by Paige Tyler
Unfortunately, their surprise only lasted a few seconds. McDonald cursed and reached into his suit jacket to pull out a small pistol. The security guards quickly followed his lead, drawing their own weapons and pointing them. Alex charged, letting out a growl that echoed off the walls and drowned out even the sounds of their gunshots. Their aim wasn’t very good, so except for one shot that got him in the chest, the other bullets barely grazed him. It didn’t even slow him down.
Alex waited until he was ten feet from the men before lifting the weapon he’d taken from Pendergraff. He aimed for the security guards first, since they were both armed with .45 caliber weapons that could do more damage than McDonald’s little .32. The only thing he thought about as he put them both down was how these men had almost certainly been part of Nicole Arend’s horrific death, whether by doing nothing to stop it or helping to cover it up.
He’d just turned his weapon on McDonald when he ran out of ammo. McDonald smirked, probably assuming this was over and that he’d won. His expression soon turned to shock as Alex closed the distance separating him from the crooked councilman and smacked the pistol out of his hand to send it flying across the room. In the same fluid move, Alex reached up and grabbed McDonald by the throat, yanking him up on his tiptoes and walking him backward down the hall to the OR doors.
McDonald ripped at Alex’s hand, trying to get free while also lifting himself up at the same time in an attempt to relieve the pressure that was slowly choking him.
“It doesn’t have to go like this,” McDonald gasped. “Bensen is dying of kidney failure, and he’s paying me millions to get him two perfect new ones. I can make us both rich. A million dollars cash in your pocket right now. All you have to do is look the other way.”
Alex wasn’t sure what pissed him off more, the fact that the pig thought he could buy him off or that he was trying to swindle him right off the bat.
He pulled McDonald closer, making sure the man got a good look at his fangs. “I was in the stairwell when you told those idiots who worked for you that that you’re getting five million dollars from the man in surgery. Makes me think you were planning to cheat me on our very first deal. Is that any way to develop a lasting business relationship?”
McDonald’s eyes widened. He struggled twice as hard against Alex’s grip, but whether to get free or renegotiate was anyone’s guess. Regardless, Alex didn’t care. He was done talking.
Alex used the councilman’s head to slam open the doors at the end of the hallway, then tossed his unconscious form to the floor. The impact was extremely loud—and extremely satisfying.
He was surprised at how easy it was to let his fangs and claws retract as he stepped into the first operating room. Maybe going through his first complete shift had improved more than just his sense of smell.
Bensen was on his stomach on one operating table, red lines drawn on his back. Kelsey was on the other, the same marks on her back. Two women in hospitable scrubs were standing beside trays loaded with a bewildering amount of surgical equipment, while a man dressed the same stood at the head of the operating table Kelsey was on. Pettine stood beside her, a sharp scalpel glinting in his hand.
Suddenly, everything clicked into place. The questions had always been why Bensen would get involved in drugs and dogfighting and why McDonald would get into the black market trade for transplant organs. It had been money, pure and simple. While the automotive king was definitely well-off, he sure as hell didn’t have five million lying around in his petty cash drawer. He would have needed to sell everything he owned to raise that kind of money quickly, and he still wouldn’t have gotten a new kidney the traditional way.
As for McDonald, the councilman had the connection to doctors like Pettine and the technical know-how to put together a black-market organ-harvesting ring. Not to mention a desire for even more money than he already had.
Two scumbags like them finding each other was only a matter of time. But none of it mattered now, because this operation was closed for good.
Pettine regarded Alex haughtily over his cloth face mask. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you need to leave immediately. I’m trying to save both of these people’s lives.”
Ignoring the three other people in the room, Alex walked around the table Kelsey was on. He didn’t say a word as he walked up to Pettine and wrapped one hand around the man’s neck, then lifted him off the floor. Pettine plunged the scalpel into Alex’s chest, but Alex immediately yanked it out and tossed it across the room. Then he tightened his grip around Pettine’s throat, watching as the bastard turned an unhealthy shade of purple.
Alex glanced at the man standing petrified near Kelsey’s head. “You can bring her out of this anesthesia on your own, right? Before you answer, make sure you’re completely honest. Because if you hurt that girl in any way, I’m going to damage you beyond all possible repair. Do you understand?”
The guy gulped and nodded.
Satisfied he wouldn’t need Pettine for anything, Alex threw him across the room where he bounced off a wall, joining McDonald on the floor.
“Bring her out now,” Alex ordered. “And if anything happens to her, I’m going to start harvesting organs myself—without anesthesia or a knife.”
The man gestured to one of the women, who hurried over to help him bring Lacey’s sister out from the anesthesia she was under. The other woman stared at Alex, watching with wide eyes as he picked up a pair of forceps from one of the trays and calmly started to dig the bullet out of his chest.
Chapter 19
By the time Lacey reached the fourth floor and found Alex in the operating room, one of the doctors had already given the proper drugs to Kelsey and Bensen to bring them out of the general anesthesia. Lacey was stunned to discover that Bensen was the transplant patient but ignored him as she checked Kelsey’s vitals to make sure she was okay. Her sister would be out for a while yet, but she was going to be fine.
Lacey helped Alex lock up all the doctors and McDonald in a supply closet just off the operating room, where he also found himself some medical scrubs to wear so he wasn’t standing there completely naked as he continued to try digging the bullet out of his chest. He said he wanted it out before the cops showed up, which should be soon.
“Here, let me do that,” Lacey finally said after watching him root around like a man trying to make the buzzer on that electronic game Operation go off as many times as he could.
Standing there with her sister and Bensen only a few feet away, Lacey took the forceps and gently slipped them into the wound, working both by feel and guided by the soft direction Alex made every once in a while. Apparently, he could actually feel the bullet in his chest, so he was able to help her navigate the forceps in the right direction. She was shocked that what she was doing didn’t seem to hurt him. She was even more stunned that the wounds where the bullets had passed straight through him were already closed up and had stopped bleeding. As a veterinarian who’d seen a lot of gunshot wounds, that was pretty hard to accept. But she supposed when it came to Alex, she was going to have to learn to accept a lot of things on faith if nothing else.
They didn’t talk much as she worked, and for a while, that was okay. Even if she was digging in him with a medical instrument, at least she was getting a chance to be close to him, touching his warm skin with her hands. It wasn’t what they’d had before, but it was something.
Finally, though, the weight of all the words that weren’t being said began to pile up, threatening to crush the air out of her lungs.
“Sorry about freaking out over the whole werewolf thing,” she finally said, not sure how else to start the conversation.
He shrugged, taking her hand and gently nudging the forceps in a slightly different direction. Lacey felt the tips of the metal instrument bump into something hard, and she prayed it wasn’t something important.
“It’s okay,” he said. �
��It’s not every day a woman finds out that her boyfriend has claws and fangs. You got a little overwhelmed there at Bensen’s junkyard. It’s understandable.”
She winced, wishing this could be as simple as just saying she was sorry. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t just talking about how I reacted that night. I was kind of apologizing more for how I’ve been behaving since then.”
“O-kay,” he said slowly, clearly not really understanding what she was talking about.
Lacey knew she had to keep going, because there was so much more she needed to tell him, and she didn’t know if she would ever get the chance again. Jayna might think Lacey and Alex were The One for each other—and maybe they were—but there was also a good chance that Alex had only been hanging around after the way she treated him because he felt he had an obligation to help her find Kelsey. Now that he’d done it, there might not be anything keeping him in her life anymore. After the cops showed up and everything was straightened out, she might never see him again.
“This is really hard to say, so I’m just going to start talking and hope this comes out right, okay?” she said, glancing up at him.
He nodded, but then she was forced to wait as the forceps clamped down on something solid. Tightening her grip on the handle, she carefully pulled out the bullet. Not that it looked much like a bullet anymore. It was nothing but a smashed-up, bloody bit of jagged metal. She dropped it on one of the surgery trays, glad the task was done.
She picked up a piece of gauze from the tray and held it against the wound to stop the bleeding even though she didn’t need to. As she did, she gathered her thoughts on how she really felt about him. The answer was simple. Saying it out loud wasn’t.
“When I first saw you…shift…I was sure you were a monster,” she admitted, quickly hurrying on when she saw Alex’s eyes harden. “But after I talked to Wendy that night and thought about it some, I knew you weren’t. Yes, you have claws and fangs, and sometimes you can be scary as hell, but you’re not a monster.”
Alex didn’t say anything, so she kept going. “I should have told you all this before, and that’s the part I’m really sorry about. I’d like to say it was because I was worried about Kelsey, but that would be a cop-out. The real reason I didn’t say anything is because I was scared. As lame as it sounds, I found it easier to let you keep thinking I thought of you as a monster than tell you how I really felt.”
“Why was it easier?” he prompted when the silence had begun to stretch out again. “What were you so scared of, if it wasn’t the fangs and the claws?”
She took a deep breath and jumped in the deep end of the pool. “I thought that if I told you how I really felt, you’d end up bailing on me at some point anyway.”
Alex didn’t say anything for so long that she thought she’d spoken too softly for him to hear, even with his werewolf senses. She prayed she didn’t have to say the words out loud again. Once was enough.
“You mean like the way your father and those other men bailed on your mom?” he finally asked.
She opened her mouth to tell him that wasn’t it, that she wasn’t her mom, but stopped herself. Maybe that was it. As wonderful as everything had been between her and Alex in the beginning of their relationship, there’d been a part of her waiting for the other shoe to drop and for Alex to turn into the asshole her dad had been, the same assholes her mom had gone out with all those other times.
“Yeah, just like that, I guess,” she murmured. “Stupid, huh?”
“It’s not stupid at all,” he said. “I’m a product of the dysfunctional family situation I was raised in. Why should you be any different? Every guy you’ve ever been around has disappointed you, so it’s not shocking that you assumed I would at some point too. When you saw me shift, you figured the big bad you’d been waiting for had just happened, and you bailed on me before I could do the same.”
She looked up at him, trying to figure out how any man could be so rational about something like this. “You’re not mad at me?”
“Why?” he asked with a smile. “For protecting yourself?”
“But I wasn’t protecting myself,” she admitted. “I was being a coward. I’ve known for a while that you’re the best thing that has ever happened to me. I think I knew from the very beginning, but I didn’t want to get hurt, so instead of taking a chance and going for it, I turned and ran the moment things got tough.”
“You’re not running now,” he pointed out. “What changed?”
It was her turn to shrug. “What changed is that I talked to Jayna this morning. She told me about what it means to find The One. A lot of things started making sense after that. Like how terrible I felt after I ran away from you, and how depressed I was when I thought we were over.”
Alex seemed surprised by that confession.
“Don’t be mad at Jayna for telling me about the legend,” she said. “She helped me understand all these feelings that were churning around inside me and figure out what they meant.”
He shook his head. “I’m not mad at her. It’s just that I hadn’t realized it was like that for you.”
“You thought you were the only one feeling these things?”
Even though Jayna insisted that he did, Lacey wasn’t too proud to admit that she wanted to hear him say he felt the same.
“Yeah,” he said. “I fell in love with you the first day I met you in the vet clinic. Then I felt all this pain when you walked away, and to tell the truth, I couldn’t understand how you could do it if we were really meant to be together. I convinced myself that it must be a one-way thing, or that you’d somehow severed the connection on your side.”
Learning that he’d been in love with her all along was painful to hear, and Lacey felt tears well in her eyes as she thought about how stupid she’d been. She was so scared of being hurt that she’d ended up hurting not just herself but Alex as well.
“It definitely wasn’t a one-way thing, and the connection between us was never broken either,” she said. “I’ve been in love with you the whole time too. It just took me a lot longer to see it. I wish I could have been brave enough to tell you sooner.”
He smiled, and it took her a second to realize she’d just admitted to loving him.
She blushed. “Um, I’d hadn’t really planned for those words to slip out quite that way.”
He did a double take. “What, you didn’t mean it?”
“Of course I meant it!” she said. “I just thought that…you know…there should be some kind of big, dramatic moment when you say those words.”
“I agree we didn’t say the words the way you’d hear them in the movies, but we both said them, and for us, that’s what matters,” he said softly. “And as far as needing a big, dramatic moment, you’ve been standing here digging a bullet fragment out of my chest with the medical equivalent of a pair of needle-nose pliers, while your heavily sedated sister lies only a couple of feet away and the people who tried to kill her are locked in a supply closet.” He grinned down at her. “I don’t think you could come up with a bigger moment than this.”
She laughed, feeling like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. They were three simple words, and yet it felt like she could suddenly breathe easier.
“Let’s make sure the bleeding has stopped, so I can kiss you,” she said.
Lacey started to turn her attention back to what she’d been doing, but before she could get started, Alex slipped his finger under her chin and tilted her face up.
“Leave it for right now. It can wait,” he murmured. “Kissing you can’t.”
As his lips came down on hers, Lacey could almost forget where she was and what kind of day this had been. She melted against him, thanking God that everything had worked out okay, despite doing her best to screw it up the whole time.
* * *
Alex had heard the convoy of patrol cars arrive. The squawk and static of th
eir radios was impossible to miss, even from the fourth floor. But the uniformed officers who’d entered the facility must not have liked the look of the three mangled bodies on the first floor. Alex heard a gruff order to pull back and establish a perimeter until SWAT arrived. Alex didn’t blame them. What those cops saw down there wasn’t anything they were trained to deal with. Without having a better idea what they were up against—and not seeing any innocents in immediate danger—it made sense for them to pull back and wait for backup.
A little while later, Gage, Xander, Khaki, and Cooper showed up to find Alex and Lacey standing watch over Kelsey. Lacey’s sister was still out of it, but her quickening heart rate told Alex that she was slowly coming out from the anesthesia.
Xander and Khaki headed straight for the supply closet and the people Alex had locked inside. A few moments later, they led the doctors and nurses out in cuffs while calling for an ambulance for McDonald.
“You got here fast,” Alex said to Gage. “How’d you know where to find me?”
Gage didn’t answer. Instead, he glared at Alex, his teeth grinding together so hard that Alex thought they might shatter.
Cooper chuckled and held out his cell phone. “Dude, you’re all over YouTube.”
Alex did a double take at the blurry video clip of a huge gray wolf running down the middle of the street and slamming into a car.
Shit.
“Over ten thousand downloads in the last thirty minutes.” Cooper’s grin broadened. “First full shift, and you’re trending. It’s freaking epic!”
Something told Alex that freaking epic were not the words his alpha would choose to use to describe the current situation.
Gage shook his head at Alex, then glanced at Lacey, his expression softening. “Is your sister going to be okay?”
Lacey nodded. “Yes. Alex got to her just in time. Another few minutes, and we would have been too late.”