Fated: The Alpha's Unwanted Luna-Chapter 17: Stay with me

Pain.

Not the sharp localized kind she had learned to endure, this was total and consuming, burning through her from the inside out with no regard for the fact that she had already surrendered. She had expected death to bring numbness. Silence. The absence of everything.

Instead there was only fire.

At some point it won. She stopped fighting and went under.

---

When she surfaced again there were voices.

Disoriented, overlapping, coming from every direction at once. She couldn’t separate them into words and with them came panic, sudden and violent, clamping down on her chest like a fist.

She tried to open her eyes. Nothing.

She tried to move her fingers. Nothing.

Her arms. Her legs. Her head. All of it foreign and unresponsive, and the panic surged higher because she knew this feeling. She had felt it before, lying on a cold stone floor with chains around her wrists while someone stood over her deciding how much more she could take.

Not again. She couldn’t go back there. She couldn’t—

"Doctor! She’s coming around!"

"What is it?"

"Her heart rate has escalated dramatically."

"Alright, let’s bring it down. Miss." The doctor’s voice was firm but not unkind, cutting through the noise with practiced authority. "Calm down. Everything is alright. There is nothing to worry about."

She didn’t believe him. Powerful people always said things like that right before they hurt you.

"Doctor, the Alpha is here."

Alpha.

The word detonated inside her chest. Alpha meant power. Power meant pain. Was it Evan? Had he come to finish what he started, to break what was left of her, to look down at what she had become and feel satisfied that she had finally been reduced to this?

No.

Don’t let him in. Don’t let him near me. Please, someone, please—

"Keep the Alpha outside until we have stabilized her," the doctor said sharply, his voice shifting from calm to urgent. "She is panicking and she needs to stay calm or everything we have done will be for nothing."

Her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her throat, in her temples, behind her useless swollen eyes. She couldn’t slow it down. She didn’t know how to slow it down when every instinct she possessed was screaming at her to run from a body that wouldn’t move.

"What is the matter?"

The new voice came from the doorway. Even from that distance, even filtered through the fog of her panic and the sedatives moving through her blood, it carried something that made the air in the room shift. An authority that wasn’t loud or aggressive, it simply was, the way gravity simply was.

She knew that voice.

She tensed so hard her muscles screamed in protest.

"Alpha, please give us a few minutes—"

"I can’t." A pause. When he spoke again it was quieter, more controlled, but something underneath it was fraying at the edges. "She needs to relax. I don’t like her in that state."

Footsteps. Crossing the room. Coming closer to her.

Everything inside her braced for impact.

But instead of pain, instead of the blow she had learned to anticipate whenever someone powerful came near her, he bent down, and he spoke. Quietly. So quietly that it was meant only for her.

"You are going to be fine." His breath was warm against the side of her face, his voice stripped of the authority it carried in the room and replaced with something she didn’t have a word for, something she hadn’t heard directed at her in so long she almost didn’t recognize it. "I know you are frightened. But you don’t have to be anymore. You need to calm down and let the sedative work so they can help you."

Nobody had spoken to her like that in years.

Viola forced her eyelids open a fraction, just a fraction, just enough. A bright fluorescent light burned directly behind his head, turning his features into shadow, his outline blurred and indistinct through her damaged vision. She couldn’t see his face. She could only see the shape of him, close and still, and hear his voice, and feel the warmth of his presence cutting through the cold panic inside her.

She didn’t trust him. She had no wolf to tell her whether he was safe, no instinct guiding her toward or away from him, only her own fractured mind, and her own mind was currently running on nothing but fear and pain and the desperate need for someone to please just stay.

She reached for his hand. Or tried to. Her arm barely twitched.

He must have seen it, or sensed it, because he placed his hand lightly on her shoulder, careful, like she was something that could shatter, like her comfort mattered more than his own ease.

The panic didn’t vanish. But it loosened, just slightly, just enough for her to breathe.

Or perhaps that was the sedative. She couldn’t tell. She didn’t particularly care which it was.

She let herself be pulled under again, and for the first time since this had all begun, the dark felt less like drowning and more like rest.

"She’s drifting off. You can leave now. Her surgery will be in two hours."

"I’m staying until then."

Those were the last words she heard.

---

The next time she surfaced the room was quieter.

Someone was nearby. She felt the presence before she registered anything else, and then something cold touched her burning skin and the relief was so immediate she nearly wept. It disappeared and the loss of it hit her sharper than it should have. Then it returned at her lips, and cool drops slipped into her mouth and down her raw parched throat.

Water.

More. She needed more. She couldn’t speak or ask, she could only lie there wanting, and the person sensed it without being told and brought the water back, slow and careful.

Then she choked.

Her chest heaved suddenly, her body convulsing with coughs that sent pain detonating through every healing injury. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t stop. The panic came rushing back—

A hand slid beneath her head and lifted it.

Another pressed against her chest, rubbing slow firm circles, a voice close to her ear saying something low and steady, words she couldn’t fully process, only the tone of them, the kind of voice that existed specifically to talk frightened things back from the edge.

Don’t go, she thought with everything she had. Stay. Just stay.

The coughing slowed. Her breathing evened out. The hand eased her carefully back down and she felt the mattress take her weight again.

She went under once more.

---

When she surfaced again he was there.

He had stayed.

The room was quieter now, her mind fractionally clearer than before. She couldn’t see them but she could hear that someone else had joined him.

"Are you going to keep her?" the unfamiliar voice asked.

Silence.

The kind of silence that has weight to it, that means something is being considered and decided. Viola lay still and breathed and waited.

"No." His voice was different now. The warmth she had clung to in her worst moments had been packed away somewhere she couldn’t reach. What remained was flat and certain and final. "Once she gets better, I am sending her away. She doesn’t belong here."

The words hit her somewhere that had nothing to do with her physical injuries.

She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Could only lie there and absorb the blow of it as the tears she couldn’t shed burned silently behind her swollen eyes.

He had stayed through her surgery. He had given her water and talked her down from the edge of panic. And none of it had meant what she had in her weakest moments almost allowed herself to believe it might.

"You should have let me die." The words existed only inside her head, pressing against the backs of her teeth with nowhere to go. "You were supposed to be my mate. I hate you. I hate you."

A small broken moan escaped her lips instead. A single tear rolled from the corner of her closed eye.

The person standing over her went very still.

She felt the shift. The pause. Then the quiet sound of a fist clenching, and his footsteps as he turned and walked away.

Leaving her alone with the silence and the white and the word echoing inside her chest.

Away.

He was sending her away.