Alpha Principal

by Preston Walker

  Footsteps thundered their way closer by the second, pushing down the stairs to where the two of them crouched.

  Still Simon just looked at Jeremy, holding his disbelieving gaze.

  “Your story will make the jury feel sorry for you. They’ll lighten your punishment. If you go to the media with it, even better. People will sympathize with you. You’ll still go to jail, but you’ll have a roof over your head, three meals a day, opportunities for work and education. You can enter a program, try to get your GED again. There are certain employers who even work with prisons to give people like you a better chance at life!”

  He had to shout that last part, because now the police were upon them. Simon found himself surrounded, pulled in several different directions at once by a dozen hands before the police got themselves sorted out and worked together. They lifted him away from Jeremy, started to carry him up the stairs; on the ground below, Jeremy had been forced to the ground, rolled roughly onto his stomach so his hands could be cuffed together behind his back.

  Simon worried for the other man’s injuries, but mostly he hoped that the man would remember what he had said. A wolf never stopped fighting. Maybe it was time for humans to do the same.

  Once the officers reached the top of the stairs, they dragged him over towards an ambulance, where a pair of paramedics and a stretcher already awaited him. The medics worked quickly and professionally, strapping him into the stretcher while asking him simple questions. He answered all of them correctly, which seemed to alleviate some of their worry. Nevertheless, he was soon bouncing all around in the back of the ambulance, staring up at the ceiling while the medics sliced up his clothes to see what sort of injuries he had. They kept asking him what parts of him hurt, though he was really just too numb to be able to answer properly. Numb from the icy water, and numb from his empty, aching heart.

  No one would tell him anything about Nathan. They acted as if they didn’t even hear his questions, as if he wasn’t saying anything at all unless he was answering one of their questions.

  It felt like he was still in the river, drifting, being pulled down into the dark.

  Eventually, the lurching ambulance jerked to a halt. The medics around him burst into a flurry of activity, getting him off the vehicle and onto solid ground. They pushed him through a seemingly-endless, brightly-lit corridor where other, random faces occasionally glanced down at him.

  “It’s like a horror movie,” Simon murmured aloud.

  “The horror is over,” one of the paramedics responded softly, soothingly.

  Until I know Nathan is okay, it won’t ever be over.

  The world spun as his stretcher was turned, taken inside an examination room where a table awaited just for him. Nurses were already in the room, waiting to assist.

  Once Simon was on the table, the paramedics left and the nurses took over where they had left off. He answered the same sort of questions, and then there was nothing for him to do but suffer through the examination. They checked practically every single part of him, moving his limbs this way and that, asking if this touch hurt, or could he feel that, and how bad was the pain on a scale of 1-10?

  His heart was a 10, but the rest of his body was somewhere around a 6.5. He was hurting pretty good, but he wouldn’t be winning any awards for Most Pain Ever Felt At One Time or anything like that.

  His stomach was examined, palpated, studied, and listened to. The baby was pronounced fine, though he was shipped off to an ultrasound specialist just to make sure. After that, he went to visit an x-ray technician in a disturbing, empty room that made all sorts of weird sounds.

  As time passed, everything all started blurring together. Faces turned indistinct. He stopped caring about voices and just responded to the words spoken without really knowing who he was talking to anymore. He was just so, so tired. He wanted to sleep until the world decided to make sense again.

  After there were no more tests that could possibly be performed on him, a doctor showed up in the room. Simon only knew the man was a doctor because he announced himself as such.

  “Do you understand how lucky you were?”

  Simon looked right at the man, feeling all his frustration and fear welling up inside him, coloring his voice with despair. “No,” he croaked. “No, I’m not lucky. Because my boyfriend was shot in the stomach, and I think he’s dead because no one will tell me anything about him. I don’t care about me. I know I’m alive. I care about him. I care about Nathan.”

  The doctor frowned, pursed his lips in thought. He seemed to be trying to come to some sort of decision. Simon just waited, because apparently these people thought he just had all the time in the world to sit around and be at their whim. And maybe he did, because where the hell else was he going to go? What else was he going to do? He was at their whim until they released him.

  Finally, the doctor let out a sigh. “You aren’t making my job very easy, Simon.”

  “My life isn’t fucking easy,” Simon snarled in response. He gestured angrily at himself, not knowing what exactly he was referring to. His omega status, his pregnancy, or the fact that he was completely alone. “You don’t have any right to complain to me right now.”

  The doctor blinked, removed his glasses and started to rub at the lenses with his white coat. Simon recalled Nathan’s stupid pretend glasses and felt his heart squeeze inside his chest.

  “Nathan is in surgery.”

  Simon’s heart squeezed so utterly tight that he thought it might turn into a diamond from the pressure. “He’s alive.”

  “Yes.” The doctor replaced his glasses on the bridge of his nose, then nodded. His spectacles immediately slipped down and he pushed them up again, a habitual gesture. “His prognosis is good. The bullet didn’t pass through any major organs, though I believe it did become lodged against one of his ribs. The surgery is to remove the bullet and to check that there was no other damage incurred by the shooting. Now, is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “Yes!”

  Startled, the doctor actually laughed. “All right, then. Will you let me examine you now?”

  Simon decided to allow it.

  The doctor found nothing else that the nurses already hadn’t, and he ended their visit by giving Simon a thick sheaf of papers to read so he would know how to take care of himself when recovering through the next several days. Despite the fact that he had no real wounds, he did have whiplash, bruises, and what the doctor called “general soreness.”

  As soon as the doctor ended their visit, a nurse arrived and brought Simon to a room where he would be observed for a few hours before being released. She said if he wanted visitors, this would be the time to have them summoned.

  He tried to think of the people he might want to see right now. His mother? His strong, soft-spoken father who had so eagerly welcomed Nathan? Elaine? No, he didn’t want to face them.

  Either understanding this, or at least pretending to, the nurse recommended he get some sleep. She did warn him that his nap would be periodically interrupted as nurses would come in to check on him.

  Simon didn’t care, just accepted the news wearily. He was almost asleep before she even really left the room.

  He dozed in and out, the world composed more of elements of light and dark, rather than sleep or wakefulness. Nurses came in as he had been told they would, to fiddle with him or the monitors he was connected to, before disappearing again for a short time. He didn’t know what he would do when they declared him stable, fit to leave. He just didn’t think about it.

  Somewhere in the middle of the process of not thinking about it, he woke up to find someone sitting in the visitor’s chair, watching him.

  Simon gazed blankly back at the other man until awareness suddenly pulsed over him. “Nathan!”

  Nathan laughed and came to him, climbing up into the bed beside him. Their arms and legs tangled together as they held onto each other. It hurt a whole hell of a lot, but it felt so good at the same time that the pain didn’t even real
ly matter.

  Their lips met between them, over and over, tasting the sweetness of their dessert from hours before, the bitterness of medicine, the salt of tears. Simon clung to Nathan as hard as he could, squeezing tightly. He couldn’t seem to make himself back off, couldn’t loosen his grip even though something worrisome in the back of his mind seemed to be trying to tell him that he needed to be more gentle.

  “Wait!” Simon exclaimed, as he realized what exactly was happening and where they were. “You just went through surgery, you stupid idiot! What are you doing?”

  Nathan grimaced through his smile, as if the mention of surgery made him remember that he was in quite a lot of pain. “I snuck out of Recovery.”

  The urge to hit him, to bash him over the head with the TV remote, nearly overcame Simon. He resisted, but only because he felt like they’d both been bashed around enough today—even though this stupid, arrogant alpha needed to have his brains jostled back into place. “Why the hell would you do that? What is wrong with you? I’m calling the nurse back in here.”

  Simon reached for his call button, only to have his hand covered, clasped by a larger one.

  “Don’t,” Nathan rumbled. His eyes were very bright, with a mixture of pain and love and exhaustion. His hair was completely messed up, driving it home just how awful the situation was. “I did it because I wanted tonight to end the way it should have begun. I was just so goddamned nervous. I put it off too long, and then all of this happened. But it’s still today, and that means I can still do what I wanted.”

  I have no idea what you’re talking about.

  Nathan reached into the pocket of his very flattering hospital gown and pulled out a little velvety box. The box had been beat to hell, but it was still identifiable as a jewelry box.

  Simon stopped breathing.

  “I never went into the water,” Nathan said. “I got tossed out of the back of the truck. I was just laying there on the bridge while you went over, and that was the most terrifying goddamn thing I have ever gone through. You were all alone. Without me. I never want you to be without me again.”

  Nathan carefully opened the box, revealing the contents. It was a slender golden ring, set with two rows of pristine little diamonds. “Marry me, Simon. Be my mate, my other half. And stay with me on the fucking bridge next time.”

  Tears blurred Simon’s vision. In the next instant, he was crying, sobbing out all the stress and peril he had gone through up until this point. He couldn’t catch his breath, couldn’t do anything but weep against Nathan’s neck while the alpha slid the ring onto his finger.

  That was how the nurses found them, combing desperately through the rooms for their missing gunshot-wound patient. Nathan went with them willingly, though the look he sent Simon would linger with him until they could see each other again.

  I love you, the look said.

  Simon clutched his ring hand and sent his love with his fiancé, until the very small hours of the next morning when Nathan was allowed to go home. If he had been a human, they would have kept him longer; as it was, his shifter healing abilities made the doctors in the know confident that he would be just fine if he managed to take it easy for a couple weeks.

  Tamara and Owen took them to Nathan’s house, then set out to fetch Nathan’s battered car from the lot where it had been towed. The engine worked fine, though the rest of it was an absolute disaster. Once they brought it home, they volunteered to stay and help out.

  Simon sent them on their way. He wanted to be alone with Nathan right now, because he knew in the coming days they would be alone very little. The police wanted to speak with them about what had happened, and there would no doubt be all sorts of visitors from the school who wanted to give their well-wishes.

  It was going to be a trying time, making everything more difficult than it already would be.

  That was why he just wanted to be left alone with Nathan.

  They lay in bed together in silence, wrapped up in the arms of the other.

  When Nathan kissed his neck, Simon tilted his head down, giving permission to be marked.

  Nathan bit the soft part of his shoulder, that curve nestled between neck and muscle. There was a pain so sweet that it was almost orgasmic. Their thoughts connected, fully and truly. They were mates, exactly the way they were intended to be.

  Burrowing closer into Nathan, Simon closed his eyes and opened up his thoughts. Nathan watched and listened, seeing the story of the well as Simon had experienced it.

  When there was nothing more to see, nothing more to tell, Simon felt gentle fingers wrap around his chin and lift his head up. Nathan kissed him, so softly and sweetly that their lips hardly touched at all.

  “You know,” Nathan whispered, “if you had told me all this sooner, you could have saved us a lot of trouble.”

  “But then you never would have known what it was like to be shot.”

  “I was always curious about that.” Nathan rolled his eyes skyward, then brought his lips to Simon’s once more. “I love you.”

  “I love you, Nate.”

  They fell asleep like that, their lips still brushing together.

  16

  If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.

  The months that followed the fateful night were some of the most confusing, chaotic times Nathan had ever experienced in his entire life. Not only was he recovering from a pretty bad injury, he had to continue to be a school principal from a distance, giving approval for this or that as the need arose because no one else was authorized for it. Much of his “recovery” time was spent on the phone with Elaine or teachers or parents, which meant he was essentially participating in just as many meetings as before.

  It wasn’t technically taking it easy like the doctor wanted, but maybe it made enough of a difference because he was soon up and about on his feet again. There was just too much to do: speaking with the police, turning away the press, going to doctor’s appointments with Simon, planning his wedding with Simon, arranging for Simon to live with him, and a thousand things more that all involved Simon. Most of their plans wouldn’t come to fruition for a long while yet, but there was no harm in getting a head start.

  He was a man of action, and he continued to make things happen even at a time when he should have demanded the world move at his pace for once.

  Things eventually settled down for a couple weeks, and then he was awoken in the middle of the night by an ear-splitting groan.

  Panic lurched through his entire body, and he sat bolt upright before he even really knew what he was doing, instincts demanding that he move. A glimmer of gold caught his attention from the corner of his eye and he turned in the direction of the source. “Simon!”

  Simon sat up in bed, holding his enormous stomach with both hands. He wore his ring, hadn’t taken it off since the day Nathan proposed to him; the skin around the thin band had turned white with tension.

  “Is it the baby?” he asked.

  Simon turned his head, the corner of his mouth turning upward into the beginnings of a snarl. “Is it the baby?” he mocked.

  His foul demeanor wasn’t exactly a new thing. His body had been having what were essentially practice contractions for days now. Each time one come over him, the pain and tightness turned him into a biting, hormonal thing. It was rough to deal with, especially the first few times when Nathan hadn’t had any idea what was going on, but he eventually figured out a strategy for such times.

  Ignoring his mate’s snarls, Nathan pushed himself out of bed and went over to the closet to grab the overnight bag they had prepared for such an event as this. Slinging it over his shoulders, he shoved his feet into his shoes, got Simon into his slippers, and took them both to the hospital.

  Simon was treated like a queen about to deliver the next heir to the throne, his every desire fulfilled. Much of those desires were snarled out through gritted teeth as the omega lay angrily in his delivery bed. Nathan did what he could before discovering that he mostly got in the way,
that the nurses were too accustomed to useless fathers to know what to do with his competency. At least, that was the thought he consoled himself with when they sent him back to his seat for the fifth time in a row.

  After that, he mostly just held Simon’s hand and talked to him about all the little fantasies they’d created together for the future. Simon’s grip on him was incredible, going beyond simply painful and into the realms of hellish, but Nathan suffered through it because he knew it was nothing compared to what his mate was experiencing.

  He could feel faint echoes of Simon’s pain through the connection they shared, reminding him distinctly of the way his entire body had hurt after being shot. Every single movement sent agony reverberating out all the way to his fingers and toes.

  It was an eternity of waiting, but only a few hours in reality. Their son slipped wetly into the world just before dawn, already giving voice to his very first howl. The cry was thin and wavering in comparison to Simon’s shriek of effort and pain, but Nathan fell in love with the sound right away.

  He couldn’t move, his feet welded to the ground. All he could do was watch as the doctor quickly examined the infant to make sure he was healthy, before reverently handing him over to Simon.

  Simon gazed down into a face that was so red and splotchy it was practically purple. All the tension evaporated from his own face. His lips parted, and he pressed a gentle kiss to the pup’s forehead.

  Then, his gaze slid over to Nathan, beckoning him near.

  One monumental step at a time, Nathan went over to meet his son, to begin the next part of their lives.

  17

  Simon hadn’t much cared about name meanings until he actually gave birth to the baby and realized he had no idea what to call this little life he had made. Nathan went out and bought a book of baby names shortly after bringing all of them back home. The hospital was reluctant to let them go without having a name on the birth certificate, though the doctor in charge allowed it. It wasn’t unusual, just inconvenient.