Kneel Alpha: The Surgeon Omega's Revenge

Chapter 5

Nora’s POV

Thursday lunch was our thing.

Every Thursday since Iris was old enough to eat solid food, she came to the hospital. Mrs. Holt dropped her off, Marcus signed her in, Wren kept an eye on her in the break room while I finished up whatever I was finishing, and then we ate together at the small table by the window and talked about whatever was in Iris’s head, which was usually a lot.

It had been our thing for two years. I had not accounted for Damien Ashborne being on the fifth floor when I set that schedule.

I should have changed it. I know I should have.

I didn’t.

I told myself it was because Iris didn’t handle routine disruption well, and that was true. I told myself it was because I was not going to let his presence change the shape of my week, and that was true too.

I didn’t look too closely at the part that wasn’t.

On the second Thursday after he was admitted, Marcus met me in the hallway outside the break room with an expression I knew too well.

“He asked me about her,” he said.

I stopped.

“Who talked to him?”

“Nobody. He figured out the timeline.” Marcus crossed his arms. “He wanted to know if she was okay. If she had everything she needed. I told him she had everything because her mother worked herself half to death and doesn’t need anything from him, thank you.”

I put my hand on Marcus’s arm.

“What exactly did he say?”

Marcus’s jaw was tight. He was twenty-two and he had watched me cry exactly once, in those first months, when I was exhausted and hormonal and Iris had been sick for a week and I’d hit a wall. He’d never said anything about it. He’d just stayed.

“He said—” Marcus stopped. Started again. “He said he knows he doesn’t have any claim. He just wanted to know she was alright.”

I breathed.

“She’s alright,” I said.

“I know.” He looked at me. “Nora. He’s been different this week. Quiet different. Not Alpha-posturing different. Something happened.”

“Something always happens with men like him. Doesn’t mean it’s our problem.”

Marcus looked at me the way he looked at me when he thought I was lying to myself.

I went to get Iris.

She had, somehow, already made it to the fourth floor. Marcus found her outside Damien’s room.

She wasn’t inside — just standing in the doorway, head tilted, watching him the way she watched anything interesting, with total unselfconscious focus.

Damien was sitting up in bed reading something. When he felt her there he looked up, and his face did something I had never seen it do before.

He looked uncertain.

Damien Ashborne had never been uncertain. Not at twenty-one, not at twenty-three, not at any point in the two years I had known him. He had been steady and frustrating and occasionally infuriatingly sure of himself. He had never once looked the way he looked now, with my daughter in the doorway — like something in him was reaching for something it wasn’t sure it was allowed to touch.

“Hi,” Iris said.

“Hi,” he said.

“You walked yesterday,” she said. “I saw you.”

“I did.”

“My mom says walking makes you get better faster.”

“She’s right.”

Iris seemed to turn this over. Then: “Do you want to see a picture of Dammy?”

She pulled her small backpack around and rummaged through it with the intensity of someone disarming a bomb. She produced a slightly worn photograph — Wren had printed it off my phone last Christmas, just a candid of Iris in her pajamas, the stuffed wolf tucked under her chin, grinning so hard her eyes were barely visible.

She handed it to Damien.

He took it.

He looked at it for a long moment. His jaw moved.

“He’s great,” he said, and his voice was very controlled.

“He goes everywhere,” Iris said seriously. “Even to the grocery store. Mom says I can’t bring him to the grocery store anymore because last time I put him in the cart and then forgot him in the cereal aisle and we had to go back and I cried a lot.”

“That sounds really scary,” he said.

“It was.” She was quiet for a moment. “He was okay though. He was just looking at the Cheerios.”

Damien laughed.

It was small — barely a sound, more like he’d been caught off guard — but it was real. I hadn’t heard him laugh in three years. I had made myself forget the way it sounded, easy and sudden, like something surprised out of him.

I had been so careful.

“Iris,” I said.

Both of them looked at me.

I was very glad I had good control over my face.

“Lunch,” I said.

Iris turned back to Damien. “I have to go eat.”

“Okay,” he said.

She held out her hand. For the photograph. He looked at it for one more second, then gave it back, carefully, like it was something important.

Which it was.

I did not look at his face as I steered Iris toward the elevator. I could feel his eyes on my back the whole length of the hallway.

Over lunch, Iris ate half a grilled cheese and told me at length about the wolf documentary she’d watched with Mrs. Holt and the fact that wolves were actually very good at swimming, did I know that, and that Dammy probably could swim even though he was stuffed if he wanted to.

“Who’s the man in the room?” she said, when we were almost done.

My stomach tightened.

“A patient,” I said. “Someone I’m helping get better.”

She considered this.

“He seemed sad,” she said.

“Sometimes sick people feel sad.”

She poked at her fruit cup.

“He has nice eyes,” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Like Dammy,” she said.

I looked out the window.

“Eat your lunch, baby,” I said.

She did.

I watched the city and told myself the tightness in my chest was nothing. Just tiredness. Just the particular weight of a Thursday.

Not the sound of his laugh. Not the way he’d held that photograph.

Not the part of me that had catalogued every second of it despite myself, and was furious about that, and was going to be furious about it for a while longer.

My pager went off.

I read it and stood up fast.

Security alert. Fifth floor. Unknown individual, not staff.

I was already moving.