My Hockey Alpha novel Chapter 163

Nina

As I walked into Enzo’s old apartment, which had been turned into a makeshift safehouse for the hockey team, my eyes widened and my face went pale as a sheet when I saw a familiar person staring back at me from the corner, tied to a chair.

“James?” I said. My throat suddenly felt dry and cracked. Whatever joy I had earned from curing my friends and being saved by Enzo and Matt was now gone.

“Nina.” James stared at me through his eyebrows, his face darkened and twisted into an angry scowl. His nose was bloody and purple; it was obviously broken.

“How did you guys find him?” I asked, turning to look at Matt and Enzo. Enzo’s eyes were narrowed as he glared angrily at James, and it was now that I realized that his arm was wrapped protectively around my shoulders. I was so shocked from seeing James sitting there that I somehow didn’t even notice.

“Ask your boyfriend,” James said, nodding his head toward Enzo.

“I should’ve killed you when I had the chance,” Enzo replied. His voice was hardly more than a low growl. “I should kill you now for what you did to Nina.”

“Go ahead,” James snarled. He tilted his chin up to look down his broken nose at Enzo. “Kill me.”

Enzo made a motion to walk toward James, but I put my hand on his chest and stopped him. He slowly looked down at me, his eyes wild with fury, but I only shook my head. He paused for several moments as though he was still considering killing James anyway, but finally conceded. Without a word, he took my hand and led me over to his bedroom and shut the door firmly behind us.

“Why do you keep protecting him?” he asked as he sat me down on his bed and crouched in front of me to get a good look at my leg. I winced as he peeled back the bloody bandage.

Truthfully, I didn’t have an answer for him. James seemed like a lost cause. He was hell bent on killing werewolves, and even shot me and left me for dead for supposedly ‘getting in the way’ of that.

Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. Enzo seemed to drop the subject, focused solely on my leg. It hadn’t healed at all on its own, and was even worse now than it was when I woke up in the back of that older couple’s pickup truck from all of the running I did. The wound was still open and bleeding because all of my movement stopped it from scabbing over.

“You didn’t heal?” he asked, raising his eyes to meet mine.

I slowly shook my head. “No. I can’t find my wolf.”

Enzo sighed, then reached out to put his hands on my leg. I instinctively flinched away, but relaxed as much as I could when he shot me a worried look. Once I was relaxed enough, he put his hands on my leg without quite touching the wound and shut his eyes.

Nothing happened at first, but soon I began to feel a tingling sensation in my leg. I watched as the wound slowly began to close up until there was hardly anything more than a red mound where the bullet hole was.