To Suffer With

Chapter Six - Escape

The elevator opens out to a bare well light corridor, at the end of the hall, double glass doors exposed a landscape of grey. I force myself into a quick walk to match the stride of the others around me. My eyes stay ever forward to my escape. A van, no, an ambulance, had started to back up towards the doors. I had to assume that the ambulance was our escape route. The glass door rolls open at our approach and I'm hit with a blast of warm air littered with exhaust fumes.

Connor marches ahead of us, pulling on the ambulance doors so that they swing open. I stare at them in disbelief.

"You stole an ambulance?" I ask both surprised and touched they had put in this much effort to rescue me. To risk so much when they had so recently suffered a devastating loss to the werewolves.

A head pokes out the driver's window, a grin I would recognize anywhere accompanying it.

"Stealing implies we're never going to give it back, which I fully plan to do," the familiar voice tells me his tone as jovial as ever.

"Remy," I greet him with an equally wide grin.

"Al nice to see you, now hurry up and get in so we can leave," he encourages me.

I don't hesitate to do as he says, accepting a hand from Connor who pulls me up. Mark moves to the front of the van and the nurse whose name I still hadn't learnt climbed in the back. She must have been one of the agents we had within the cities, like Remy but who didn't have much contact with the rest of us. I guess her undercover life in the city was over now.

The doors of the van slam shut as I feel the ambulance begin to move and I let out the breath of relief I had been holding in. I sit down on the bench across from the bed giving Connor a small smile as he sits across from me.

"Al, you sure you're alright?" Connor asks me his words gentle as if he was waiting for me to break down in tears.

He'd be waiting a long time.

"Fine," I mutter, glancing around as I ponder what was to come next, "so I take it you know?" I question him.

My words are mumbled, embarrassed. I didn't know why I felt embarrassed about being Roman's mate it wasn't like it was my fault. But being back around the resistance, my nice and cushy hospital stay suddenly felt wrong. Like I had been treated to some luxury while they were all struggling.

"I passed on word," the nurse answers before Connor can speak, "when you were first brought into the hospital. The Alpha having a human resistance fighter for a mate wasn't something that was ever going to stay quiet," she explains to me with a shrug.

"And then we put the plans in motion to initiate our awesome rescue," Connor brags with that stupid smile on his face that I thought I might never see again. Without thought I reach across to him and pull him into another hug.

Connor returns it more gently this time, "Al you're freaking me out," he mutters into my hair.

I let go of him, "Sorry," I mutter.

"Its okay I know its been hard to be away from me for so long," Connor jokes.

"I thought you were dead," I say, slapping him on the shoulder causing him to fall backwards.

He holds up his hands in a gesture of surrender his face losing its carefree expression, "I was lucky to make it. Not a lot of us did," he tells me.

"It was that bad?" I whisper. Roman hadn't been very helpful in filling me in on what happened during the attack. Probably because he didn't want me to hate him forever.