Strays

Epilogue

       

EPILOGUE

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TWO WEEKS LATER

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It took everything I had not to flinch as the nurse peeled away the last layer of bandages from my back. I'd pulled my hair over my shoulder and my fist tightened around the ponytail, my knuckles turning white as I waited for her to get on with her job. The anticipation was always the worst.

But then I felt the first prod of the needle against my spine and I remembered, Nope. The needle was always the fucking worst.

Shards of ice dug into my nerves. It spread like the legs of a spider, prickling and stinging my back as it pulsed through the weakened, charred veins the whip had left behind. I gritted my teeth to keep from screaming but I couldn't help the soft whimpers that escaped every now and again.

I tried to slow my breathing, to inhale and exhale in long, calming breaths – but all I could smell was the clinical stench of disinfectant and chemicals, and the wrongness of it all fucked with the anxious feeling in my gut. 

In all the years I'd spent tumbling in and out of life or death situations, I'd never been inside a real, honest-to-god hospital. Human hospitals were out of the question – better to lose a leg than explain why lacerations several inches deep tended to disappear after a good night's sleep – and hospitals that catered to lycans tended to be a light on the ground.

Even after the war, instead of opening the Laurence Baxendale Memorial Hospital to the public, the streets of the City had been lined with long, white tents with soldiers and civilians separated according to the severity of their wounds and the people on hand equipped to deal with the carnage.

I remembered reclining on one of the cheap cots they'd left for superficial injuries while one of the Royal seamstresses sew my leg together and sent me on my way with a bandage and instructions to change as much as possible over the coming days. There were no shots, no medication, no needles. We were lucky to have a sip of whiskey before they went to town on our injuries.

But back then, my super-fast lycan cell regeneration and immune system hadn't been all-but obliterated by silver poisoning.

"The skin grafts seem to be healing well," the nurse announced in a high, cheerful voice. There was no way it wasn't at least partly forced. "What do you think? Will I get you a mirror?"

I was tempted to tell her where she could shove her damn mirror but I was afraid if I opened my mouth, I was going to start screaming. Or worse – crying.

It wasn't even the pain that I couldn't withstand. I could feel the experimental treatment working; at night, my skin itched like crazy as it slowly knitted itself back together, the burn of the silver lessening in increments with every passing day. My body was healing the way it was supposed to.

But my head...

It was like whatever had happened the night in the park had broken something irreparably inside me. Something no amount of skin grafts or antidotes could fix. And it hurt. Whatever the fuck he'd done to me – it hurt worse than anything Niall could have done to me. Worse than anything Sebastien had ever done.

Every time I so much as thought his damn name, I could feel the tell-tale prickle of tears filling my eyes and my head would start to pound with the effort it took to stem the flow. To hold it in. I hadn't known it at the time but I'd lied when I told Sebastien I didn't care if he hated me, as long as he was alive to do it.