Page 61 of Fight or Fly

He gave a hoarse chuckle and wrapped an arm around my shoulder, tugging me against his chest. I was still worried I’d hurt him if I squeezed back, so I tried to keep my weight as light as possible against him as I soaked up the contact. Spicy musk tickled my nose, soured by stale sweat. I breathed it in deeply anyway.

Kam patted his shoulder, then stood up. “I’ll find a doctor.”

“Alex and Beckett?” Flynn asked. “They okay?”

“They’re here,” I hedged, not moving from his embrace. “Alex is in surgery for her hand. Beckett is... a bit more complicated, but I’m pretty sure he’ll be okay now. Jax has a hole in his leg, but he seems all right otherwise. He’s just across the ward.”

Silence fell for a moment, too heavily.

“There’s something you’re not telling me, sweet thing,” Flynn said, proving that his hard skull had apparently done its job of protecting his brain after all. “Is it something I need to know about?”

I pulled back so I could meet his single, bloodshot eye. “It is, but the doctors want to assess you for concussion first. Promise I’ll tell you right afterward, okay?”

He gazed up at me with an easy sort of trust that broke my heart. “If you say so, Leona. Just hope they’re not planning on asking me any hard questions—I forgot to study for the test.”

“If you know what year it is and who the current prime minister is, I think you’re probably fine,” I told him.

Kam returned with a doctor in tow, and the woman ran through the usual protocol of checking pupillary reaction while asking a few basic questions. When she moved on to ask him if he remembered what had been done to him, my stomach dipped unpleasantly.

“Mostly beatings and electrical torture,” he said, as though it wasn’t completely horrific. “Got a couple of teeth loose on the right side, and I’m fucking pissed because I’m pretty sure nipple clamps are ruined forever for me now.”

“We’ll schedule you for dental assessment as soon as you’ve had a bit more time to rest,” the doctor replied, equally matter-of-fact. “And I’m all too familiar with alpha bravado, so I’ll see if we can get a trauma specialist in for counseling.”

“Trauma counseling? Seriously? You’ve really got all the bells and whistles here, don’t you?” Flynn mused. “Does kind of make me wonder where the hell we actually are, though.”

The doctor gave a bland smile and left without answering.

“About that,” I said, when the three of us were alone again.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “About that.”

“We found out who Beckett’s mate is,” Kam said. “And... it’s a bit complicated, to put it mildly.”

“Also, Irina’s alive,” I blurted. “Alex doesn’t know yet.”

Flynn stared at us for a long moment. “Maybe you’d better start from the beginning.”

“Right.” Kam exchanged a glance with me and cleared his throat. “Shortly after you failed to check in, paramilitary troops stormed the safehouse in the middle of the night and captured us. They flew us to this compound, which is in Cuba, by the way.”

We ran through the unlikely sounding story, interrupting each other with various salient points until I finally finished, “And by that point, Beckett was in heat. Nikolayev stormed into the helicopter to get him, which is when we realized that he’s the mate Beckett’s been protecting all this time.”

Flynn continued to stare at us for so long that my eyes watered with the need to blink on his behalf.

“Bullshit,” he said eventually.

“Apparently not,” Kam told him. “It... mostly adds up, though there are a few questions I’d like the answers to, before we pulled get much deeper into this situation.”

There were questions I needed answered, as well. Questions about Nikolayev’s dead sister, and the unregistered omegas he’d so famously hunted down for sport on his family’s estate in Russia. Questions about how Beckett had ended up mated to the chairman of the Euro-Soviet Committee.

Flynn gave a slow, one-eyed blink. “You said Irina’s alive. You absolutely sure about that?”

“Jax is sure,” I said. “He knew her before, right?”

“Yeah,” Flynn replied after a faint pause. “He did. Shit, that’s gonna be Armageddon all on its own, if it’s true.”

“She’s close with Nikolayev, from what we’ve seen so far,” I said. “She also organized the mission to retrieve you.”

“Fuck me sideways,” Flynn muttered. “Gotta say, this isn’t what I expected when I woke up to find you two looking down at me.”

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