Forty-two

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I always wished that nothing would ever change. I always thought nothing ever would, that my life was at a perfect standstill, a sweet bliss that I never wanted to end. I was always hoping and praying that things would never change, because when something did it always brought more pain. I knew that change could bring confusion, I knew it could bring terror and an unbreathable amount of fear.

What I didn't realize was that change also brought good.

It brought happiness, it brought comfort.

It brought my mate.

I may not have known that Austin was my mate, or even what a mate was at the time, but I knew that I didn't like it when he left. It was like I could feel him leaving, something in my chest pulled tighter with every step that he took in the direction away from me. A sense of panic had me running after him, being slowed down by just my two legs and weak new body. Kara and Shar found me at the top of the stairs, staring down them with warry eyes and pacing back and forth with agitation and despair.

By the time they had gotten me to follow them away and to the small moving room, I thought that it was too late, that Alpha was gone and from the urgency and anger that I felt coming from him I didn't think he was ever coming back. I didn't know what the small room was that they took me into, but I figured it couldn't be bad if they stepped in it as well, letting the fourth wall to slide closed behind them.

The fact that they didn't seem fazed in the slightest by its jolting and humming kept me clam, but the moment that wall opened again, and I saw that we were no longer in the same place we were when it closed, panic set in. Fear of the unknown kept me rooted in place, aside from causing me to press myself against the far, cold metal wall. The bite of the steal reminded me a lot of the collar I used to wear and the chain that always seemed to always clipped to it.

Subconsciously my hand reached up, the back of my knucks gently grazing over the raised skin that acted as its replacement. The silver metal had burned and rubbed my skin raw enough over the years that my throat and back of my neck would forever have scars in the places it chafed the most.

To observed in my own head, I was completely oblivious to Kara as she tried to coax me out of the, what I know now as, the elevator. Shar tried as well, but I had shut my brain off, focusing only on the repeated motion on my knuckled running over the scares.

The only thing that broke it was him.

His hands clasped around mine, startling me out of my daze. I pulled back out of his hold form fear, but once I looked up, I realized that the straining my chest had slackened to just a phantom pull. Still, I was startled form his leaving and sudden reappearing, so I only allowed myself to place my fingers in the palm of his hand. I pulled back a little every time he tried to close his hands back around them. He quickly got the hint and just sat there, hands palm up and open, letting me trace the lines in his palms nervously. Something happened then.

My throat vibrated with sound, but it was not a growl or snarl, not even a whine.

I don't know how I was able to do it. I don't know how the words were formed as they came out of my mouth, but as they rolled off my tounge I knew the sounds where what I meant for them to be. My voice may have been shaky and horse, the syllables broken and leaving my vocal cords with a scratchy sound. But still, I knew. 

Alpha seemed to be confused, asking "Go? Go where Max?"

I pulled one of my hands away from his, my body instantly missing the warmth that came from the small contact. I pointed over his shoulder and back behind him into the large, mostly empty floor of the hospital lobby. I had been here before, but it wasn't the large expanse of space that sent me on edge. It was the fact that we seemed to end up here out of nowhere on top of not having Alpha with me.

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