Page 77 of Knot Broken

He didn’t finish that thought. Instead, he strode back into the room, the door slamming shut in my face.

It would’ve taken nothing to open it. A twist of the doorknob, a hard one if it was locked and I’d be inside. Instead, I just stood there. Breath flaring across the door’s surface, my hands forming fists. I would’ve torn the heads off her exes, kicked the arse of the idiot from her work that tried hitting on her, but this…?

I had no fucking idea what to do as Nadia suffered.

Muffled voices, Riley’s, Candy’s and Ethan’s filtered through, but my brain couldn’t make out the words. Just that everything was very terse, right up until the point it wasn’t. The silence that followed was deafening, punctuated by the rapid beat of my heart, right before the door was yanked open again.

“She’s resting,” Riley told me. “The shift was unsuccessful and we were forced to sedate her. Thankfully that was enough to revert her back to skin so she can sleep it off now.”

“Can I…? Can I see her?”

Say no, I thought, because I didn’t deserve that honour. Instead, she stepped aside, ushering me in as the two doctors made their way out of the room.

“She’ll be super tired for a day or two. Keep things low-key.” The instructions had me nodding dumbly. “Try not to set Nadia off again. Shifting takes a huge amount of energy and usually that’s only over in seconds. The longer she is stuck, the more energy she burns. When she wakes up, she’ll be very hungry, shaky, and feeling quite weak, but we’ll be by before that to check on her.”

“But will she be OK?”

Who the fuck decided that I was an adult? Because I didn’t feel like one now.

“We’ll know when she wakes up,” Riley said, giving my shoulder a squeeze before both ladies left the suite.

It took everything I had to walk back into Nadia’s bedroom. My feet dragged as the wolf inside me whined, only to discover she was lying in Ethan’s arms. He glanced up, eyes still hard and silvery, staring me down before pressing his lips to the crown of her head.

“Riley said⁠—”

“I know what she said,” Ethan ground out.

“Nadia needs rest.”

“Trust me when I say no one in this suite knows better than me what my mate needs.” His hands clutched her tighter, and at that, she let out a little sigh as her head nestled into his chest. “I told you this would be hard. That it wouldn’t all be sexy fun. I told you…”

A little snuffle from Nadia silenced him and me too, because there was nothing more to say and everything, all at the same time. I slid down the wall, watching them from a distance and had a realisation. What stopped people from just saying what was on their minds? The truth, because sometimes it is too hard, too impossible, for another person to comprehend. That was enough to keep my lips pressed together, for an uncomfortable silence to fall over the room, broken only by the faint sounds of Nadia’s sighs.

Chapter 36

Nadia

I was asleep in my childhood bedroom. Sun was streaming in through the window and our old labrador, Goldie, was nudging me in the ribs. This is why I was a cat person. The damn dog would put her cold nose against your skin and then give you a shove for good measure. With a groan, I rolled over, opening my eyes to see not my parent’s dog, but her.

“Whoa…”

I scrambled into a seated position to stare at a massive white wolf just sitting there. Her jaws opened, and she panted gently as if in welcome. Moving slowly, I peered at her, taking in the long, silky fur, the ears that were swivelling right now, then a very familiar set of brown eyes.

I stared at them each time I looked in the mirror.

“Are you…?”

Reaching out slowly, as if not to scare the beast, her feet moved. I felt that same strange sensation inside me as a result, though it was muted now. My body felt… heavy, like my hand was a boulder I was trying to heave through space. Fingers outstretched, I made a small sound of protest, but that did me little good. The wolf seemed to get further and further away as the seconds ticked by, only to shiver, then disappear completely as soon as I touched her. Her sudden absence allowed something far less welcome in.

Pain.

When I was a kid, I got migraines. They were so much more painful than a headache, they almost needed a different classification. Throbbing skull, lighting flashes of light playing across my eyes, even as I screwed my lids shut. My world narrowed down to just the ice pick of agony stabbing into my brain.

That’s what this felt like.

I couldn’t sit still and just allow it to happen, but moving was like wading through quicksand. Shifting back and forth, demanding my body obey me, finally had my eyes opening, only to see Ethan staring down at me. Before I could ask why, a wave of intense nausea had my mouth flooding with bile.

“I’m gonna be sick.”