Page 56

Breathe. Right. I could do that. In through my nose, out through my mouth. I could feel things poking me and movement happening all around me, but I couldn’t focus enough to know what they were doing. Breathing was what I needed to concentrate on. The needles I felt made me growl, and I could sense things moving inside me. A coldness swept over me, and then I could hear beeping and activity surrounding me.

Where was I? No. That’s not important. Breathing was important. In through my nose, out through my mouth. Yeah. That’s what I should be doing.

Within a minute or so, my vision slowly cleared, and I could see I was in a small room. An IV was hooked up, and Charlotte and Nathaniel were on either side of me. There were others in theroom, too, but they were hooking things up and looking at charts in their hands, not paying me any mind.

“Where am I?”

“The clinic,” Nathaniel told me. “The baby is coming, remember?”

I looked down at my swollen belly and smiled. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“Kylie, you don’t sound okay,” Charlotte said, glancing over at someone in the room.

Was I okay? I wasn’t sure. The pain wasn’t as bad as it was before. There was a button in my right hand, and I was tempted to push it. Nathaniel moved it away and gave me a soft smile.

“You don’t need that yet. You just had a dose.”

“Dose of what?” I asked, still unsure of what was even happening, as my mind felt like it was just swirling around.

It felt like I was floating on a raft in the middle of the water. My body still felt too heavy to move, but there was a calmness sweeping through me that made me not care about what was going on.

“Pain medication. The doctors said it would work since your lycan seems to be dormant right now. We don’t know what happened.”

Mentally, I reached for my lycan, and I could sense she was asleep. That wasn’t good. If I was having the baby, I needed herto be awake. What if things went wrong? I could die if she wasn’t strong enough to heal me.

“No, no meds. It’s making her go to sleep.”

“Shhh…” Charlotte tried to calm me, but how could I relax? “It’s okay. The doctor will help you through this. Nothing will happen.”

That was a lie. She couldn’t promise that. Lycans needed their animal to help them through this. They needed the strength and healing from them just to survive. Lycan pups were not small. I might not have been around many pregnant females, but I had heard of pups being eight pounds or more at birth. With our healing, it didn’t matter.

But if my lycan was dormant, then I wouldn’t survive this.

Those thoughts made my breathing quicken, like I couldn’t catch my breath. My chest felt constricted, and my vision became blurry once again. This wasn’t going to end well. I couldn’t do this without my lycan. When I reached out to her again, it felt like she wasn’t even there. The medications must be suppressing her instead of calming her enough to help me through this.

This wasn’t good. I needed to get off these medications. They weren’t helping me; they were killing me.

“No!No!Get me off this!” I screamed wildly, trying to grab my IV to rip it out. Nathaniel held onto my hands and told me not to do that, but I refused to listen. This wasn’t helping me at all. “It’s making my lycan too tired! She’s asleep! I need to stop this to wake her up!”

Pain erupted inside me as I continued to disconnect myself while Nathaniel tried to bat my hands away. My chest continued to constrict, making it hard to breathe. The black dots in my vision urged me to stop, but I couldn’t. If I stopped trying to remove this pain medication, it would cause more damage than not. I didn’t want to die today. I wanted to live. I wanted to hold my baby and see them grow up.

I will live.

But the more I tried to pull the IV out, the more I felt myself slipping into the darkness I was struggling so hard to avoid. If I let myself fall in there, I wouldn’t get back out. Even thinking that now, I could feel the truth in it. I didn’t want to succumb to that well of darkness.

I wanted to live.

Yet the darkness consumed me, swallowing me whole. My body felt too heavy to keep upright, and the softness of the bed and pillows pressed against my back. The world fell away. The only thing I could see was black. But the same thought repeated in my head.

I will live.

27

Maximus

Before I gathered my things for my car, Eli came into my room with the same expression as before. I was beginning to hate that look because, so far, it had never led to anything good. I had been told that my mate had been going to the clinic because of how sick she had become without her lycan connecting to her properly. If he had worse news than that, I might just kill him.

Don’t kill the messenger.