by Maia Dylan
Pepper sighed as she was lowered back to the bed. Just those few movements exhausted her. She licked her lips and looked at the two men watching her intently.
“Where am I?” she asked, thankful that she was able to form words this time. Her voice was hoarse and sounded like she hadn’t used it in a long time.
The two men shared a glance as they talked telepathically. She frowned for a moment as she thought about that. Talking telepathically for most in the world would be odd, but for her, it was normal. She talked with her sisters telepathically when she was able to. They—
Pepper cried out as pain burst behind her eyes. She lifted her hands and pressed her palms against her eyes as a kaleidoscope of memories slammed into her. The compound, Aristos, the treatments, and everything that had been done to her to further develop her psychic talents. She had grown up in that compound, and there were only two memories that held warmth and not ice-cold pain. Melaina and Parris. They had been held there, too, and they were as close as sisters. She remembered her escape, pushing Rafael psychically to do what she wanted him to do. She remembered the trunk and driving toward safety. Grey River was where Melaina told her to go, and that was where she was heading when she made Rafael drive off the road. Then—
“Oh God! I killed him!” she cried out as she remembered pushing the guard who had tormented her for all these years away from her and against a tree. No, not pushing him, she hadn’t actually used her hands, she had used her mind and thrown him against that tree. He hit four feet from the ground and was impaled on a branch. She had killed him.
“Pepper!” She heard the voices of the two men calling her name, their hands stroking her hair and her hands, trying to get her to calm down, but the memories kept coming. She made it to Grey River and to Parris. Melaina had told her that if she could just make it to Parris, then she would be safe. She met men who helped her instead of hurting her. Two men in particular, Tomas and Diego Reyes—they were the men in the room with her. She had waited for Melaina, and true to her word she had come. Then, hard on her heels came the devil himself. Aristos Christakos.
Aristos had taken some of the treatments that had enhanced her psychic abilities. He attacked, and Pepper had fought him with her sisters. To save Melaina, she had thrown herself into the abyss, burning herself out completely until she flamed out and was drifting toward death. She went happily because she had taken Aristos out of the world and her sisters were safe!
Then, she felt something pulling her back. She struggled for a moment until she felt the presence of two beings pulling her back into life. She immediately sensed Tomas and Diego. They were saving her, pulling her back from the darkness, and she had turned to go to them, but then it stopped. She was stuck, somehow lost in the darkness.
Pepper had floated in space. Or at least that was what it had felt like. There was no sound, no light where she was, no heat, no cold, and no sensation whatsoever. Just Pepper, floating in the dark with her thoughts. When she had first become aware of where she was, she had been okay. This was her happy place, and she’d told Melaina as much that day they had all ended Aristos. But after a while, she started to feel scared. She hadn’t moved on to the next life or regained consciousness. She just floated. The pull had gone, and there was nothing.
After failing to draw herself out of her own mind like she had so many times in the past, she had called out to Melaina and Parris for help. Then when the panic became almost unbearable, she had started to shout, begging for Tomas and Diego to come and save her.
Pepper knew it was strange for her to call out to the two wolf shifters for help. It wasn’t as if they knew each other very well. But as odd as it had seemed, she had felt safe with them from the day they walked into her hospital room, and for someone who had lived in fear most of her life, feeling safe was unheard of. But they never came. They never came!
Pepper threw back her head and screamed, “You never came! You left me there!”
She opened her eyes and glared at Tomas and Diego, both of whom looked pale and concerned. They were leaning over the bed toward her.
“Pepper, calm down,” Tomas said. “Please, baby, this is killing me, just calm down.”
“You left me. I called for you, and you didn’t come.” Pepper could hear the hysteria in her voice and felt it rising within her.
“Pepper, baby, you aren’t making any sense.” Diego cupped her face in his hand, and she stared up into his face. “We were always there, we hardly ever left your side.”
“Liar!” she accused, and, pushing to sit up, she threw her hands out from her body. Both men grunted as they were thrown across the room and slammed hard against the wall opposite her bed. They hit with such force she heard the wall crack, and the painting that had been to the left crashed to the ground.
The edge of her vision was blurring, but she fought against it and held the men with ease. “You left me.”
“No, cariño, we didn’t, we—” Tomas ended on a grunt as Pepper used her ability and applied pressure to his chest.
“Shut up!” she snapped. “You left me, you fucking left me in the dark. You dragged me back from death, and then you left me there in the darkness. I called for you. Over and over, I called for you. But you never came. You left me. You left me!” Pepper knew she was screaming hysterically, but she couldn’t stop. The darkness that had been edging into her vision now swept in, and she cried out. It washed over her once more, and her last thought before she was plunged back into it was that maybe this time she would never make it out.
* * * *
Diego watched Pepper as she rested. He leaned with his elbows on her bed, her hand clasped in both of his and pressed to his mouth. She lay so still. Her skin was pale, almost translucent, and there were dark smudges under her eyes. She frowned and whimpered in her sleep, and his heart bled for every sound of distress she made.
“Do you think we should call Chris?” he asked quietly, and for a moment he thought perhaps Tomas had fallen asleep with his head resting on their mate’s bed, but then he sat up.
“No, I don’t think there is anything he can do.” Tomas sounded tired, and Diego could feel the pain and heartbreak he was feeling down their bond. It mirrored his own. “If she hasn’t woken up by morning, then we’ll rethink it, but for now, I think it’s just best that she’s sleeping.”
Diego nodded and returned his gaze to his mate. She was tossing and turning a little in her sleep and murmuring.
“Tomas, Diego,” she whispered, and there was fear in her tone, and Diego’s wolf howled within him. He made comforting noises as he reached out to stroke her face and her hair, desperately praying that she would fall into a restful sleep.
“My wolf is shredding me from the inside,” Tomas admitted, his tone bleak. “She was calling for us, wherever she was, locked within her own mind. She was calling out to you and me for help, and we never came.” Tomas’s voice broke on the last two words.
Diego swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat. “Two months. Two fucking months she was somewhere in her own mind, and we never knew.”
Tomas sighed, and he swept his hand over his eyes. “If we dwell on that, hermano, we will both go crazy, and we can’t afford to do that. We have a lot of work to do.”
Diego’s phone rang with Hunter’s ring tone. He pulled out his cell and answered with a swipe of his finger.
“What the fuck is happening?” Hunter asked immediately.
Diego and Tomas both frowned. “Right now, nothing.”
“Well, something sure as fuck happened earlier tonight,” Hunter snapped down the phone. “Melaina and Parris are going ballistic! Chris and I had hoped to give you a couple of days before they found out, but all of that was blown to shit by whatever the fuck just happened.”
“Pepper woke up,” Diego replied. “Tomas and I both gave her our claiming bite this morning, and she rose steadily to consciousness. She was fully awake less than an hour after that.”
“That’s great!”
“Yes, and no,” Diego said with a wince. “Hunter, she completely lost it. She came to, and we were talking to her, keeping things calm and quiet just like Chris said we should, but then she was overcome with memories.”
“We think everything came to her at once,” Tomas added. “A few moments after it started, she cried out ‘oh God, I killed him,’ and we reckon that had to have been that fucker Rafael who we found in the forest.”
“Then she started screaming at Tomas and me,” Diego continued, “shouting that we never came, that we left her. She said that we dragged her back from death and then left her.”
Hunter was quiet for a moment. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means that day in the clearing, we saved her with the bond just like we thought we did,” Diego said quietly, “but the bond wasn’t strong enough to bring her all the way back. We believe it snapped, and it somehow left her locked somewhere in her own mind, but because it snapped within her mind, for us it just seemed to have disappeared behind a curtain. We had no way of knowing that it had been severed.”
“Fuck,” Hunter groaned. “Then for her, she has been locked in her own damn mind, calling for help, but you could never hear her because the damn bond was broken. And then when you claimed her—”
“The bond snapped back into place,” Tomas said, his tone bleak. “We were able to draw her from her mind and bring her back completely.”
“That poor woman,” Hunter said softly. “What she must have gone through.”
“I can’t even begin to imagine,” Diego said in a pained tone.
Hunter’s sigh came over the phone. “Okay, well, I will deal with the fallout here for as long as I can. I am going to have to tell Ty and Trent, and that’s a fucking conversation I could have lived my whole life without having to have.”
Diego winced. “Damn, hope he doesn’t kill you.”
Hunter grunted a laugh. “Yeah, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. If I were you, I would be more worried about Melaina and Parris and what they plan to do to you. They know that Pepper is awake. Somehow she managed to broadcast something to them, and they are sharpening knives as we speak.”
“Fuck,” Tomas said with a shake of his head, and Diego knew what he was thinking. They had both fought side by side with Melaina Christakos, and the thought of her coming at them was not a nice one.
“I reckon you’ve got a few days—perhaps Ty can get us to five days if I can get him on our side, but you won’t have more than that.” They spoke for a few minutes more and then signed off, and Diego slid his phone back into his pocket.
Tomas sighed. “Five days is not a lot of time.”
“It will have to be enough to convince our mate to forgive us,” Diego said firmly. “If we can get her to do that before Parris and Melaina get here, then perhaps she can stop them from gutting us.”
Tomas grinned at him over the sleeping form of their mate. “That’s what I’ve always liked about you, Diego, your eternal optimism.”
Diego flipped his brother off before the two of them started to plan how they were going to court their mate.
Chapter Five
“We were always there, we hardly ever left your side.”
The words continued to echo within her she as rose to the surface. Images of the moments just prior to losing consciousness came back, but it was Diego’s words that remained for her.
Pepper was immediately flooded with relief as she came slowly awake. She wasn’t locked somewhere in the dark recesses of her own mind—she’d actually woken up. She pushed aside the memory of the last time she’d come to. They were too difficult to process right in at this moment.
Before she opened her eyes, she took a minute to take stock of herself. She still had a headache, but it wasn’t pounding as much as it had the last time she’d woken up. Physically, she felt…okay. There was weakness, but that was to be expected.
Psychically, she had nothing left. She had completely flamed out from the strain of trying to maintain a presence in this life for as long as she did, or from throwing Tomas and Diego against the wall. She wasn’t sure which, but either way, she was psychically blinded. She was about to open her eyes and face the light of day, but saw something she hadn’t noticed before. There was a thread of light that seemed to bind itself to her consciousness. She couldn’t remember ever seeing it before, and when she reached out along it, she found two strong and independent minds.
She sensed similar feelings and emotions coming down both. They were anxious, a nervousness neither of them had ever experienced before. There was also a mixture of fear, regret, and grief. Tomas and Diego Reyes.
Opening her eyes, she blinked a few times to clear her vision. She was once again staring up at the vaulted roof with the beautiful wood beams.
“Pepper,” Diego said quietly, and she turned to face him. He was standing away from the bed this time with his shoulder resting on the wall.
“Where are we?” She asked the same question she had before. She had a feeling they weren’t in Grey River anymore. If they were, then Melaina and Parris would be here with her, of that she had no doubt.
“In a cabin near Ouachita National Forest.” Pepper turned to Tomas as he spoke from the opposite side of her bed. He, too, had taken a similar position to Diego and leaned against the wall. “Arkansas side. It belongs to a Zeke and Ryan Harrison. They’re friends we work with.”
Pepper frowned. “Why are we here? I would have thought someone who required medical attention would have been better off at the medical facility in Grey River.”
Diego nodded and ran a hand through his hair. “You were there, baby, for a long time. With what we planned to do, we had to take you out of pack lands. It was not a decision that we made lightly, and we sought advice from the medical professional who was in charge of your case, but we had to try something. You weren’t getting any better.”
Pepper thought about that for a moment. “So you took me out of Grey River to avoid consequences of claiming a woman without her consent.”
Both men looked a little surprised, but there was pride there, too. “That’s right,” Tomas confirmed. “Ty and Trent run a tight ship with their pack. They have very strict rules, and we didn’t want to break them on pack lands. It seemed like the best idea at the time.”
“My sisters, do they know what you did? And where I am?” Pepper got her answer when both men grimaced. “Why couldn’t you tell them?”
“If we’d had a moment to spare, we might have been able to convince them that what we were planning to do was the best course of action,” Diego answered. “But time was running short. You were weakening, and when either of us walked too far away from you, we felt that same fucking awful sensation we did when we almost lost you. We couldn’t afford to wait any longer.”
“So, Parris and Melaina basically think that you’ve kidnapped me?”
Tomas nodded. “They know more now that Hunter and Dane have no doubt talked them through it all, but yeah, we probably aren’t high on their Christmas list.”
“Hit list, yes,” Diego said with a wry smile, “but definitely not their Christmas list.”
Pepper processed that information, pleased that her mind seemed clearer than it had been when she’d first come to, and that her ability to think things through was improving. She was about to ask when they might call her sisters when something Diego said suddenly registered. “How long?”
“We’ve been here for almost two days. We—” Tomas broke off when Pepper shook her head.
“No, how long have I been gone? How long has it been since we fought Aristos?” Her voice was barely a whisper. Diego and Tomas stared at each other. “No!” Both men turned to look at her. “You don’t have a conversation about me without me hearing what you have to say. No more telepathy. Just answer my damn question.”
Diego took a breath. “You were in the hospital and under the care of Chris Carson for two months, niña.”
Al
l the air seemed to be sucked from the room, and Pepper struggled to draw breath. When both men moved to approach her, she threw out her hand.
“No, it’s okay. I’m okay,” she whispered as she took a long, slow deep breath. “Two months. I was in that hospital for two months.” She looked down at herself and nodded. “Well, I guess that would be the reason behind how much weight I have lost, and how weak I feel.”
Diego moved one step closer but stopped when she shot him a look as a clear warning. “Pepper, physically you’re fine. The weakness will go away, I promise. While you were in the hospital, Chris had the physiotherapists with you as much as possible, working your muscles and ensuring that you were able to make a full recovery as soon as you were awake.”
Pepper nodded. That all made sense. “But this doctor was adamant that I would? That I would make a full recovery?”
When her question met silence, she looked up. Both men were looking at her, and Pepper didn’t have to have her psychic talent back to know what they were thinking. They were worried that she was going to relapse or freak out.
“Look, I am calmer than I was,” Pepper said in an effort to reassure them. “Just tell me straight.”
“Chris wasn’t sure what was going on,” Tomas admitted. “He knew from me and Diego that you had fought against Aristos to the point where your consciousness was slipping away. We felt it in that field as soon as you started to slip away, and we pulled you back as you know, but the bond between us snapped before we could get you all the way. We didn’t know what had happened to you, and physically there were no reasons why you were in such a comatose state for so long.”
“Then it was the mating bond that pulled me back,” Pepper whispered, and although both men looked a little shocked, they nodded. “And it snapped. So, I was your mate?”
“You are our mate, Pepper,” Tomas stressed, “and we knew the moment we were near you—we felt the Quickening strike.”
