Escaping Death

Solana

Two things are immediately clear to me when I wake up: my stomach is bunching up in knots, and I am no longer in the Grove.

The last thing I remember was being in my room with Ace and Hunter. I woke up parched and found a pitcher of water and breakfast on the coffee table. I poured myself a glass, used the bathroom, and was brushing my teeth when nausea hit me with violent force.

Hunter is convinced I’m pregnant, but I really don’t know either way. Nausea has a hundred causes. No sense in getting everyone all worked up over a symptom that could fit any one of a hundred ailments.

I remember Ace getting me another glass of water, which I drank greedily considering I just vomited up the first. And then… I woke up here.

The air in the room is warm and dry, and light pours generously across the tiled floor through glassless windows. Across from the king bed in which I’m laying is a shower. No door, no separate bathroom. Just a single floor to ceiling glass pane between the room and the water jets.

Just outside of the bedroom door is a curved staircase that empties into a similarly tiled and windowpane-less living room.

“Good morning, love. I hoped that was you padding around up there,” Hunter pulls me into his lap at the dining table just beyond the living room where Eli and Tate are also sitting.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“We flew south, so to speak,” Eli teeters his head side to side and then breaks into a mischievous grin.

“How far south?” The landscape is lush, hilly and textured, brimming with organic life. There are parrots congregating in the tops of coconut trees and an actual fucking macaque climbing a banana tree.

“Bem-vindo ao Brasil,” Eli chirps.

“What are we doing in Brazil? Does my family know?”

The three of them pass a look between them, as if they’re mentally drawing straws on who has to be the one to explain to me what is going on.

“Your family knows we took you with us, but they don’t know where. No one except the six of us know we’re here.” Hunter explains delicately as he ever so subtly runs his hand over my belly.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Tate asks.

“I was in my room at the Grove with Ace and Hunter. We were just talking,” my brows draw down trying to concentrate on any memory beyond that, “but then my memory gets blurry. I remember tasting metal, I remember feeling cold…”

Hunter hugs me tighter to him, and they all nod silently. “Sunshine,” Eli looks at me with sympathetic eyes, “you were poisoned.”

“By a rare and rather aggressive poison, actually,” Tate adds.

“Ember healed you herself,” Hunter plants a kiss on my bare shoulder. “She tried kicking your parents out of your hospital room but they were so furious they wouldn’t let you out of their sight.”

“You say that like you were there,” I mutter at him teasingly, but the way his body tenses beneath mine makes me wonder. Slowly I twist in his lap so I can face him better. “Please tell me you didn’t do something stupid like show up in the infirmary.”

“I was there long enough to show Ace where to go, and then I made myself scarce. Don’t look at me like that. Tate isn’t the only one who can skirt around unseen.”

He kisses the corners of my mouth, softening the way my lips have pursed in frustration. If anyone had recognized him things could have tailspun out of control.

“Why did we come here, though? Why not go back to the pack house?”

“Solana, you were poisoned,” Eli is incredulous. “Whoever poisoned you did so from inside the Grove. Which means we have to assume they know you’re with us.”

Tate continues for him, “which also means that we have to assume that the safety of our packhouse is compromised.”

“Fucking Ace and his overprotective bull—“

“This wasn’t on Ace,” Hunter interrupts me. “This was a unanimous pack decision.”

“Calma, menina,” Eli purrs at me from across the table. “Why don’t you go put on your skimpiest bikini and I’ll acquaint you with our private beach?”

“I didn’t pack any bikinis, I was supposed to be in the Grove.”

“Mm, no bikinis? Even better,” Eli licks his lips suggestively and Tate smacks him on the back of the head while an unstoppable giggle slips from my lips.

The laughter dies in my throat, turning into a groan as the bunching feeling returns to my stomach. It’s not an unfamiliar feeling, it’s one I’ve had many times in my life, but this time I find myself hoping I’m wrong about its cause.

“I’m going to go take a quick shower and see what I have for beachwear.”

Hunter lets me slide out of his lap and all three of them follow me with their eyes as far up the staircase as they can.

Once in the bedroom, I strip off my clothes leaving them in a trail like breadcrumbs from the door to the glass shower wall. Water cascades down from the ceiling like rain, drenching me in perfectly warm water.

Another bunching grips my stomach so I shift to prop myself up against the wall by my forearms. With my forehead resting on my fists against the wall, I look down at my feet watching the water as it swirls and routes itself towards the drain.

The water pounding against my back kneads at the knots and aches in my muscles, but another tighter cramp grips my stomach. I bend and stretch and move my hips from side to side to ease the ache but it’s no use.

Bent over at almost a ninety degree angle, arms propped up against the wall, I open my eyes once more but now I see red.

Blood.

Blood from a thin red line trailing down my leg and mixing with the water at my feet. My period. A harsh indication that I’m not pregnant. Any hope I secretly allowed myself to feel over the possibility of carrying new life drips slowly down the drain along that thin red line.

Never have I been so disappointed, so crushed, to start my period.

I crumble to the shower floor, rest my back against the shower wall, and hug my knees to my chest, slowly contemplating the ramifications not `````being pregnant has on my place within Death.

— — —

Ace

“You’re sure she’s healed?” I question Ember as she checks over a sleeping Solana for the third time in the last twenty minutes.

Sol’s parents took off shortly after they started her transfusion. They could see I wasn’t leaving Sol’s side and felt confident leaving her with me and a dozen medical staff members.

“Yes, Ace,” she smiles at me sympathetically. “She’s as healthy as ever.”

“Then why hasn’t she woken up?” I don’t mean to snarl, but I’m struggling to keep my wolf calm enough to think straight.

“Her own natural healing has taken over, most of her energy is being used to bring her body back to baseline.”

“How much damage did the poison do?”

Her shoulders relax, releasing the tension and anxiety they’ve been carrying, “fortunately minimal thanks to you getting her here so quickly.”

While that is comforting, what I’m really trying to ask is if the poison affected our pup. “So there’s no reason to think it got to her…heart — or, her liver or whatnot?”

Ember tips her head to the side and smiles warmly at me before turning her attention to Sol, “it must have been something she ingested, so the poison didn’t have time to spread through her body. The antidote cleared away the rest. Now she just needs to regain her strength.”

I huff out a breath, frustrated that I still don’t have a clear answer. I check to make sure there’s no one lingering in the halls to overhear what I’m about to ask her point-blank.

“It’ll be a little while before her blood tests come back, so I’ll know if there are any other developments that we need to monitor. But I stand by what I said before, there’s no reason to suspect that there was any permanent or irreversible damage done.” Ember looks me square in the eye knowingly, giving my arm a reassuring squeeze.

Oddly enough it does reassure me and I feel like the mountain sitting on my chest is lifted. “Is she stable enough to go back to her room?”

Ember beams at me, a flash of something sparks behind her eyes, extinguishing as quickly as it appeared. “I’m sure she’d be more comfortable there. Go ahead, I’ll let the others know.”

I scoop Solana up from her hospital bed and teleport us out, but not back to her bedroom.

With Solana safely tucked in bed at the safe house I port back to her room in the Grove where the guys are waiting for me.

They bombard me with silent, pained looks. Each of them coping in their own way. Tate is sitting alone in a dark corner of the room, Eli is sitting spread on the couch nervously bouncing his knee, Dean sits across from Eli with his hands clasped in his lap, wrestling his thumbs, while Hunter paces back and forth behind him.

“She’s okay, I brought her over to the safe house. Dean, you’re staying with me here while we finish sorting shit out, but the rest of you need to be at the safe house with her. Ready?”

Tate, Eli, and Hunter grab all six of our bags between them and huddle up to be ported over to Sol.

A few seconds later I’m back in the Grove with Dean. “I need to speak with the Alphas before we leave.”

We make our way down to the Queen’s office first where, fortunately for us, the door is already open in invitation.

Two courtesy knocks to the door is all the announcement I give of my entering her office. Magnolia is standing propped against her desk, wiping blood off of her hands and face with a towel whilst her mates pore over a dozen documents laid beneath their laptops.

“Magnolia, Alphas, do you have a minute?”

Magnolia throws the towel over her shoulder and stalks towards the couches, gesturing for me and Dean to have a seat.

“Human or animal?” Dean asks her without thinking. It’s not uncommon for one of the guys to need to blow off steam every once in a while, sometimes that means coming home covered in blood. It’s more of a running joke now to ask about the source, because then we’d know how much steam they needed to unleash.

“Enemy,” she practically hums through a grin so malicious it sends shivers up my spine. “Six people in connection with her poisoning are now dead. Have you come to explain to my mates why you two should not be seven and eight?” Her eyes ignite with mischief, like the look of a predator playing with her prey.

“We had nothing to do with that breakfast tray,” Dean reiterates. “It wasn’t there when we left this morning. Someone obviously snuck it in sometime between us leaving and the others waking up.”

“Putting aside the fact that five grown men were in my daughter’s bedroom before dawn,” Varian grunts, “Solana is alive because you were there. We obviously made the right decision hiring you.”

My jaw ticks and I hope they don’t notice the way I flinch at his words, because Solana is so much more than a job. Seeing the reality of the threats against her and being reminded of the implicit expiration date of our job makes me want to tell her that she’s not going anywhere, that I won’t let her go like we originally agreed.

“You’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty. Ember tells me you haven’t left her side since you brought her to the infirmary and that you brought her back to her room to rest.” Magnolia says.

“I took Solana out of the infirmary, but I didn’t bring her to her room. She’s currently resting at one of our safe houses. It’s clear to us that the safety of the Grove is compromised as is the safety of our pack house. Death are the only five people in the world who know the location of this safe house.”

Rohanor stands up abruptly and stalks over to me. He has an inch or two on me in height and he’s fucking built like a tank but I’ve knocked down guys his size before.

Rather than throw a punch at me, he sticks out his hand. “You’ve kept her safe so far. Do what you need to do to continue keeping her safe. We’ll reach out soon to go over what we’ve found.”

We shake hands with the Alphas and port out of there, eager to get back to the guys and Solana.

We land in the living room of the safe house and immediately I know something is wrong. Tate sits quietly at the dining table, Hunter is out in the yard hacking at logs like he does when he’s upset, and Eli is nowhere in sight.

“Everything okay?” Dean asks his brother gently.

“Sol’s bleeding,” Tate answers.

I’m halfway to the stairs when Tate calls to me, “Ace, not like that. She’s fine. She’s just…bleeding,” Tate adds emphasis to the word like I’m supposed to divine new meaning from the words ‘she’s bleeding.’

Tate groans as he drags his hands down his face. I’ve never seen him so flustered. Our resident psychopath is all bent out of shape talking about blood.

“Fucking hell, her period. She’s bleeding, not pregnant,” he sighs, “and she’s taking it pretty hard.”