Chapter 125: Waking Up From A Nightmare
My eyes cracked open. The first thing I saw was a blinding flash of sterile white. Panic instantly shot through me.
For a terrifying moment, I thought I was back in that facility—that everything had been a hallucination, and I was still trapped in one of Esther’s experiments.
My heart rate spiked, and I tried to sit up, only to feel a sharp pain in my abdomen that forced me back down with a gasp.
“Easy there,” a familiar voice said, and relief flooded through me as Matilda’s face came into view, her kind eyes crinkling at the corners. “You’re safe now, Hazel. You’re at the pack infirmary.”
I took a shaky breath, trying to calm my racing pulse. If Matilda was here, that meant that I was finally back in Emberfang grounds.
“How long have I been out?” I croaked.
“About twelve hours,” Matilda replied, checking the IV drip attached to my arm. “You collapsed from exhaustion, among other things. We thought it would be better to keep you here rather than in your bedroom. Those triplets of yours would never have given you the peace you need to heal properly.”
A small smile tugged at my lips. “They can be a bit... overwhelming.”
Except I had greatly missed this sort of ‘overwhelming’.
“That’s putting it mildly,” Matilda snorted, making notes on a chart. “I had to physically bar them from spending the night in here. Even then, they took shifts sitting outside the door like guard dogs.”
I glanced around the room, taking in the medical equipment and the sunlight streaming through the blinds. It was fairly empty, and the only thing I could smell was the antiseptic.
“What happened to me?” I asked, my hand instinctively moving to my stomach. Fear gripped me as I remembered the blood running down my legs before I passed out.