The Alpha's Saviour

Chapter 3

Cooper POV

Beep, beep, beep. The slow steady noise beside my head drags me from my sleep and into what feels like the worst hangover ever. I open my eyes slowly and it takes me a couple of seconds to get my bearings and realize that I am in a hospital bed. I try to sit up but a sharp stabbing pain in my stomach makes me lie back flat on the bed. I wince at my splitting headache and the agony I feel as I try to move my arms and legs. I hurt absolutely everywhere. I growl to myself, not liking this feeling of weakness one little bit, and lower my head back to the pillow.

“You’re going to be a terrible patient, aren’t you?” My sister Leila is standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips, chuckling to herself. I just growl at her and close my eyes tight against the pain. She lifts the chart at the end of the bed and scans down over it, dark brows pulled together in a frown as she switches into her serious doctor mode, reading out some of the litany of injuries catalogued on the clipboard in her hands. Fractured skull, cheekbone and jaw. Dislocated shoulder, broken collarbone, arm and wrist, broken ribs, ruptured spleen, shattered ankle and multiple deep lacerations. I wish she’d stop because I don’t really want to hear this. She shakes her head, dark chestnut brown hair falling forwards over her shoulders and whistles softly.

“You…you were very, very lucky. This….” she pauses, blinking hard and shakes the chart at me before continuing in a wobbly voice thick with emotion, “this would be enough to kill most people, even us Cooper. I don’t know how you are even awake yet. If that girl hadn’t dragged you out of the river, even with your healing…. I can’t even think about it, it’s too scary.”

She keeps talking to me, well lecturing me really, about what a close call this was. As if she needs to tell me that getting hit by a van was a bad idea, but I’ve stopped listening. As soon as she mentioned the girl, flashbacks of what happened start running through my mind. But not of the bad stuff, there is something else that my wolf is pushing me to remember. That amazing scent that I smelled before the crash, I can remember it vividly and it’s making my mouth water just thinking about it. Then the tingles I felt all over my face and body as she gently touched me, the feeling of calm and contentment that washed over me, despite my pain, as she whispered comforting words in my ear. Her warm breath touching my neck. Another flashback of long tanned legs, a toned stomach and drips of water running down a slender neck and into a tight sports bra as she stands just a few feet away from me, a curtain of long wet hair hiding her face from view. A much less pleasant picture of her cradled in Ethan’s arms, her face buried into his shoulder and her hand resting on his chest pops into my brain. I clench my fists tight and grit my teeth, a growl building in my chest.

“Cooper? What’s going on? What the hell was that? Are you in too much pain?” my sister asks, staring at me as the heart monitor starts to beep rapidly and my blood pressure shoots up. The thoughts of another man having his hands on her is making my blood boil in my veins, and a jealously unlike anything I have ever experienced flares up inside my gut. I have heard stories about the possessiveness that comes with finding your mate, but this is of an intensity I never expected. I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the metal framed bed, ignoring the searing pain in my abdomen where I have probably pulled open some stitches, and try to blink away the dark spots that appear in front of my eyes. I grab at the tubes and wires attached to my arms, trying to rip them out.

I have to find her.

It’s a primal need like nothing I have ever known, and the thought just keeps repeating over and over in my brain as my wolf pushes me to get moving.

“Jesus Christ, Cooper! What are you doing?” When I don’t answer, I see her bolt for the door to get help, but I don’t care, they won’t stop me. I don’t care about anything other than finding her. What if she was hurt too? How am I going to find her again? My wolf lunges for the surface, urging me to keep going and ignore the dizziness that is making my hearing fuzzy and the room swim. I push up onto my feet, grabbing the bed railing for support as my knees wobble slightly. Only then do I notice the cast on one leg up to my knee which will make walking difficult. I reach down to slip my fingers into the inside of the cast and start to pull lumps of the plaster away.

“Woah, hold up Cooper, what are you doing man?” Ethan rushes in the door and grabs my arm, trying to stop me destroying the cast and while simultaneously turning me back towards the bed. Then I smell it, I’d recognize it anywhere. I smell her, my mate, and that delicious scent that makes my heart soar, but it’s all wrong. It’s on him, I can smell her on him, and it’s fresh. In a split second, I pivot and grab him by the front of his shirt with two hands, shove him hard against the wall, pinning him in place with a forearm across his throat.

“Where is she?!” I roar at him, not caring who might come in and who outside might hear the commotion. Ethan slowly holds up his two hands in front of him and turns his neck to show me his submission, to show he won’t even attempt to fight back. But at the same time, he is grinning at me like a fool and it’s infuriating. I don’t care that he is my best friend of 20 years, at that moment all I know is that he is an unmated male who smells like my girl, and I want to rip his head off.

“Cooper, you need to chill out. Hayley’s fine, she’s safe, I promise.” he says in a low, calm voice. Hayley.

Pride fills my chest as I hear my beautiful mates name and I loosen my grip slightly, and I feel Ethan relax a bit as I remove my arm from his throat. It’s short lived however, as that feeling of joy at hearing her name is quickly replaced by jealousy and rage as I realize that he knows her name and not me. He has her scent on him while I haven’t even seen her face yet. I roar again and lift him off the ground this time, shoving him hard against the wall again, causing a c***k to appear in the plaster behind him.

“Who is Hayley? Ethan, tell me what on earth is going on?” My sister asks totally confused. She stands a few feet back, knowing better than to intervene and blocking the door from anyone else who might try to come in. But I can hear the fear in her voice as she tries to work out what has happened between me and my best friend that could explain her normally controlled brother acting so nuts.

“Cooper, she’s here, she’s in the hospital, but she’s fine. I thought she might be yours, so I went to check on her for you. I knew that if it was, you’d want to know how she was and where to find her when you woke up. That’s all, I swear!”

I set him back on his feet and fix him with a cold stare, growling at him one last time before I push away and drag in a few deep breaths to try and slow down my racing heart. I drag a hand across my now stubbled jaw and try to regain some control.

“Show me where she is.” I growl at him as I hobble around the room, searching for something slightly more respectable to wear to meet my mate other than a hospital gown with my ass hanging out.

“No Cooper, you can’t go to her….”, Ethan starts, but before he even finishes his sentence, I rush at him snarling but he’s expecting it this time and dodges me, darting sideways, and managing to put the hospital bed between me and him. He rakes a hand back through his blonde hair and exhales sharply and holds his two hands up in front of him in surrender again.

“Wait, wait, wait! Cooper, damn it, stop trying to kill me. I am just saying you can’t go to her right now. She is a human man, she’s human! You’ll scare her if you don’t get a grip on yourself.” He sighs and stands up a bit straighter when I haven’t moved to attack him again. He looks me right in the eye and I can see the sincerity in his eyes, he is trying to look out for me. “She saw you get hit by a van yesterday for f***s sake, she brought you back to life, so she knows how badly you were hurt. How are you going to explain this? How are you going to explain how you are up on your feet and walking around today?”

He gestures up and down my already rapidly healing body. I pause for a second and my stomach plummets to my feet as I realize he is right. I don’t want to scare her or freak her out.

“But she’s my mate.” I grumble sulkily, and I hear Leila gasp from the corner of the room as she finally catches on to what is happening. I slump down defeated on the bed, with my head in my hands. This is just unbelievable; this is the second time being close to her in the last twenty-four and I still don’t get to see her. I had heard about the mate pull, and I had longed for many, many years to experience it for myself, but I never thought it could feel like this. I am desperate to get to her. It’s feels like my skin is crawling with the urge to get up and go to her, damn the consequences. Even though I know Ethan is right, every fibre of my being is screaming at me to rip out his throat and tear the building apart to find her. I am normally the calmest, most composed person in the room. Not today though, and both Leila and Ethan look like they are about to throw themselves on top of me if I try to get out of this room. I twist to face Ethan and fix him with a stare,

“You! You make sure she is safe, if anything happens to her, I will end you.” Ethan nods, still grinning like an i***t, and then I face Leila, “And you, please get me out of here, I will tear this place apart if I stay here knowing she is in the same building,” I plead with my sister. She nods and leaves the room immediately, hopefully to set things in motion for my discharge. Given the majority of the town’s residents are wolves, the staff here are used to treating rapidly healing wounds, where making sure that bones set correctly is normally their greatest concern. Before he leaves, Ethan reaches out, places his hand on my shoulder and squeezes, and then he throws back his head and laughs, as if seeing me so tormented is the best thing he has witnessed in a long time.

“Congratulation’s man! You found your mate!” He cheers, tipping his head back to laugh at me some more. It doesn’t really feel like congratulations are in order, but I try to console myself with the thought that this is only temporary. I wince as I lie back down on the crisp white hospital bedsheets and let out a loud sigh, wondering how long this torture is going to last.