There’s nowhere else. Nothing else.”
“So what are you avoiding telling me?”
“Which part? That you almost died? That I put the person I love the most in the biggest danger or that my brother tried to kill you?”
There was more, something unspoken lingering there between them, but her head was pounding too much for her to focus. “There’s more.” Her eyes darted back to her left wrist, to the gauze that seemed to be mocking her. “Did he cut my wrist too?”
“No.”
“Then why am I bandaged?”
“Because you are being set free. It’s what you wanted, right?”
She swallowed hard. He’d had her tattoo removed? Had removed his as well? A wave of nausea rolled over her and panic seized her chest. A sob built up inside her, but she was damned if she would let it escape. It was over. The thing that she wanted the most. Then why did she feel as if her soul had been ripped from her body?
“So you are letting me go.” She kept her words as steady as her trembling lips would allow.
“We had a deal, remember?”
“So your brother is okay?”
“No. He’s gone. Back into the swamps. Are you in pain?” He shoved off the chair and moved to the dresser, which was lined with pill bottles.
Yes. She grimaced. Her entire body was starting to pulse with pain, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted to numb it just yet. And she sure as hell didn’t want to be sedated again. What she wanted to do was get the fuck out of this bed and figure out what exactly had changed between her and Kenyon, why he would take such drastic measures to be rid of her. He had confessed his love to her, and she had foolishly done the same. And now this. “How soon can I leave?”
His jaw ticked as he spoke. “Two more days of IV drugs.”
“Great,” she groaned. She was not used to being still, and two days—two conscious days—in the hospital would not sit well with her. “I assume my family knows I’m here?”
“Yes. Your parents were called as soon as you were brought in, but due to the nature of…everything, it was decided it would be best if they didn’t come.”
That didn’t sound like River and Nollie. If their only child were in the hospital, they would be by her bedside, blaming themselves and using the opportunity to make her feel guilty for moving fifty miles away from them. The horror. “Who decided they shouldn’t come?”
“It’s a delicate situation.” He sat back down and resumed the tapping of his feet.
“I assumed that, but I know my parents. And it doesn’t seem like you’re willing to tell me exactly what the situation is.” The way he was sitting there, his feet tapping a hole in the floor, she knew there was so much more going on.
“I’m not the doctor.”
“Convenient answer.”
“Do you want a pain pill?” Nice redirect.
“Will it knock me out?”
“Do you want it to?”
“No.” The last thing she needed was more unconscious time. Something told her there was a lot more going on than a gash in her body, and the sooner she found out what it was, the sooner she could deal with it.
“Then it won’t. I can give you something that will dull the pain but keep you conscious.”
“Sounds like a plan.” She settled against the pillows. Sitting all the way up was impossible, but lying on the flat of her back didn’t make her feel claustrophobic. And her left side was hurting like a mother. Swallowing the pill, she focused her attention back to Kenyon.
“I’ll have everything ready for you to leave in two days. I just wanted to be here when you woke up.”
His words combined with her pain to make her head spin. So he wanted her to leave now? Would get everything ready for her? Nausea washed over her again and the new pain in her chest had nothing to do with her wound and everything to do with the man who was silently staring at her, his face as unreadable as stone.
CHAPTER TEN
She hadn’t intended to sleep, but the pill Kenyon had given her had relaxed her more than she’d wanted. Either that or she was still extremely exhausted from having her body ripped open. At any rate, when her eyes opened again due to shuffling around in her room, the light coming in through the window had faded to twilight. She was still in a semi-sitting position and her cheek was wet from drooling on it. What a fine picture she must be!
She grumbled and tried to move, again stopped by the pain in her shoulder and chest, and worse, the pain in her wrist. It was a constant, throbbing reminder of what he had done, of the choice he had taken away from her.
“Don’t get up on my account.” Kenyon’s baritone voice seemed to echo in the stark room. He was standing by the window, his back to her, but he must have sensed her waking and knew she was trying to move.
“Fuck, this hurts.” She tried to get comfortable, to settle into her bed, but it was no use.
“Do you need another pill? Your last one was six hours ago.” He turned to face her, and she could immediately see the worry etched on his face.
“Six hours? Fuck me. I thought you said it wouldn’t knock me out.” Damn liar. It would be like him to drug her so she couldn’t ask more questions, especially considering what he had done to rip them apart.
“It didn’t. Your body is healing itself. You have one hell of a wound.”
“Your brother’s handiwork.”
He nodded slowly. “Yes. My brother.”
“And yours.” She held up her bandaged wrist. “So how did you do it? With a laser or what?” She fumbled with the bed’s controls and managed to sit up even straighter, but now her pillows were all out of whack. She grumbled.
“Let me help you with that.” She didn’t want him near her, but when he leaned over to adjust her pillows, she was glad for the proximity. Her parents weren’t here. None of her family was here, but her determined mate was. Her former mate. He had seen to that.
“Well?”
“A knife. Sliced through the design. Mine too.” He held up his wrist, as if she hadn’t already noticed the bandage.
“Well, thanks for not letting me die.”
“I would never let that happen. I shouldn’t have let this happen.” His voice was hollow, and she hated hearing it like that. Kenyon’s voice was usually filled with gunpowder and lead as far as she was concerned. They were like a raging river and the rocks it crashed against.
“I was there voluntarily. Because I wanted to be. It was a choice. Unlike this.” She indicated her wrist.
He leaned forward and placed his head in his hand, squeezing the bridge of his nose. “None of this was supposed to happen. Things have become immensely more complicated, and I know you don’t want to hear this, but it would be safer for you if you leave as soon as you are well. I promise I won’t bother you any longer. I just needed to see you. Needed to be sure you were okay.”
“I’m just fine,” she lied, reaching for him, and he took her hand in his. Electricity flowed through them, a stupid cliché, but it was true. Every time she touched him, she felt it. “Tell me why you are hell bent on destroying me.”
He let go of her hand and stood, stalking back to the window, keeping his back to her. She wanted nothing more than to be able to go to him, to put her arms around him, to press her chest to his back. She wanted to run her hands along the black lines of his body, to peel away whatever pain he was wearing.
“Woods is dead. He died en route to the hospital. And Nik…” His voice trailed off.
Her stomach twisted into a knot.
Dead.
No. No one was supposed to die during this excursion, especially not a member of Kenyon’s clan. “Oh my God, Kenyon. I am so sorry.” She meant it. Her heart felt as if it was on fire, tears stinging the backs of her eyes.
He turned to look at her, his eyes glittering with unshed tears, the kind of tears a man like Kenyon never shed, the kind that told her he’d been trying to be strong for too damned long. “I was so scared I was going to lose you. Do you know what that would have done to me? You were lying there, bleeding. I had no idea how bad the wound was. I couldn’t go after him. I had to let him go.” His eyes were wide, that fear still a tangible thing standing between them. He was afraid for her. Because of her. “And then, as soon as he made it to the door of the cage, there was gunfire. It seemed to be all around them. Jonas was there. He was driving the van. He saw what was happening, pulled it around. It was a fucking nightmare.”
Her fault. The words rang in her ears. His brother was missing because of her. Had she not been there, he could have turned and followed Nik into the woods, but she was there, and she had gotten hurt. “I’m sorry.” It was all she could manage. “What about the kid? What happened?”
“I don’t know. All I know is we were ambushed. The guys claimed to be cops, but when my cousins attacked, they said the weapons didn’t look like standard issue. More like a local vigilante group or something. Probably the owner.”
“What about the others? The ones who shot? Did they…did your cousins kill them?”
“No. Just knocked them out. More likely scared the hell out of them. They weren’t expecting a tiger attack.”
“We will find him.”
He let out a laugh, a frustrated, not genuine laugh. “No.
We
will not. I will find him. Lorenzo and Jonas have been tracking him. We will find him. His family. Not you. You no longer have an obligation to us.”
For the first time ever, she wanted to scream at him that she was his family too. She was bonded to the Maddux family as much as to her own, and she had tracking skills they could use. And whether her tattoo was intact or not, she was still his. Every breath she took was because she belonged to him. But she didn’t say anything. She just sat there, numb.