Chapter 91: HOW DID YOU KNOW TO COME HERE?
Chapter 92
Ren
"Darren, I can’t... I can’t do this again. I can’t stand in that corridor and lose the one thing that actually matters to me."
He didn’t offer some hollow reassurance about how everything would be fine, because he knew me well enough to know I’d have hated him for it.
He just stayed there, solid and quiet beside me, letting me come apart completely in a car park at.
"All these years I told myself she’d never be mine," I continued, my voice cracking clean through the middle of the sentence.
"That she belonged to someone else’s story, some life I wasn’t written into, and that I’d have to watch her from a distance and learn to call that enough.
Because wanting more than that felt like wanting something that wasn’t mine to want.
And then, somehow, impossibly, against every single thing I’d already accepted about my own life, I got her.
I got to have her, even if it was only for a little while. And now I’m standing here about to lose her all over again, and I don’t understand why the universe keeps handing me the one thing I want most in this world just long enough to make losing it unbearable."
I pressed the heel of my hand hard against my eyes. It didn’t stop a single thing.
"She’s not just some woman to me, Darren. She’s the reason I’m anything at all worth being. Before her I was just a title people bowed their heads to, an Alpha going through the motions of leading people I hadn’t yet learned how to actually love properly.
She walked into my life without asking a single person’s permission and turned into my light. My direction. The first , become someone I wanted near me. She became the reason any of the rest of it, the pack, the title, any of it, actually matters to me at all."
I looked out across the dark, empty car park, at nothing, and everything all at once.
"I don’t know how to be whatever I am without her somewhere in the world. So she isn’t allowed to leave it. Not like this. Not over a letter I know, all the way down in my bones, she never truly meant to write."
Darren said nothing still, only tightened his grip on my shoulder, steady and wordless, and the two of us stood there together in the cold, waiting for a door to open with news that neither of us had any power at all to change.
The cold night wind whipped across the empty driveway, but I couldn’t feel it anymore.
All I could feel was the massive, crushing hole in my chest. The doctor had said she was stable for now, but stable in a hospital meant she was barely holding onto life by a single thread.
And the child... our baby... was already gone. I hadn’t even had time to wrap my head around the fact that she was carrying my child before the decision was forced upon me to save her life.
I’d do it again a thousand times over if it meant keeping Lumi breathing, but the pain of it was a heavy iron weight pressing down on my lungs.
"Come inside, Ren," Darren said softly after a long, heavy silence. "You need to be in there. Not out here in the dark."
I swallowed down the lump in my throat, wiped my face again, and nodded. "Yeah. I need to be with her."
We walked back into the hospital. The glass doors slid open with a soft hiss, revealing the quiet, empty hallway of the private wing.
Every step felt like dragging weights across the floor but I forced my feet to keep moving.
When we reached the top floor, my guards were already standing at their posts outside her room, their faces stiff and serious.
They bowed their heads as I approached, but I barely registered them. My entire focus was locked on the heavy door at the end of the hall.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The room was dimly lit, dominated by the dull green glow of the heart monitor and the deep hum of the machine forcing air into her lungs.
Lumi looked so small in the center of that wide hospital bed. Her skin was far too pale, nearly blending into the white sheets tucked around her shoulders.
Clear plastic tubes ran into her nose, and an IV line was taped securely to the back of her hand.
I pulled a heavy wooden chair right up to the edge of the mattress and sat down. I reached out, my hand trembling as I gently cupped her small, freezing fingers.
I brought her hand up to my lips, pressing a kiss against her knuckles, trying desperately to pour my own heat into her cold skin.
"I’m right here, Lumi," I whispered into the quiet room, my voice barely more than a scratchy breath.
"I’m not going anywhere. You just have to keep fighting. You have to come back to me and Theo."
She didn’t move. The monitor just kept up its slow, steady beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. A constant reminder of how close she was to the edge.
Darren stepped into the room behind me, shutting the door quietly so we wouldn’t be overheard by anyone passing by. He stood by the wall, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes fixed on the floor.
"The report came back from the lab," Darren said in a low voice, making sure it didn’t carry outside the room.
"The doctor confirmed it was a heavy dose of liquid sedatives mixed with a muscle relaxant. If you had been twenty minutes later getting to that house..."
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. I knew what twenty minutes would have meant. I would have been carrying a corpse out of that dusty old house.
"She didn’t take them herself," I said, my voice turning hard, all the tears from the car park drying into pure, unadulterated venom.
"She didn’t write that letter, Darren. I don’t care how much it looked like her handwriting. I don’t care what the hospital logs it as. Someone stood in her mother’s house, put a hand over her mouth, and forced those pills down her throat."
"I know," Darren said quietly. "I believe you, Alpha."
"Then tell me who," I rasped, turning my head to look at him, my eyes burning with a desperate, dark light.
"Who knew she was going to her mother’s house? She didn’t tell Priya. She didn’t tell her team at the office. She hadn’t been to that building in years.
So who could have known? Who knew her secrets well enough to write a letter about her mother, about her past, about Callum, and about..."
I froze, the words catching hard in the back of my throat as the pieces started slamming together in my brain.
"Neve?" I breathed the name out loud, my eyes widening as a cold, sickening horror began to take root deep in my gut.
Before Darren could even answer, the metal handle of the hospital room door clicked.
The door swung open, and the heavy silence of the room was shattered by the sound of quick, nervous footsteps on the linoleum floor.
I turned around slowly, my heart dropping straight into my stomach.
Standing in the doorway, clutching a designer handbag tight against her stomach, was Neve.
She looked pale, her eyes wide as she scanned the room, taking in the sight of the monitors, the tubes, and me sitting by the side of the bed. She looked completely out of breath, as if she had run all the way up the stairs.
"Ren?" she whispered, her voice trembling as she took a hesitant step inside. "Oh my god... is she... is she okay?"
I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t. My mind was spinning so fast I felt dizzy.
I hadn’t called Neve back after she hung up on me earlier. I hadn’t texted her.
I hadn’t told a single soul outside of Darren and my highest-ranking guards which hospital Lumi had been brought to.
This was a private wing of a private hospital, hidden away under pack security. Her name wasn’t even on the main reception desk’s board downstairs.
My hand slowly slid away from Lumi’s fingers. I stood up from the chair, drawing myself up to my full height, my shadow falling long and heavy over my sister.
"Neve," I said, my voice dangerously calm, completely devoid of any emotion. "What are you doing here?"
She blinked, taken aback by the coldness in my tone. She shuffled her feet, her hands tightening their grip on the strap of her bag until her knuckles turned white.
"I... I came to see if you were okay. You sounded so strange on the phone earlier when you asked if she could hurt herself, and then you just hung up on me. I got worried about you, Ren."
"How did you know to come here?" I asked, taking one step toward her.