Simon was so stunned and horrified by the fact that Nathan had just gone and abandoned him in Viola! that he couldn’t move for a long time. In reality, only a few seconds actually passed. It felt like a thousand more, like he had been waiting in the same spot for years and years for his runaway lover to return.

There was chaos in the restaurant as all the patrons noticed something was greatly amiss. Most of them must have cast aside the notion that there was someone dangerous in their midst when they realized it wasn’t their vehicle being broken into; now that Nathan had disturbed them, they had become aware and consequently nervous. They formed a crowd, milling in the aisles, pressing against the windows. The quiet of only a few minutes before, the quiet that had reigned through the restaurant for the entire evening, suddenly broke and became a thunderous din as everyone tried to speak over everyone else. As a result, no one was really saying anything. They were just screaming.

Maybe it was the screaming that released Simon from the trancelike state he had been thrust into by shock and betrayal. Maybe it was the fact that the hostess grabbed him by the arm, her mouth moving as if she was trying to tell him something important.

Maybe it was the fact that he had finally, finally realized that Nathan had been working up to something momentous and important throughout this dinner. It hadn’t simply been for an exchange of “I love you’s.” It had been for something more, something that had been cut short.

Whatever the reason, it got Simon moving.

He yanked his arm away from the hostess and started to shove his way through the crowd. The patrons had been so spaced out before that he hadn’t quite understood just how many of them there were. Now that they were all crammed together, he was finally able to understand the scale of things. Everything was so, so much bigger than he previously thought.

If he had been human, he never would have gotten anywhere.

But Simon wasn’t human. He was a wolf. And not just a wolf, but a physically powerful omega, driven by adrenaline, love, and a protective instinct that had been developing inside him without him ever having noticed it until right this moment.

Where he stepped, the humans noticed him. It was his presence preceding him. Something buried deep inside them responded to the primal nature of the animal within him, and it made them get out of the way. Those who didn’t, who were incapable of doing so because they were all packed together into awkward spaces like sardines in a can, he pushed them away like they were as light as balloons.

Someone occasionally grabbed for him. Security, the hostess, Pascal the waiter. It didn’t matter. He kept pushing and shoving, redirecting the crowd with his very anger, until eventually he was at the front door. Sprinting the last couple feet, he burst through them and out into the calm of night. The air seemed chilled, almost cold, in stark contrast to the balmy moderateness of before.

As he rounded the corner of the building, Simon saw them. Nathan, his true mate, his future mate, his lover and his love, the only one who had ever understood him.

And he saw the man who he had bitten in the process of saving his mother that day at the craft store, the man who had presumably set Tobias Noble after him. The man known only as Richard Cox.

Nathan seemed to be speaking to Cox, who stood beside the beaten corpse of Nathan’s pretty little Chevy Malibu.

Maybe he’ll get him talked down, he thought.

Then came the gunshot.

The sound was high and sharp and fierce, yet also strangely muted a split second after that initial burst. Muffled screams echoed from the nearby restaurant.

Nathan staggered, clutching at his stomach with one hand. A comical expression of surprise flickered across his face, perfectly illuminated by all the various forms of light found within a city. He dropped down to his knees.

Someone howled, and Simon realized it was a wail of grief coming from his own throat. He, too, was on his knees. His joints ached abruptly, and his stomach jumped around from a force within as the baby kicked for the first time. Simon felt the presence that had bothered him so when he hadn’t known what it was; he finally understood that it was the baby, reacting to what he was feeling.

Reacting now, to his devastation.

Whirling red-and-blue lights flashed across the street as the police advanced another block, so close now that they might as well have already arrived. Cox glanced in the direction of the squealing vehicles, then lunged down and grabbed onto Nathan with both arms. The gesture was absolutely ridiculous, since Nathan was so broad and Cox was so emaciated, but size often had little to do in matters such as this when adrenaline was involved. Pulling upwards on Nathan, with strength almost superhuman in nature, Cox dragged the limp wolf over to the rusty truck and tossed him inside. Then, snatching keys from his pocket, fumbling with the gun to do so, he jumped behind the steering wheel and pulled away from the curb fast enough to leave smoking black tread marks on the concrete.

Simon pushed himself sideways just as the truck blazed past him, picking up speed. The overheated tires missed him by only a few inches, stirring his hair around in all directions.

No telling where Cox was going, where he was taking Nathan. No telling how this was all going to end, except for very, very badly.

Reacting before he even really knew what he was doing, Simon shifted. He shifted right out there in the middle of the street with dozens of people watching, most of whom saw him stop being a man and become a wolf with golden fur and a rather long tail. Twisting around, Simon put his paws to pavement and streaked after the truck like he was made of light itself.

The rusty truck headed directly for the approaching police cars, some of which tried to swerve to block the road. Braking, the front of the truck wavered, and then its rear fishtailed, before the worn tires caught again. Cox must have slammed on the gas again because the heavy vehicle lurched forward again in a drunken manner, scraping between two cop cars. Scraps of paint flew and the truck lost both of its mirrors at once, one of which exploded upon contact with the ground.

The braking was what allowed Simon to catch up. He tucked his head down, pushed himself forward, to his limit and beyond even that, and then he jumped longer and higher than he had ever done before in his entire life. He hung in the air for a moment, as free and weightless as a bird, and then he crashed down chest-first into the back of the truck.

The metal of the truck bed was so incredibly, impossibly rusty that one of Simon’s paws punched clean through. Lurching, he yelped in alarm before managing to wrench himself free again. He left behind clumps of fur and his right back leg was badly scraped, but he was otherwise unharmed; the same couldn’t be said for the truck, which now had another window through which a person could watch the pavement go whipping away.

Nathan lay on the bottom of the bed, both hands clamped over a bloody hole on the left side of his stomach. Blood pumped sluggishly up from the wound, so dark and slick that it was like Nathan was bleeding snakes, like the rivulets were alive.

Nathan! Simon shrieked. He might only have screamed in his head, he was beyond knowing at this point, but the alpha jumped as if he had heard. His eyes popped open wide.

“Simon?” Nathan groaned.

Whatever Simon might have wanted to say was knocked from his mind as the truck started to swerve and weave all across the road. The sky was a dizzying funnel of blackness, briefly filled with lights and glimpses of buildings, before pirouetting back into the shadows again. Cox drove like a maniac, either trying to get the police to leave him alone, to dislodge the furious pregnant wolf which had boarded his vessel like an unwelcome pirate, or both. Or none, and he was simply drunk. Or insane.

There was nothing for Simon to hold onto as the truck blazed wildly across the city with more and more police cruisers joining in on the chase, called from all across Norfolk, from Portsmouth, from the other neighboring cities. The bed was smooth, the rust too flaky for him to dig his claws into it. He rolled all over, bumped and jostled and thrown, gathering bruises like a bad apple.

Nathan was in the same situation, only he was leaving smears and splotches of blood behind.

He’s going to die. Going to die before he meets the baby.

Simon was terrified, more afraid of the outcome of this than he had ever been afraid of anything in his entire life. Nathan could die, bleeding out. The baby could die, miscarried from this stress and the constant barrage of impacts.

Simon could die. Would die, if he was left with nothing at the end of this.

He had only just found his real purpose, had only really just begun to understand his place in life. He had only recently started to get excited about what his life held for him, to understand he could love an alpha without losing himself. And now it was all about to be taken away from him, from both of them.

No.

The voice inside him wasn’t his own and it didn’t belong to Nathan, either. It wasn’t even really a voice at all, just a toneless denial of absolutely everything in the entire world.

It was the wolf inside him, gathering its last bit of strength because a wolf will always fight to the very end. Even starving, even dying, a wolf would never back down. A wolf would never give in. Not when there was still a chance. And there was always, always a chance.

Simon got his paws underneath himself and pushed up, then braced himself hard against the wall of the truck bed. Crouching low, fighting to hold his balance for just a second longer, he threw himself forward into another leap. He had no destination in mind, no purpose other than forward.

His powerful, muscular shoulders slammed against the truck’s rear window. Glass exploded all around him, thick shards slicing away swathes of his fur, tearing into his skin, shredding tendons and muscle and meat. Collapsing into the backseat, he pushed himself forward again with everything he had left, writhing and struggling and fighting, until he was now up in the front, draped across the center console.

Cox stared at him, his eyes completely off the road. With one hand, he grabbed wildly at empty air, searching for the gun that had clearly slid away from him in the middle of his escape attempt.

Simon stared at him and opened his mouth. With his last remaining strength, he formed a word.

“Why?”

Then a police car struck them from behind, sending the truck spinning. A horrendous, earth-wrenching crash split the world in two as the truck hit the guardrail of the bridge they were driving on, spanning the length of the Elizabeth River.

The rail might have been able to survive the impact, had the police car behind the truck not spun out as well. And the cruiser after that was incapable of putting its brakes on it time, and careened right into both of them. That was, at least, the final version of events which ended up in the police report after weeks of gathering testimonies and eyewitness accounts.

All Simon knew was that he was suddenly weightless again after the impact, telling him that his luck had run out, that he had died and was soaring away to Heaven—or wherever it was that gay shifters went.

In the next instant, he knew he wasn’t going to be as lucky as to be given such an easy way out. The weightlessness came to an end with a resounding crash, and this time it was a very familiar sensation, like diving into a pool, only thousands of times louder. Water surged up around the sides of the truck, cutting the light down to a point where they might all as well have been dead already except for the fact that Simon was still breathing. His teeth were chattering, his body shaking as the enormous, chilled weight of the entire river sought to invade the truck. His paws were already wet, water bursting in through all the various holes and cracks the truck had sustained. Soon enough, he was soaked.

The hole he had made in the rear window would more than suffice as a way to get himself out of here, even if the whole rear part of the truck was crumpled up in new and fascinating ways as a result of all the recent collisions. However, he didn’t just have himself to think about. There were two other people at risk here.

The cold, cold water was already up over the torn leather seat cushions, rising higher and faster with every second. Simon’s wolf senses, and his human senses, were completely overloaded. This was an environment he had never experienced before, had never even needed to imagine. It felt as if he was in some sort of rocket ship that had run out of fuel and now it was just drifting eternally through space while the vacuum force from outside ripped out all the air.

Getting his sodden paws underneath him, Simon wriggled through to the back seat, which was tilted up at an angle now. Water poured into his face and he pushed himself out through the window and looked through the murky darkness in the direction of where he had last seen Nathan’s prone body.

Nathan wasn’t there.

Panic coursed through Simon’s body, his heart fluttering in his aching chest. Though wolves usually loved to be in water, animals didn’t naturally prepare to hold their breath before entering such an environment. That was a human-centric awareness, an ability which even infants fresh from the womb possessed. In the wild, animals had to come about this skill through trial and error.

Having never been in this kind of situation before, Simon’s wolf was completely unprepared. It wanted to breathe, didn’t quite understand why it couldn’t, why it had to resist the burning, primal urge to open its mouth and draw breath.

Simon looked up, towards the surface of the river. He paddled his paws in the water, his fur tugged around his body by currents. There was air up there, sweet, night air, but there was something more important in that direction, an absence of information that helped him to figure out what exactly it was that he should do now: no body. No Nathan. Not within his sight. He could see two dark, drifting blobs off to the sides, police cruisers, but no people.

Wherever Nathan was, Simon would just have to hope that he could take care of himself because there was something else that he had to do.

Even though everything inside him screamed that this was a fool’s errand, that everyone involved in this would be better off if he left Richard Cox to drown. That would be like killing a man, and Simon just couldn’t let himself do such a thing. There was clearly something wrong here and he wanted—needed—to know what it was.

Simon shifted back into his human form. The currents battered him as water flooded in to fill the spaces that he had once occupied, pushing up against his changing body. A rush of bubbles poured from his nose from the effort. The urge to breathe was so awful, so terribly overwhelming, but he fought against it and kicked out in the direction of the sinking truck.

Swimming had never been his forte, as he didn’t really have the shape for it. Still, it was physical exercise and he had tried everything at some point, even going so far as to crack a bone in his arm once while skateboarding. He never did that again, though he did go snowboarding a year after that with better results.

All the same, he had experience with the activity, and he pushed himself easily back inside the truck. As the truck sank, the light faded more and more. Simon could barely see anything at all, couldn’t use any of his other senses. It was all he could do to make out the fact that the entire left side of the truck had been hit so hard that it had literally folded over, restricting Cox’s movement. He had managed to get his seatbelt off, or maybe he hadn’t been wearing it at all. However, Cox was unconscious now, drifting while gently pinned.

Reaching out, Simon grabbed the man and pulled as hard as he could. Something must have given—metal, fabric, or flesh—because Cox came suddenly towards him after a few moments of struggle.

Tucking the unconscious man under his arm, Simon turned around in the cramped space and started swimming up towards the distant surface. Black spots obscured his vision like schooling fish and his chest was on fire, burning hotter and brighter than it had any right to in such an environment as this. His clothes were soaked, dragging against him. He was so, so tired, every part of him hurting from the abuse it had taken during the crazy ride.

Still, he swam. He swam, because a wolf never gives in.

Suddenly, blessedly, his head broke through the surface. All of the breath rushed out of his lungs in an explosive gust, and he pulled in an enormous gasp, swallowing air and water simultaneously. Treading water didn’t really work well when he had a huge, bobbing weight tilting him to one side. Turning his head, hardly able to see for the sting of water in his eyes, waves sloshing against his face repeatedly, he looked around for somewhere to go before his body finally gave out on him.

All of his life, he had thought of the Elizabeth River as being shallow. That was how it was near all the various parks in Portsmouth. Here, so close to where the waters filtered in from the ocean, it wasn’t that shallow at all. He couldn’t just swim over to shore, because there really was no shore right here. There were high concrete walls fashioned to control flooding, to maintain the proper height of the water at such an important length between the two cities.

Turning and turning in circles, disorienting himself, Simon finally saw a smooth section that looked as if he might be able to reach it if he could just get over there. It was so far to the right that if he had been anything less than a determined bastard, he never would have been able to make it.

But he was a determined bastard, and he started to swim to the right. He let the current carry him, trying not to fight against it. If he tried to go directly to the right, the water kept pushing him away. If he just swam straight, he would run out of steam and drown. The only thing to do seemed to be to head at a diagonal and to hope he arrived at the right spot at the right time.

It seemed as if he swam for the entire rest of the night, as if the sun would come up and he would still just be going at it. He was so cold, so tired. So goddamn sad. The weight of his burdens would drag him down if he stopped moving for even a second. He had no idea what had happened, had no idea if Nathan was even still alive right now. Hell, at this point, Simon didn’t even know if Cox was alive. The man hadn’t moved an inch.

Red and blue lights flashed out across the water from the police cars still up on the bridge. An emergency helicopter from Norfolk—Portsmouth didn’t have any—soared by overhead, shining a spotlight on the water as if looking for survivors. The lights didn’t come anywhere near the two of them.

Then, suddenly, the smooth lip of concrete Simon had seen before was right there beside him, scraping against Cox and causing his head to dunk underwater. Letting out a breathless cry of alarm, Simon shoved his shoulder up underneath Cox and managed to heave the man halfway up onto the concrete. Then, he pulled himself up onto the lip as well, flopping onto his back.

This part of the wall must have been designed as a place for maintenance workers to have easy access to boats and other watercraft. Whatever it was, it had quite literally saved their lives.

Simon focused on breathing for what might have been an eternity, or just a single minute. Straightening up, coughing a little, he looked over at where Cox still lay limply across the concrete lip. His feet dangled in the water.

Standing up wasn’t an option. Crawling over to Cox, Simon grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him further so he wasn’t still in the river. He turned the man on his side, then was about to start pounding him on the back when Cox jerked and coughed, bringing up mouthfuls of water on his own.

Simon waited until Cox had stopped coughing and was just laying there looking blankly at his surroundings. The police were still combing around the edges of the river, the helicopter doing its rounds, but they were effectively alone.

Now or never.

“Cox.”

There was no reaction from the man.

“Richard fucking Cox,” Simon snarled.

There was a soft sound in response that time, a faint wheezing that at first Simon mistook as rough breathing before realizing it was laughter.

Cox let out another laugh. “You know that’s not my real name, right?”

“That’s not important,” Simon growled. Sudden rage swamped over him. All that stopped him from drowning Cox himself was the desire to know exactly what the hell had started all this. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You tried to mug my mom and now you have some sort of need for revenge? What the hell is your logic here, you bastard?”

“You’re a fucking animal. Not in a good way either. Holy shit. And you think I’m just going to leave you alone?”

“Took you fucking long enough,” Simon snapped. He bared his fangs in warning, letting the light glance across them. Cox flinched visibly. “Try again.”

The scrawny man looked much more uneasy than before, rather than simply resigned. “Okay, okay. Holy shit, don’t do that. Freaks me the fuck out. Okay. I followed you for awhile after you fucking bit me, okay?”

“You stalked me?”

“Watched you. You and that principal you’re fucking.” Cox wheezed again, except this time his laughter seemed nervous. “And you. Both of you just animals. And teachers.” He spit out the words like they were the worst swears he would possibly think of. “Two of the worst, most ravenous goddamn things in the entire world.”

“What do you have against teachers?” Simon supposed this might not be the best time to point out that Nathan was a principal, not a teacher—though he had been in the past.

“What the fuck do you think?” Cox said, and his voice was almost like a snarl as well. “Didn’t even let me get my goddamn GED. My life fucking sucks, man. Always has. Never fucking had a chance. Never got given a chance. I hate you bastards. All of you.”

Simon closed his eyes, trying not to feel sorry for the poor jerk. Shit like this was exactly why he felt so bad for Tobias Noble. The system hadn’t been adaptable enough to accommodate them and as a result, they were considered failures. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. And no fucking wonder a person like Cox would develop a grudge against teachers and the like.

“I’m sorry,” Simon said.

Cox blinked. Simon hadn’t realized until now that the man’s forehead was bleeding, trickling filmy red ribbons into his eyes. Who knew what other injuries he had sustained in the crash and the subsequent fall?

Hell, Simon had no idea how badly he himself might be injured. He was running on pure adrenaline at this point, and there was no telling how much longer all that would last. It all had to come crashing down around him at some point. He knew that.

“You’re sorry? You’re sorry? It’s too late for sorry. You think an apology is going to make up for the fact that I have to steal to even be able to live? That I haven’t had a steady place to sleep in years? Haven’t held down a job in just as long? I live out of my shitty truck, and now that’s at the bottom of the river.” Cox balled his hand into a fist and brought it down roughly on the concrete.

Bright light swept across the river, wavering over the both of them where they crouched on the concrete. The spotlight swept back, stopping directly on top of both of them this time. Someone cried out to them through a loudspeaker, though the words were too indistinct to make out. The message was clear, anyway. They had been found. The police would be coming now. They had only a few minutes left alone together.

Really, Simon could take a step back and distance himself from all of this now. He had the information that he wanted, that Cox had a horrific life up to this point and was rightfully furious about it. That was all the motive he needed to be satisfied, to understand this whole damn thing wasn’t just a result of random aggression.

As much as he wanted to distance himself, he couldn’t. That just wasn’t his way.

“Cox.”

“My name is Jeremy. Jeremy Thomas.” Jeremy shrugged one thin shoulder. “You might as well be the first to know, since soon everyone else will.”

For some reason, Simon was touched. He knew he shouldn’t have been, that knowing the man’s real name was useless, but he was touched all the same that he had been trusted with that information. “Jeremy, then. I know an apology isn’t going to make up for everything that’s happened to you. I’d be lying if I said it was supposed to help even a little bit. But, things are actually going to get better for you.”

Jeremy looked at him as if he was insane.

The emergency helicopter came in for a landing on a street nearby, up at the top of the wall. Police cars had parked there, and now an ambulance joined in the mix. A fire engine honked its way through traffic up on the bridge, and Simon could see a strange orange cast to the sky in that direction. Something must have caught on fire from all those high-speed collisions, or was in danger of doing so.

Footsteps thundered their way closer by the second, pushing down the stairs to where the two of them crouched.

Still Simon just looked at Jeremy, holding his disbelieving gaze.

“Your story will make the jury feel sorry for you. They’ll lighten your punishment. If you go to the media with it, even better. People will sympathize with you. You’ll still go to jail, but you’ll have a roof over your head, three meals a day, opportunities for work and education. You can enter a program, try to get your GED again. There are certain employers who even work with prisons to give people like you a better chance at life!”

He had to shout that last part, because now the police were upon them. Simon found himself surrounded, pulled in several different directions at once by a dozen hands before the police got themselves sorted out and worked together. They lifted him away from Jeremy, started to carry him up the stairs; on the ground below, Jeremy had been forced to the ground, rolled roughly onto his stomach so his hands could be cuffed together behind his back.

Simon worried for the other man’s injuries, but mostly he hoped that the man would remember what he had said. A wolf never stopped fighting. Maybe it was time for humans to do the same.

Once the officers reached the top of the stairs, they dragged him over towards an ambulance, where a pair of paramedics and a stretcher already awaited him. The medics worked quickly and professionally, strapping him into the stretcher while asking him simple questions. He answered all of them correctly, which seemed to alleviate some of their worry. Nevertheless, he was soon bouncing all around in the back of the ambulance, staring up at the ceiling while the medics sliced up his clothes to see what sort of injuries he had. They kept asking him what parts of him hurt, though he was really just too numb to be able to answer properly. Numb from the icy water, and numb from his empty, aching heart.

No one would tell him anything about Nathan. They acted as if they didn’t even hear his questions, as if he wasn’t saying anything at all unless he was answering one of their questions.

It felt like he was still in the river, drifting, being pulled down into the dark.

Eventually, the lurching ambulance jerked to a halt. The medics around him burst into a flurry of activity, getting him off the vehicle and onto solid ground. They pushed him through a seemingly-endless, brightly-lit corridor where other, random faces occasionally glanced down at him.

“It’s like a horror movie,” Simon murmured aloud.

“The horror is over,” one of the paramedics responded softly, soothingly.

Until I know Nathan is okay, it won’t ever be over.

The world spun as his stretcher was turned, taken inside an examination room where a table awaited just for him. Nurses were already in the room, waiting to assist.

Once Simon was on the table, the paramedics left and the nurses took over where they had left off. He answered the same sort of questions, and then there was nothing for him to do but suffer through the examination. They checked practically every single part of him, moving his limbs this way and that, asking if this touch hurt, or could he feel that, and how bad was the pain on a scale of 1-10?

His heart was a 10, but the rest of his body was somewhere around a 6.5. He was hurting pretty good, but he wouldn’t be winning any awards for Most Pain Ever Felt At One Time or anything like that.

His stomach was examined, palpated, studied, and listened to. The baby was pronounced fine, though he was shipped off to an ultrasound specialist just to make sure. After that, he went to visit an x-ray technician in a disturbing, empty room that made all sorts of weird sounds.

As time passed, everything all started blurring together. Faces turned indistinct. He stopped caring about voices and just responded to the words spoken without really knowing who he was talking to anymore. He was just so, so tired. He wanted to sleep until the world decided to make sense again.

After there were no more tests that could possibly be performed on him, a doctor showed up in the room. Simon only knew the man was a doctor because he announced himself as such.

“Do you understand how lucky you were?”

Simon looked right at the man, feeling all his frustration and fear welling up inside him, coloring his voice with despair. “No,” he croaked. “No, I’m not lucky. Because my boyfriend was shot in the stomach, and I think he’s dead because no one will tell me anything about him. I don’t care about me. I know I’m alive. I care about him. I care about Nathan.”

The doctor frowned, pursed his lips in thought. He seemed to be trying to come to some sort of decision. Simon just waited, because apparently these people thought he just had all the time in the world to sit around and be at their whim. And maybe he did, because where the hell else was he going to go? What else was he going to do? He was at their whim until they released him.

Finally, the doctor let out a sigh. “You aren’t making my job very easy, Simon.”

“My life isn’t fucking easy,” Simon snarled in response. He gestured angrily at himself, not knowing what exactly he was referring to. His omega status, his pregnancy, or the fact that he was completely alone. “You don’t have any right to complain to me right now.”

The doctor blinked, removed his glasses and started to rub at the lenses with his white coat. Simon recalled Nathan’s stupid pretend glasses and felt his heart squeeze inside his chest.

“Nathan is in surgery.”

Simon’s heart squeezed so utterly tight that he thought it might turn into a diamond from the pressure. “He’s alive.”

“Yes.” The doctor replaced his glasses on the bridge of his nose, then nodded. His spectacles immediately slipped down and he pushed them up again, a habitual gesture. “His prognosis is good. The bullet didn’t pass through any major organs, though I believe it did become lodged against one of his ribs. The surgery is to remove the bullet and to check that there was no other damage incurred by the shooting. Now, is that what you wanted to hear?”

“Yes!”

Startled, the doctor actually laughed. “All right, then. Will you let me examine you now?”

Simon decided to allow it.

The doctor found nothing else that the nurses already hadn’t, and he ended their visit by giving Simon a thick sheaf of papers to read so he would know how to take care of himself when recovering through the next several days. Despite the fact that he had no real wounds, he did have whiplash, bruises, and what the doctor called “general soreness.”

As soon as the doctor ended their visit, a nurse arrived and brought Simon to a room where he would be observed for a few hours before being released. She said if he wanted visitors, this would be the time to have them summoned.

He tried to think of the people he might want to see right now. His mother? His strong, soft-spoken father who had so eagerly welcomed Nathan? Elaine? No, he didn’t want to face them.

Either understanding this, or at least pretending to, the nurse recommended he get some sleep. She did warn him that his nap would be periodically interrupted as nurses would come in to check on him.

Simon didn’t care, just accepted the news wearily. He was almost asleep before she even really left the room.

He dozed in and out, the world composed more of elements of light and dark, rather than sleep or wakefulness. Nurses came in as he had been told they would, to fiddle with him or the monitors he was connected to, before disappearing again for a short time. He didn’t know what he would do when they declared him stable, fit to leave. He just didn’t think about it.

Somewhere in the middle of the process of not thinking about it, he woke up to find someone sitting in the visitor’s chair, watching him.

Simon gazed blankly back at the other man until awareness suddenly pulsed over him. “Nathan!”

Nathan laughed and came to him, climbing up into the bed beside him. Their arms and legs tangled together as they held onto each other. It hurt a whole hell of a lot, but it felt so good at the same time that the pain didn’t even really matter.

Their lips met between them, over and over, tasting the sweetness of their dessert from hours before, the bitterness of medicine, the salt of tears. Simon clung to Nathan as hard as he could, squeezing tightly. He couldn’t seem to make himself back off, couldn’t loosen his grip even though something worrisome in the back of his mind seemed to be trying to tell him that he needed to be more gentle.

“Wait!” Simon exclaimed, as he realized what exactly was happening and where they were. “You just went through surgery, you stupid idiot! What are you doing?”

Nathan grimaced through his smile, as if the mention of surgery made him remember that he was in quite a lot of pain. “I snuck out of Recovery.”

The urge to hit him, to bash him over the head with the TV remote, nearly overcame Simon. He resisted, but only because he felt like they’d both been bashed around enough today—even though this stupid, arrogant alpha needed to have his brains jostled back into place. “Why the hell would you do that? What is wrong with you? I’m calling the nurse back in here.”

Simon reached for his call button, only to have his hand covered, clasped by a larger one.

“Don’t,” Nathan rumbled. His eyes were very bright, with a mixture of pain and love and exhaustion. His hair was completely messed up, driving it home just how awful the situation was. “I did it because I wanted tonight to end the way it should have begun. I was just so goddamned nervous. I put it off too long, and then all of this happened. But it’s still today, and that means I can still do what I wanted.”

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Nathan reached into the pocket of his very flattering hospital gown and pulled out a little velvety box. The box had been beat to hell, but it was still identifiable as a jewelry box.

Simon stopped breathing.

“I never went into the water,” Nathan said. “I got tossed out of the back of the truck. I was just laying there on the bridge while you went over, and that was the most terrifying goddamn thing I have ever gone through. You were all alone. Without me. I never want you to be without me again.”

Nathan carefully opened the box, revealing the contents. It was a slender golden ring, set with two rows of pristine little diamonds. “Marry me, Simon. Be my mate, my other half. And stay with me on the fucking bridge next time.”

Tears blurred Simon’s vision. In the next instant, he was crying, sobbing out all the stress and peril he had gone through up until this point. He couldn’t catch his breath, couldn’t do anything but weep against Nathan’s neck while the alpha slid the ring onto his finger.

That was how the nurses found them, combing desperately through the rooms for their missing gunshot-wound patient. Nathan went with them willingly, though the look he sent Simon would linger with him until they could see each other again.

I love you, the look said.

Simon clutched his ring hand and sent his love with his fiancé, until the very small hours of the next morning when Nathan was allowed to go home. If he had been a human, they would have kept him longer; as it was, his shifter healing abilities made the doctors in the know confident that he would be just fine if he managed to take it easy for a couple weeks.

Tamara and Owen took them to Nathan’s house, then set out to fetch Nathan’s battered car from the lot where it had been towed. The engine worked fine, though the rest of it was an absolute disaster. Once they brought it home, they volunteered to stay and help out.

Simon sent them on their way. He wanted to be alone with Nathan right now, because he knew in the coming days they would be alone very little. The police wanted to speak with them about what had happened, and there would no doubt be all sorts of visitors from the school who wanted to give their well-wishes.

It was going to be a trying time, making everything more difficult than it already would be.

That was why he just wanted to be left alone with Nathan.

They lay in bed together in silence, wrapped up in the arms of the other.

When Nathan kissed his neck, Simon tilted his head down, giving permission to be marked.

Nathan bit the soft part of his shoulder, that curve nestled between neck and muscle. There was a pain so sweet that it was almost orgasmic. Their thoughts connected, fully and truly. They were mates, exactly the way they were intended to be.

Burrowing closer into Nathan, Simon closed his eyes and opened up his thoughts. Nathan watched and listened, seeing the story of the well as Simon had experienced it.

When there was nothing more to see, nothing more to tell, Simon felt gentle fingers wrap around his chin and lift his head up. Nathan kissed him, so softly and sweetly that their lips hardly touched at all.

“You know,” Nathan whispered, “if you had told me all this sooner, you could have saved us a lot of trouble.”

“But then you never would have known what it was like to be shot.”

“I was always curious about that.” Nathan rolled his eyes skyward, then brought his lips to Simon’s once more. “I love you.”

“I love you, Nate.”

They fell asleep like that, their lips still brushing together.