Chapter 4: Basement

I clamped the tubing with my thumb and ripped the line out of his arm.

Blood ran down his wrist onto the sheet.

He made a sound through his teeth that shook the bed frame.

I felt it in my own arm, a white-hot sting, and I almost dropped the clamp.

"Lucille!" I yelled into the hall.

The guard woke so fast he fell off his chair.

"Get Lucille from the basement. Run."

He ran.

I tore a fresh line kit open with my teeth.

Stellan's arm was all muscle and thrashing, and I put my whole weight on it.

"Look at me," I said. "Stellan. Look at me."

His eyes came open, gold all the way through.

His wolf was right up against the skin, trying to get out and fight whatever was eating him.

"If you shift with a hole in your chest, you'll split your staples and die on this floor," I said. "Stay a man. That's an order."

He stared at me.

His fingers dug into the mattress.

The gold sank back to brown, a little at a time.

I got the new line into the back of his other hand and opened clean saline wide.

Lucille came through the door in her socks, out of breath.

"What the hell."

"Silver in his drip. Draw me blood off the old site and hang two more bags. From the basement stock, not this floor's."

She was already moving.

We worked for twenty minutes without saying anything but numbers.

His heart rate came down, a hundred and twenty, a hundred, ninety.

The sweat on his face dried.

The bag had only run a few minutes.

If I'd come up at four instead of twenty to, it would have run an hour.

I took the poisoned bag off the pole and held it up to the light.

Somebody had written on the label in black marker.

L.R. 0320.

Lucille looked at it over my shoulder.

"That's not my hand," she said. "I make my R's like a pretzel. Everybody knows that."

"I know."

"Somebody wants it to be me."

"I know."

Stellan spoke from the bed, hoarse.

"Bag it. Give it to my guard. Nobody else."

I put it in a biohazard bag, sealed it, and wrote my name across the seal.

The guard took it like it was a live grenade.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Forbidden Mate: Claimed by My Ex's Alpha Uncle from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.