The day had barely begun when Aaron heard Lionel’s torn voice charging through from far away, and he stopped counting. He was at the hospital, and this was earlier than expected. Aaron thought he might begin his journey this morning and arrive here later in the day.
When Ivan called yesterday to inform Sesi about the incident, she told him Lionel was going with Betty back to the state to have Tatiana’s body laid to rest. Ivan shared the sad news with Sesi, who couldn’t guarantee Lionel would take the news well. Losing Tia was hard enough; adding Zera to it would completely crush him. Still, he had to know, and she promised she would tell him as soon as Tatiana’s body was laid to rest.
Lionel’s arrival at the hospital now made it obvious that he set out to come over as soon as he received the news.
“What floor are they on?” Aaron heard him ask.
“It’s four a. m., Lionel. You’ve barely had any sleep, and you’ve been driving all night. Can you take a rest?” Sesi’s voice came through.
“That’s not the answer to the question I asked, Sesi,” he fumed.
She sighed. “She’s on the sixth floor, and I can get you there faster if you hold on to me.”
“No, I want to feel every step, every moment, and every pain. I don’t want you to make it better,” he answered in a shaky voice.
Aaron heard no other word for the next three minutes, and when the elevator’s ding sound went off, he heard footsteps approaching at a closer pace.
Ivan, who had been asleep a while ago, had now woken up. He must have sensed the familiar presence. Aaron didn’t sleep; he couldn’t. Instead, he paced around and did a mental counting up. He knew only nightmares and torture waited for him in the dream world, and so, as hard as being awake was, he did it with ease. He was six hundred and thirty-seven thousand paces away when he heard Lionel’s voice.
“Sesi and Lionel are here,” he told the now-awake Ivan, and the next second, the two walked in.
Aaron stopped pacing, and his eyes lifted to acknowledge them, both looking torn.
They both appeared tired and miserable, especially Lionel, and Aaron couldn’t fault him. He had buried his younger sister yesterday evening and was now about to lose another. No one could take such a cruel deal at the hands of fate.
Ivan got up, walked over to Sesi, and threw his arms around her for a strengthening hug.
Lionel finally broke the silence after a minute of entering the room. “What happened?”
Aaron pressed his lips together, a wounded look appearing on his face. He would not sugarcoat it. She was in this state because of him, and there was no other reason. “I failed to protect her,” was all he could say.
“Well, Sesi said she was in a terrible state, and I think I’m going to need a better explanation than ‘I failed to protect her’, Aaron,” Lionel growled, stepping towards him.
“I am sorry. Zera found out the truth about Levi Adams, your father, and fled before I could stop her.” Lionel knew the truth. He had told him after discovering it two weeks ago. He couldn’t keep it to himself and act like a saint towards the family he hurt. Lionel had advised him to hold onto the truth until Tia’s burial. That’s what he did, and that plan backfired.
“I was going to tell her as planned, but Nicole beat me to it. She did what she did with the intent to get to Zera, and it worked.” His eyes turned red as he tried to control the sad emotions on his face, and his hands grew hairier, and his claws grew longer. “I should have stopped her, but I didn’t want her to hate me more than she already did, and so I let her go. I failed her, I failed you, and I failed Zion.”
“Aaron, you’re bleeding,” Sesi said, and at her words, the eyes of the other two men in the room dropped to Aaron’s fist to find blood dripping from it and onto the floor.
He unclenched his fist and took a deep breath. “It’s nothing.”
Sesi turned to Ivan, her brows narrowing. “He isn’t back to self-harming, is he?”
“He’s here, listening,” Aaron said, not too pleased that they had diverted their focus from the important matter, Zera, to him.
“Letting your rage get to the point of harming yourself will not change the course of things,” Ivan told him.
He knew that, but rage was the best channel for his emotion over sadness. He needed the balance.
“We are already miserable about what happened to Zera. We cannot be worried for you as well,” Sesi scolded him.
While they had yet to speak, the doctor who had gone into the ICU with Zera when she came in many hours ago walked in. The four people in the waiting room approached the doctor, who had just come in.
“How is she?” Lionel asked.
“Is she out of the woods yet?” Sesi asked.
“Can we see her?” Aaron asked.
“Do you have good news?” Ivan asked.
They all had eyes of expectancy as they stared at the doctor, waiting for the answer to their various questions. The middle-aged doctor gave them all weary eyes and shook his head to answer all their questions. “We have done all we can, but we cannot guarantee she will live past the evening. Her heart is failing at a rate we’ve never seen before, and it’s hard to sustain.” He answered.
Aaron’s heart broke in his chest, and he stepped back. Everything the doctor said after his first sentence, he didn’t listen to. The last piece of hope he had was gone, and Zera would not make it past the evening.
He needed to see her.
He stormed out of the waiting room, heading towards the ICU where Zera had been kept. He heard the panicked call of the nurses, but he didn’t turn to look at them. They weren’t important; only Zera was.
He pushed open the door of the ICU, and there lay the unconscious body of Zera on the bed in the hospital’s Johnny gown. Her head now had a large bandage covering most of her face. The exposed side of her face, which he saw, looked pale. Although the nurse had cleaned the blood on her face while preparing her for surgery, she still had cuts on her forehead, cheeks, and lower lips and blood coated a little below her chin.
The tears he had done so well to control these past hours ran down his face, and he cried out bitterly in pain, and his hands balled into a fist.
“We can’t lose her.” He heard Lionel speak from behind, and he turned to see him with his eyes red and swollen. He didn’t know how long he had been here but didn’t ask. “I lost Tia, and I couldn’t do anything about it. It hasn’t even been a day since we laid her to rest. I can’t lose Zera, too.”
Aaron bit his lips and glanced heavenward. Lionel was hurting, and it wasn’t fair. “There is nothing I can do, Lionel.”
“There is! You’re an alpha, the strongest of your kind. There is a lot you can do.” He replied.
He understood what Lionel asked for, and that was something he couldn’t do.
“I can’t turn her, Lionel. It’s so much more complicated than you think.”
Pio was the wise one of the Dominio pack. He had helped shape him into the man he was before dying and passing on the ability to Ivan. He taught him about the limits and boundaries that existed in the realm of the supernatural. There were limitations to turning a human into a wolf. This was one of those limitations.
“And she will die if you don’t. Is that what you want for me, yourself, and your son?”
“Do you really think I haven’t considered all the options? Don’t you think that was the first thing that crossed my mind after seeing her in that car, bruised and unconscious?”
He wanted Zera back more than anything, but biting her in this condition might do more harm than good to her. If she woke up and found herself in a horrible state, she would hate him, and he could take anything the world threw at him, but he couldn’t bear to live in a world where Zera hated him.
“Do you think I would have handed her over to the doctors if Ivan or I could do anything good to remedy her current state? There are boundaries we don’t push; there are limits we don’t cross because we do not know what we could unleash by doing so. No one had ever been bitten while unconscious before. If they were, there had been no record of them, but these were some of the things I was warned about as a young alpha wolf.”
“You’re right; we will never know, but if Zera could speak now, she wouldn’t want to leave her son all alone in this cruel world. I know she would want better for him,” he said, walking away from the room.
He agreed with Lionel. Zera was selfless in that way, and he loved that about her.
He had stood beside Zera’s bedside in the last two hours, staring at her unconscious body while Lionel’s words replayed in his head. The decision wasn’t an easy one, but it had to be made regardless. This could kill her or save her, but if he did nothing, she would surely die. He chose to defy the promise he made to Pio to never push the boundaries.
“Are you going to do it?” Ivan asked with his eyes fixed on Aaron.
Aaron tore his eyes from Zera over to the door where Ivan stood. “I don’t know. I know Pio would tell me not to, but I want to take my chances. I’d rather live in a world where she survives, and I face the consequences than in a world where she doesn’t exist.”
“You’re right. We will not know until we take the step. She might come out as the girl you’ve always known, only a werewolf, or she might come out completely different. It’s a risk you would have to take.”
Aaron drew a sharp breath and ran a hand through his hair. He knew the probabilities were vast, and some were out of control, but he had his mind made up.
“Then I will leave you to it,” Ivan said, and he stepped out of the ward.
Once again, Aaron and Zera were left alone, and he stepped towards her this time.
His legs now felt weak with the heaviness of the decision before him, and he needed to sit. He walked to the seat beside her bed and slumped onto it.
He took her icy hand into his and gave it a firm squeeze. “I may never get the chance to say this again, but I need you to know that I am sorry.”