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CHAPTER 6
SAIGE
“We’ve stabilized him for now.” Thankfully, Harley gets right to the point. After waiting for twenty-five minutes to see Aden, none of us has any patience left for small talk.
He keeps talking, but I’m too busy staring at Aden, nearly buried beneath wires, as pale and bleached as the white sheets swaddling him.
“But things aren’t looking good.”
A machine beeps loudly, and it’s clear that it is doing Aden’s breathing for him. If they hadn’t hooked him up to that… I swallow hard. I try not to think of that.
“He’s not going to make it.” Dariel’s voice is the same calm, perfectly in control alpha he appears to be. If you overlooked the rumpled black t-shirt, gray sweats, and bare feet, he’d look right at home sitting at the head of a board meeting.
“We’re planning to operate again. The ventilator is breathing for him, but the sudden drop in blood pressure suggests his heart has started bleeding again.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be the prodigy?” Beside me, Kade bristles with a rage so tangible it raises the fine hairs on my forearms.
I hug myself, ignoring the flash of pain in my belly, and rub my chilled arms, never taking my eyes off Aden’s pale, pale face.
It’s only when Kade takes a small step toward Harley that I rip my eyes from Aden in response to a fight I can’t let happen in this hospital room.
Harley merely nods at the looming threat Kade represents. “I am.” He pulls a piece of paper from his clipboard and holds it up. It’s an X-ray, but it’s almost impossible to understand what it means. Bones are bones and muscles… muscle. If something is wrong with Aden’s insides—as something must be for Harley to show us—I don’t see it. “Your friend had ten lacerations on his heart. One is enough to kill you.”
Harley points them out, but I’m not really listening, or even seeing, because he’s telling us this for one reason and one reason only. He’s preparing us for the worst.
“Aden is going to die on that operating table, isn’t he?” I ask, my voice so unnaturally quiet and tinny to my ears, it’s as if I’m standing at the bottom of a well and whispering up it.
Harley slips the X-ray back into his clipboard, looks me right in the eye, and says, “There’s a high possibility we’ll stop the source of one laceration, but we might find others. I’m hoping that isn’t the case, but—”
“You’re not telling us this for no reason,” I interrupt. “And you said you needed to talk to me as soon as that alarm went off. You’d already made up your mind to tell us this. Hadn’t you?”
“He wants one of us to bite Aden,” Dariel says. “It’s the only way Aden lives through this. That’s what he isn’t saying.”
My eyes bounce between Dariel and Harley. Neither is looking at me.
As they stare at each other, I get the impression there’s some kind of silent communication going on. It’s in their body language mostly. Since Dariel doesn’t look like he’s getting ready to tear into Harley the way he wanted to in the waiting room, I’m not sure what it is they’re silently communicating.
Is this what happens when two shifters meet? They vie for dominance when they share the same space for too long?
After a beat, Harley sighs, raking a hand through his hair. “Your friend has an option few people do.”
“One with a higher probability of surviving than an operation?” I ask in a low voice, conscious we’re in a hospital talking about a type of creature most people would never believe existed.
Harley levels me a stare. “Despite your friend’s dim view of me, there are some things I am egotistical about. I know what I am capable of, and I know what I am not.”
He’s saying he won’t be able to save Aden again.
Nodding as I swallow down the tears clogging my throat, I turn to Dariel, who hasn’t moved from his stiff-backed pose beside Aden’s bed. “Will you?”
I don’t ask if this is what Aden would want. It sounds awful to even think it, but I just want him to live through this. No matter what.
Selfish.
Dariel doesn’t look at me, just shakes his head as he says, “I can’t shift in this hospital.”
And then I remember.
Before this, he was fighting a battle with himself to control his wolf. He seemed to be okay in the attic, but it wasn’t all that long ago that he lunged at me in the Cerberus—twice. If Kade hadn’t stepped between us, Dariel would have painted the floor red with my blood.
