“He’s alive!” I scream, my pain forgotten as I run to his side. “Sutton, baby. I’m here. It’s gonna be okay.” I tell him again and again that he’s going to be okay as I kiss his sweat and blood-streaked face.
Like a spell is broken, Razyr and Angie pull away from each other. He utters a promise, “We will finish this later.”
Razyr then joins me at Sutton’s bedside. “Layla, please, I need to examine him.”
Inspecting Sutton’s wounds, Razyr mutters, “Impossible.”
“What is it? What’s going on?” I ask, worried he’s going to tell me I’m going to lose him again.
“Not only did he survive the alpha venom. His wounds are healing. Slowly, but definitely healing.”
“How can this be?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to need to do more tests and—” Razyr sniffs the air, his nostrils flaring with each deep inhale. His brow furrows. “You are not in heat anymore.”
Now that he mentions it, I realize the agonizing pain is gone. Like it was never there in the first place.
“No way,” Angie says, standing behind me, wrapped in the white sheet from the hospital bed she’d been bent over just moments before.
A hard banging on the locked door distracts all of us from the impossible, wild scene we’ve found ourselves in. I don’t even care anymore how insane things got. I don’t care about anything except that my husband is alive.
My Sutton is alive!
“I do not think we should let him in,” Razyr says. “I do not think we should let anyone in until we know exactly what is going on here.”
“Except Strykr,” Willow says with as much authority as Razyr.
“Of course,” he concedes.
“He’s in pain,” I say, watching the sweat drip and soak Sutton’s coal black hair and the pillow and sheets beneath him. “A lot of pain, and he’s still bleeding. A lot.”
“I have a theory about that, but I cannot test it with you here,” Razyr tells me.
“What? Why not? You can’t just let him suffer. It’s cruel. I—”
Raised voices flood the room when the door flies open.
I turn to see the end of a fight between Strykr and Zayd as Strykr barks a final order for Zayd to leave, shutting the door between them.
“I’m sorry, Strykr. This mess… It’s all my fault.” Tears pour down my cheeks.
“Nonsense, Layla,” Willow says. “This is merely the reality of our world. And it’s nothing new to them.”
“No, Willow. This is all very new to us,” Razyr says, waving for Strykr to join us, gathered around Sutton’s bed. “I have not had a chance to analyze his blood sample yet, but Sutton is not a beta. Nor an alpha. I believe he is something new.”
“Is this really the time to talk about this? My husband’s in an incredible amount of pain. Can’t you help him first?”
“Not with you here,” Razyr reiterates.
“I can’t leave him. I won’t abandon him. Please, just help him.”
“What happened, Razyr?” Strykr asks, diffusing our argument.
“The alpha’s bite did not kill him. It only incapacitated him for a short while. While he was incapacitated, Layla went into heat. I think, when he is conscious, her heat is suppressed. The issue with his pain is, our venom has the ability to heal him. But—”
“But if you bite him, I’ll go into heat again and cause utter chaos,” I finish for him.
“And you’ll need your heat tended to,” Willow adds.
