The Winged beauty and The Tormented Beast

Chapter Seven

~Alexander~

"CLEAR!" The word detonates in my mind, a verbal thunderclap that kick-starts my heart into a frenzied rhythm. My body jerks as life surges back through veins that had resigned to stillness. Air floods my lungs in a ragged, desperate rush, and my eyes snap open to a bleached-white blur.

I'm sitting upright, my chest heaving as if I've just broken the surface from the depths of a dark ocean. The faces encircling me are a mixture of clinical detachment and wide-eyed disbelief. Doctors and nurses, clad in their scrubs, masks dangling beneath their chins, are frozen mid-movement, their expressions mirroring the shock of a miracle they can't quite comprehend.

But it's not their amazed faces that anchor me to reality; it's the sudden, piercing recollection of her—Tabby. The memory cuts sharper than any scalpel, more precise than any defibrillator's jolt. I died that night in the woods. The realization is a cold splash of dread. Tabby, she's out there, she's vulnerable, she's... she's only 11.

A surge of adrenaline kickstarts my limbs into action. I throw the sheets off, the hospital gown clinging to me like a shroud I'm desperate to shed. "Tabby..." The word is a wheeze, a vow, a promise as I attempt to vault off the bed.

But hands—firm and insistent—press against my shoulders, coaxing me back down onto the stiff hospital mattress.

"No, you need to rest," a stern voice instructs, more accustomed to obedience than resistance.

Rest? The word is laughable. Rest is a luxury afforded to those not haunted by the image of an 11-year-old girl alone and scared, a girl who thinks the only person who's ever cared for her is gone. But I'm not gone. Not yet.

The restraint ignites my frustration, transforming it into a seething, primal anger. "You don't understand," I growl, my voice gravelly, raw from disuse or screaming—I can't tell which.

I make another attempt to rise, my muscles coiling, ready to fight against the well-meaning imprisonment of medical protocol. But the hands are relentless, and I'm forced back, pinned by the sheer number of them. My heart hammers, a caged animal within my chest, each beat a drum call to action.

They don't know. They can't know. Tabby needs me. I have to get to her. I have to save her. The thought is a loop, a mantra that fuels my struggle. She's out there, and time is a currency that's slipping through my fingers like sand.

"Sir, please, you just woke up from your deathbed!" The urgency in the doctor's voice claws at me, but it's like he's speaking from the other end of a long, echoing tunnel. His words, meant to tether me to caution, only urge me to break free faster. I can't afford their shock, their whispers of a car wreck, their pity that I'm the sole survivor of a tragedy I have no memory of. They don't understand that the man they saved isn't the man lying in this bed.

The same doctor who brought me back with a jolt of electricity tries to tell me more, but his voice is a distant buzz against the forefront of my mind. New memories crowd into my consciousness. Kyle. That's me now. I'm 21, and my family—no, his family—is gone, torn away by the same accident that nearly claimed this body.

A sharp sting pricks the corners of my eyes, and I'm blinking back tears for people I never met, mourning losses that aren't mine. The doctors, sensing my distress, finally give me space, leaving me alone on the hospital bed, though they would never understand my battlefield of conflicting emotions.

I hate this—the invasion of grief that belongs to someone else. It's an emotional hangover, a part of the process when I jump into a new life. It always fades, but the initial wave is a brutal reminder that I'm trapped in a cycle of borrowed time and borrowed hearts.