Tristan
The first thing I registered was her face.
Athena’s face hovering above mine with tears streaming down her cheeks and those green eyes I’d memorized shining with relief and something else, something that made my chest tight.
The second thing I registered was that I felt good.
Too good.
My body hummed with energy, with strength, with a vitality that shouldn’t have been there and I blinked trying to understand why everything felt so right when the last thing I remembered was pain and darkness and the metallic taste of blood in my mouth.
The bike race.
The memory hit me in fragments, flying down the mountain trail at speeds that would have made Athena yell at me, taking a corner too fast, the fron wheel catching on something, the world spinning as I went over the handlebars.
Impact.
Pain exploding through my ribs and my head and my arm.
Darkness.
I’d known even as I was falling that I was hurt bad, known that even with my alpha healing this was going to take time, weeks probably to fully recover from the damage I could feel spreading through my body.
But now there was no pain.
No ache in my ribs where I knew at least three had been broken, no throbbing in my head where I’d felt my skull crack against rock, no burning in my arm where bone had snapped.
Nothing.
Just this warmth flowing through me like liquid sunlight and I looked up at Athena’s tear–streaked face and understood.
The third thing I registered was rage.
It started as a small spark in my gut but it grew fast, spreading through every inch of me and burning away the warmth she’d left behind until all 1 could feel was fury.
“What were you doing?” I asked even though a part of me knew the answer, my voice coming out tougher than I intended as
tried to sit up.
A twinge in my ribs made me pause but it was nothing, barely a whisper of discomfort when it should have been agony, when I should have been laid up for weeks while my body knit itself back together.
I should have been unconscious for days with the injuries I’d sustained, should have been in a hospital bed hooked up to machines while my alpha
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Chapter 338
healing worked slowly to repair the damage.
But I wasn’t.
I was awake and aware and almost completely healed and there was only one explanation for that.
“You let her heal me,” I asked Orion, but my eyes was staring at Athena’s face again.
I watched her expression shift from relief to understanding to something that looked like defiance and I had to clench my jaw to keep from saying all the things building up inside me, all the angry terrified words that wanted to pour out.
She took a step back from the bed, her hand going automatically to her stomach in that protective gesture she’d developed since finding out about the
twins.
Her stomach.
Our babies.
The babies she’d just risked by using powers we didn’t understand yet, powers we had no idea how they worked or what they cost.
Powers she’d channeled through her pregnant body to save me when I was supposed to be the one protecting her.
She’d only used them to save once. And that was because it was necessary
My hands fisted in the hospital sheets.
“Tristan,” she started but I shook my head once, sharp and final.
Not now, not when I was this angry, not when I could barely think past the terror of what could have happened, what still might happen because we had no idea what using her healing while pregnant meant for her or for our children.
Dr. Ben came back again and moved closer with his clipboard and monitoring equipment, his expression professionally neutral in that way doctors had when they were trying very hard not to get involved in family drama.
“Let me check your vitals,” he said, reaching for the blood pressure cuff. “See how the healing took.”
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Sara Lili is a daring romance writer who turns icy landscapes into scenes of fiery passion. She loves crafting hot love stories while embracing the chill of Iceland’s breathtaking cold.
