Page 7 of Desperate Decisions

He growled, but he sat back down, fixing me with a glare.

“Go.”

“Amara, I’m not fucking leaving while you’re in the hospital.”

“Get. Out.” I growled, my heart rate monitor going haywire and summoning a pair of nurses to rush in.

“Sir, please step outside,” one of the nurses said, ushering him toward the door and closing it behind him.

They checked me over and once they were satisfied I wasn’t going to kick the bucket in the next few seconds, they stepped back to talk to me.

“Do you remember what happened? How you got in this condition?”

I gave them a vague explanation. Met a foreign alpha, fucked the afternoon away, with no mention of the attempted abduction and us fleeing from Naples to Rome.

“How are you feeling?” one of them asked.

“Like ass,” I replied.

“Hopefully a few good meals and the IV will get you feeling better. Do you have the contact information for your mate? We should let them know you’re here.”

“Uh, yeah, I don’t exactly know his name.”

The nurses exchanged a glance. “We’ll consult with the doctors for some medication to mitigate your symptoms, but if it’s at all possible, we should get in contact with your mate. That’s the simplest way to calm down your body’s reaction to being apart.”

I sighed and wiggled against the pillows. “I’ll just get used to suffering. There’s no way in hell I’m gonna be able to find him again.”

“Never say never.” One of them patted my hand.

I didn’t bother to reply. I had no choice but to say never. It wasn’t like my mystery mate was going to show up on my doorstep. God, I was so fucked. This was a million times worse than getting drunk-married in Vegas. Did I still have to register as mated if I had no one’s name to put down?

“Would you like us to keep your father out of here?”

“Please. Tell him I’ll text when I’m out of here.”

The nurses bustled off to get rid of him for me, and I knew they had succeeded from the rise of shouting that went silent a moment later.

I stared up at the ceiling. Would rubbing one out set off the heart monitors again? Now that I was on my way to healing, my body was ratcheting up other issues and raising even more questions.

How the fucking fuck did I get bonded when I didn’t go through a heat? Whatever the hell had happened in Rome wasn’t that, as close as some of the symptoms might’ve been. That wasn’t how things worked.

I should’ve at least gotten his first name out of him so I could go full Internet stalker. But alas, I hadn’t asked and I was just going to have to fucking regret that for the rest of my goddamn life.

By the time dinner rolled around, I was bored out of my skull. I hadn’t thought to ask my dad to get my phone from the apartment so I had nothing to occupy myself with. The nurses were run off their feet, so I couldn’t even bother any of them to hang out with me.

My night shift nurse checked in before I fell asleep. “We got your most recent lab results. Your levels are much more reasonable and you’ll be allowed to go home in the morning after breakfast, provided your next set of labs is consistent with this.”

“Sweet. Thanks.”

That was a relief at least. I still didn’t feel fabulous, but I was definitely a million times better than when I had woken up here. That ever-present neediness still rumbled under my skin, my body doing its best to order me back into proximity with the alpha who had apparently bonded me.

I squirmed petulantly when I was left alone again. “Stop it, for the love of god. We can’t go back to Italy.” Saying it out loud didn’t work any better than screaming it internally.

Trying to keep my mind occupied, I counted the holes in the ceiling tiles: 4,684.

If I did go back to Italy, the alpha would probably think I’d lost my goddamn mind after I’d fled Naples in a panic, but I felt like I was likely to do that anyway eventually. This was probably why they had all those tragic stories of omegas tossing themselves into the sea after the death of their mates. Having to deal with this bodily bullshit on top of grief like that would be a nightmare.

I slept fitfully, waking a dozen times whenever I heard someone walk by, my sleeping brain bursting with hope that it might be my alpha showing up. Each time I grumbled and pulled the blankets up to my chin, holding them tightly to resist the urge to get my fingers on my pussy and relieve some of the burn urging me to touch. I guessed technically it was urging me to get him to touch.

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