Page 78 of Star-crossed Betas

Then the smell hits me. It’s not just smoke in here.

I can smell burned flesh—Fee’s burned flesh.

I swallow the vomit that rises up my throat and focus on how I’m going to get him out of here.

Shifting quickly, I punch my fist through the window, which already has a crack in it from the extreme heat. Thankfully, it shatters easily. I turn Fee onto his side and shift back. In oneswift movement that will possibly kill us both, I bite down onto his shoulder for purchase and dive out of the window.

Making sure to land on my back so I’m cushioning his fall, several of my ribs crack at the impact. For the time being, the adrenaline coursing through my veins is enough to mask most of the pain.

I shift back again and carry Fee’s limp body further from the house as debris keeps landing all around us.

“Fee, love, I need you to wake up, okay? You need to wake up and shift so you can heal.” I jostle him in my arms. Pressing two fingers to his neck, I can feel a pulse. It’s faint, but it’s still there, and I need him to hang on in there.

He’s so badly burned; his usually beautiful olive skin is covered in blisters, and the wounds are deep. I dread to think of what the smoke damage has done to his lungs. I don’t think he’ll heal quickly enough in his human form. He needs to shift, but he can’t if he remains unconscious.

Once I lay him back down on the ground out of further harm’s way, I really begin to panic. This can’t be how our story ends; we were meant to become crotchety old men together. I refuse to be a twenty-five-year-old widower.

“Fee, you need to wake up. You don’t get to leave me behind, okay? When we go, we go together, and it’s not going to be today, so you need to fucking wake up!” I’m yelling in his face with tear-stained cheeks, but it’s no use.

“Phoenix Campbell, I’m Ordering you to shift right now!”

My own voice reverberates around my skull in a way I hardly recognise. It’s familiar but not a sound that has ever come from me before.

It’s a voice I grew up with. It’s the authoritative voice of my father.

Not only that, it’s an Order.

An Alpha Order.

Twenty-nine

October 2022

Phoenix Campbell

The faint sound of voices slowly stirs me awake. I try to swallow, but my throat feels like it’s been scraped raw with razor blades. My eyelids are heavy, and I squint at the light in the room. It’s not even that bright, but it feels intrusive and makes my eyes sting. When I try to speak, only a rasping noise comes out, and even that makes me wince in pain.

“Fee? Oh my god. Thank fuck, you’re awake. He’s gonna be okay now, isn’t he?” Cee seems to be half speaking to me and half talking to someone else I haven’t spotted yet.

“Yeah, he should be out of the woods.” A deep male voice replies. It’s vaguely familiar, but I can’t place who it belongs to at present.

“Here, have a sip of water,” Cee passes me a cup with a straw and pushes it to my lips. I take a few gentle sips, and thecool water feels blissful going down my inflamed throat. I’m so parched I feel as though I could down several pints of water, but Cee pulls the straw away before I can guzzle it and tells me to see how it settles first.

As my eyes adjust to the unfamiliar room, I take in Cee as he perches on the edge of the bed. He looks as bad as I feel. His bloodshot eyes have dark shadows underneath them; he looks exhausted, like he hasn’t slept for days.

It’s funny how when you see someone frequently, you don’t really notice them getting older, but now I’m really looking, I can see how much the boy I met almost five and a half years ago has gone, and how much I love the man he has become.

“What’s happened? Where are we?” I croak out, my voice still raspy despite the glass of water.

“There was a fire… You were unconscious upstairs, and I managed to get you out, but we don’t know how long you were trapped inside before I got there. You were badly burned, and your lungs were in bad shape from all the smoke inhalation.”

What. The. Fuck. A fire? How would our house end up on fire? Why didn’t I get myself out? This doesn’t make any sense.

“I’m so sorry, Fee. It’s all my fault.” I scrunch my face up in confusion.

“What do you mean? How is it your fault? Did you set our house on fire?” I ask, knowing full well he absolutely would not have, and there will be some absurd reason he’s decided to shoulder the blame for some sort of freak accident.

“No, of course I didn’t set our house on fire,” he huffs.

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