A nurse takes over for Mathias, and he grabs the scalpel. He doesn’t hesitate as he presses the blade against her skin and cuts into her stomach.
I clutch my own, the skin opening up as we try to heal Kat. The nurse beside us shrieks, and Maddox growls as pain sears through him.
He’s becoming weaker, yet he refuses to shift. He won’t back down until he’s sure she is fully safe, and most importantly, will survive this. Kat might think that sometimes we overreact with our worries, but she fails to understand how much we really need her. Without her, there is no us.
Two nurses have to hold her stomach open as it tries to heal and close. It feels like they have their hands in my stomach, stretching it apart, and I grunt from the continued pain.
Maddox licks Mateo’s fingers, and he absent-mindedly strokes the fur on our face. Under different circumstances, it would be a beautiful moment of bonding, but the tension that surrounds us just proves how terrifying this situation is. His touch is calming, but not enough.
We close our eyes, close to tears, and then, we hear it – a loud cry.
The sound fills the room, and my gaze snaps to Mateo. He takes in a sharp breath and pulls the line from his arm like he only now realized it is there.
A nurse bundles our child in a towel and walks off with our baby before I hear another cry.
Mateo jerks to his feet. A pool of blood covers the floor beneath him. He grabs the pole that has the IV and blood bag attached to catch himself. His face is extremely pale as he staggers, his other hand clutching his stomach, and his face twists in pain. Mateo looks like he is struggling to stay awake.
The ground is slippery beneath our paws from our blood spilling on the floor.
“Nearly done. Get that line back in him!” Mathias growls at the nurse when he sees Mateo staggering around the surgical room, trying to get to the two nurses with our babies.
Maddox is on the verge of passing out as our vision blurs and the room spins. Even I feel like we just entered the rollercoaster of nightmares.
“Pin him, if needed,” Mathias yells at the nurses, and they grab Mateo.
“Maddox, are you still strong enough?” Mathias asks.
Being in wolf form, we are healing almost instantly, but we have still lost heaps of blood from our wounds reopening and closing. But Maddox doesn’t care if we aren’t fine. He isn’t about to let our mate die.
“Move, let him through,” Mathias orders his assistants, and everyone moves, except Mathias, as the woman still does the chest compressions.
Maddox carefully jumps on the gurney, and it uses nearly all of our strength to haul our weight up, while Mathias holds the gurney steady. Maddox licks the long cut across her abdomen.
One of the nurses calls out to Mathias, and he tells her to wait. I don’t pay any attention to anything that doesn’t concern Kat and her well-being right now. I focus on the wound, desperate to see it close up and give her a chance to pull through this nightmare.
“Doctor, something is wrong. What are these marks on their necks?” The nurse asks.
I should worry, but I pay no mind to her words. The twins are alive. I can tell by their cries that they are fine. The babies are healthy, and right now, as happy as I am to know they’re here, I still need to do anything in my power to save Kat. I release a breath and hear a crash off the side of me. Mateo collapses out of the corner of my eye.
Everything happens so fast. The entire place looks like nothing but chaos, but I almost cry out when Kat suddenly gasps, and the nurse doing the chest compressions shrieks and stops.
Maddox jumps off the table, and we headbutt the floor, colliding with a steel table that falls over as he can barely keep upright. I feel us fading out while Maddox knocks the nurse out of the way. She is trying to hook a blood bag back up to Mateo, who is bleeding out on the floor.
“Maddox, no, you can’t handle much more,” Mathias warns, and he pulls on our hips, but Maddox growls, and he quickly removes them. I won’t lose either of them.
I lose feeling and consciousness when Maddox heals Mateo, taking his injuries as if they were his own. Finally, the voices in the room fade out, and Maddox grows weaker and weaker as he fights to suck in each breath before collapsing beside Mateo.
“Maddox?” I hear Kat’s frantic voice before everything goes black, and I am sucked under.
I don’t feel, hear or see anything else. Nothing but pitch black. And yet, somehow, I am happy. Happy that our babies are alive, that Kat is alive, and that Mateo will be fine.
That thought alone encourages me to give in for good as my mind slowly fades into the nothingness of oblivion.
Katya
Seline frantically stared down into the water while I nervously watched from the side, chewing my nail, trying to stop myself from freaking out that I was technically dead.
“I just need to push the idea in one of their heads,” she says, and I see her eyes on Ezra. She swirls the water with her finger, whispering while she does.
“What are you doing?” I ask, watching curiously.
“Trying to give Maddox an idea,” she mutters. “Though, maybe I should have tried a different one…”
“You can do that?” She waves her hand from side to side.
“More of a push in the right direction, but it is up to him to take it. I can’t force words in their heads but a nudge, a fuzzy image.” She shrugs.
Mathias starts hand compressions, and time seems to slow until an ambulance shows up.
“Did it work?”
“Yes, Maddox knows something is up with the babies, but Mathias is smarter than I have given him credit for. His mind instantly went to getting them out,” she comments, her hands placed on both sides of the round bowl as she looks down at the scene playing out in it.
As Mathias works on me, I feel a strange tugging sensation in my stomach. Yet I feel no pain as I watch myself cut open. The first baby, a little boy, comes out covered in my blood, and a nurse quickly wraps him up, taking him off to the side. He looks healthy and big for a newborn. A few minutes pass by, and I watch in horror as Mateo grows weaker, bleeding profusely as he clutches his stomach and face twists in pain, losing color. Blood soaks the ground under him.