Page 34 of Wishes in the Moonlight (Rocky Mountain Wolves #4)
~Troy~
One moment, I could have sworn I was dying. The next, something hard pushed against my chest and the numbness that followed the silver bullet lodging in my heart disappeared.
Now, everything fucking hurt.
“Troy.” Amanda’s hands cupped my face, sending a pleasant tingle of sparks across my skin that helped to ease my discomfort, at least a little. Even if she hadn’t spoken, I would have known the touch came from her. Nothing had ever felt as good as her hands on me did. “Can you hear me?”
“I hear you.” My tongue felt heavy, the words ill-formed, but she didn’t seem to care. Her fingers trembled against my face as she rested her forehead against mine and I never wanted the moment to end.
But someone else spoke up, a voice I didn’t recognize. “Alpha, we should take him to the hospital and monitor his recovery there.”
“No,” I pushed out, doing my best to ignore the pain in my chest. I still had no idea how I survived but I knew one thing for certain: I wasn’t going anywhere while someone was trying to kill my mate. “No hospital. I’m okay.”
“You are most certainly not okay,” Amanda contradicted, and for a moment, I feared she would actually try to send me away.
“But you can recover here as well as in the hospital. Take him to the guest room at the far east end of the second floor and set a guard outside the door. Do whatever you need to make sure he’s stable and comfortable and I’ll be there shortly. ”
My hand reached blindly for hers. I still hadn’t managed to force my eyes open. Thankfully, she found me instead, her soft hand slipping into the grip of my rougher one. “I’m not leaving you.”
“Yes, you are,” she replied, overruling me again. “You’re no good to me right now anyway.”
The words could have been harsh if spoken in her usual businesslike Alpha tone, but a vulnerability seeped through them instead, robbing them of any sharp edges.
It only hit me then that she must have believed I was dying as much as I did, and her sending me away now wasn’t meant to be a punishment.
It was fuelled by fear.
Her breath skated over my cheek as she leaned closer. “I’ll be there soon, I promise. I just need to deal with a couple of things and then we’ll regroup and come up with a plan. Will you go along with them quietly, please? For me?”
There was no way I could say no to that.
More voices appeared on my other side, and solid hands lifted me off the ground and onto some kind of stretcher.
The bumpy movement as they carried me through the pack house stirred up a wave of nausea to go with each jolt of pain, but the stinging meant healing, so I gritted my teeth and bore it without complaint.
In the room, I finally managed to crack open my eyes while two of the pack’s paramedics moved me onto the queen-sized bed. My shirt had been cut away and blood smeared across my chest above the wound where the bullet must have gone in.
How did it come out, though? No pain on my back suggested I had no exit wound, and the rapidly healing hole in my chest wasn’t big enough for the medical team to have gone in to extract it. But it was gone. I wouldn’t still be drawing breath otherwise.
A doctor followed behind the two paramedics and began checking me over while I resisted the urge to scratch at the itchy, healing wound.
“You’re healing very fast,” he noted, frowning down at the blood pressure monitor in his hand.
“Faster than I would expect in these circumstances. Do you have any ranked-wolf blood?”
“Not that I know of.” I’d never seen this particular doctor before and didn’t feel like getting into my family background with him when I had more pressing questions. “How did you get the bullet out?”
He let out a soft snort. “You’ll have to ask the Alpha about that. I’m not entirely sure what happened.”
What the hell did that mean?
“I’m going to give you a mild sedative,” he continued, pulling a small bottle of pills from his bag. “It will help you sleep and you’ll heal even faster.”
“You just said I’m healing fine,” I protested. “I don’t want to sleep.”
You need to, though, Hunter said inside my head, speaking up for the first time since the gunshot.
Silver affected him even more than me, and I was glad to hear his voice, even if it sounded a little weaker than usual.
You didn’t sleep all night and you just got shot.
How can we be at our best when Amanda needs us if we’re exhausted?
I hated when he was right.
Reluctantly, I took the pills the doctor offered and swallowed them down.
One of the paramedics cleaned my chest and placed a bandage over the already-healing wound, and the other one pasted some electrodes to my chest to monitor my heart while I slept.
I kept my eyes open as long as I could, clinging to consciousness so I didn’t miss anything important, but eventually, I couldn’t fight it anymore and I let sleep take me.
When I woke, a couple of hours had passed, based on the sun’s position in the sky.
I noticed that first, followed quickly by Amanda’s presence in the room.
Her scent infused every breath I took, and my nerves were calm in the way they only were when she was near.
A desk that hadn’t been there when I fell asleep now sat against the far wall, and she sat behind it, facing towards me, her head bent down over an electronic device.
Its light bathed her face in a warm glow, accentuated by the sunlight through the window, making her look utterly angelic.
Even more than usual.
“Hey,” I croaked out, and her head immediately snapped up, her body already halfway out of her chair before her expression softened into a smile.
“Hey.” She strode over to me and picked up a glass of water from the bedside table, offering it to me. “Have a drink. You sound parched.”
I pulled myself up to a sitting position before taking the glass from her. The cool liquid quenched the dryness in my throat in no time, feeling almost as good as anything I’d ever put in my mouth.
Almost.
“How long have I been out?” I asked as she took the empty glass from me.
My hand went to my bare chest and the bandage there.
A bit of blood had soaked through, but the pain beneath it felt like little more than a scratch.
The electrodes were gone; the doctors must have decided they weren’t necessary.
“A couple of hours,” she confirmed. “Are you still tired?”
Her hand returned to my face, just as it had in her office, and once again, the trail of sparks left by her fingertips soothed me better than any amount of rest could.
“No, I’m fine. Where’s Jasper? What happened to the shooter? Did you get him? What about the former Beta? Is he…”
I started to pull the covers back as my questions multiplied, but Amanda grabbed them from me and firmly tucked them back around me. “I’ll tell you everything, but only if you stay in this bed. Deal?”
She held my gaze, her blazing brown eyes daring me to contradict her, but even without her Alpha authority, I would have given in. My ability to say no to this woman was pretty much non-existent
“Deal,” I grumbled, bowing my head in acceptance before I locked eyes with her again. “How are you?”
Amanda threw up her hands in exasperation. “Would you stop worrying about me ? You’re the one who almost died.”
That reminded me I still had questions about that too. “Speaking of that: how am I not dead?”
The way her eyes immediately slid away from mine gave me a warning that I wouldn’t like the answer. Still, I didn’t expect the words that came out of her mouth.
“Kalo saved you. I wished for it.”
For a long moment, I could only stare at her, the implications snapping into place piece by piece in my head.
She had used one of her chances to wish for anything in the world to save my life.
That had to mean she cared enough about me to at least want me alive, and she must have been convinced I would die in order to use her wish that way.
But Kalo had made it very clear that anything she wished for would have to be undone, or things would end badly for her.
She’d bought me a reprieve, but possibly only for a matter of days, the same way she held off the attacking packs to buy us more time.
And at the end of that time, if it came down to a choice between her life and mine, there could only be one decision.
I would never let her put herself in danger to save me, and from the pain and uncertainty written across her beautiful face as she watched me put it all together, I knew that she knew it too.
“I’m going to bring Kalo in here now that you’re awake,” she told me, doing her best to sound in control despite the way her voice wavered. “It’s time to figure out exactly what he wants and why.”