Page 38 of Free Me

He did.

Forty minutes later, he was fed, showered, dressed, and in the passenger seat of their shared green sedan. Symon and Jaxson had to run some errands before Jaxson dropped Symon off at Perks, and they agreed to take Miko to the hospital. By the time he made it to the correct floor in the observation wing, he had twenty minutes before visiting hours started. A row of chairs bordered a wide window just outside the ward and, not wanting to get into trouble with the day shift, Miko sat and waited.

He tapped his fingers on his knees, and it struck him that his hands were empty. He hadn’t thought to bring a single gift for Linus. Not a magazine, stuffed animal, or even a bag of his favorite honey & spicy mustard pretzels! If anything could jolt Linus’s taste buds back to life, it would be those things.

Some freaking bondmate I am, can’t even bring my suffering alpha a gift.

Maybe he had time to race down to the nearest gift shop and—Liam and Isa Higgs turned the corner from the direction of the elevators, and Miko’s heart sank. Naturally, Liam had a large gift bag in one hand and a small flower arrangement in the other. Isa leaned on his cane and was a bit red-faced from the walk, and Miko couldn’t imagine the toll all this stress was taking on the aging alpha. The trip from the parking garage to Linus’s room would be a lot easier if Isa used a wheelchair, but Miko knew the Higgs clan backward and forward. Liam and the kids had likely already made that argument and Isa had shot it down.

It would probably take an actual heart attack for Isa Higgs to allow himself to be wheeled further than twenty feet with the use of a wheelchair. Not when one of his kids was hurting. Miko’s own sire would have reacted the same way.

Alphas and their pride.

“Miko, good morning.” Liam gave him an awkward hug around his armful of gifts. “Full disclosure, Brogan called me last night.”

Miko blew out a frustrated breath. “I’d say I’m surprised, but you guys have been best friends longer than I’ve been alive. Is he mad?”

“You haven’t spoken to him?”

“No, I’ve been giving myself space. I slept over at the Beta House.”

“Ah. No, your parents are not mad. They are concerned and a little ashamed that they never saw how outside of things you felt. That they took you for granted for a lot of years.” Liam nudged him with an elbow. “But you didn’t hear any of this from me.”

Miko mimed locking his lips. “I didn’t mean to lose it on them. Everyone is stressed out.”

“You have every right to feel what you feel,” Isa said in his “constable tone” that was not to be questioned. “Your bondmate is hurting, and that will make anyone especially sensitive to, well, anything. It will absolutely inform your mood and your reaction to things, especially as an omega.”

“Well, I definitely feel better after talking to Linus last night.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, he called me.”

“Really.” Liam’s dark eyebrows arched high. “Did you tell him?”

“About the fight with my parents? Yeah, he let me vent about it.” Miko wanted to say more but it had also been a private conversation, and there was such a thing as oversharing with your maybe-future-in-laws. In-laws-twice-over? Whatever.

“No, I meant about feeling the bond.”

“No, I didn’t bring it up yet. His senses are all discombobulated from the concussion and the coma, and I told you I don’t want to pressure Linus into saying he feels something if he doesn’t.”

“I think that’s a mature perspective,” Isa said. “You never expressed urgent interest in finding your mate in front of me, but it’s something that we, as alphas and omegas, are raised expecting to find once we hit the age of majority. It can’t be easy to keep this from him.”

“It’s not. It’s really not, but it feels like the right thing to do. To let Linus’s sense of smell come back naturally, and for him to feel what he feels without me influencing him. If I said something about the bond today and he suddenly told me he felt it, I’m not sure I could believe it one-hundred-percent, you know?”

“I do.” He looked pointedly at Liam.

Liam held his mate’s gaze a beat, then smiled at Miko. “I understand, and I promise we won’t say anything to Linus. I’mjust grateful you’re here and that he reached out to you last night.”

“Me too. Did you know Gaven was his overnight nurse?”

“We did. I called Linus about an hour ago to check in and he told me. He also mentioned the strawberry protein shake and lemon sorbet he had for breakfast were pretty tasteless. Seems he’s still having problems with his senses of taste and smell.”

Lemon sorbet for breakfast? Then again, Miko wasn’t sure what a full liquid diet actually entailed, but it didn’t sound like anything solid. Linus had already lost weight after a week in a coma, and he wasn’t going to gain anything back eating like that. Miko had to remind himself Linus’s doctors knew best even if, to Miko, the diet sounded like a starvation plan.

“He’s only been awake for twenty-four-hours,” Miko said. “I’m sure it’s temporary.”

And if I keep saying it, maybe I’ll even believe it.

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