“You still need time to recover. How long can you take off work?” Wilder asked.
“They have a pretty good sickness policy. They won’t question it if I take a week off—they know I haven’t been doing well lately.”
“Did the symptoms start immediately?” Nolan asked, his brows pinching together.
“Pretty much, but they were mild—more of an inconvenience than whatever’s going on now,” I explained. “They’ve been slowly getting worse and worse until… well.”
I trailed off, casting an unhappy look down at myself.
“Just skin and bones,” Wilder said, crossing his arms around me.
“Trust me, I know. I must have lost at least fifteen pounds in the last month. On the very rare occasion I do have an appetite, it’s impossible to keep anything down. I even resorted to a banana bag a few weeks ago.”
Wilder’s brows rose, but he shrugged with a nod. “Smart.”
“I’ve been doing the best I can—taking as many multivitamins as possible to help sustain me—but it was only a short-term solution.”
“What were you going to do if we didn’t turn up?” Nolan asked, folding his arms like Wilder.
“I don’t know. I was hoping that if I just powered through, it would get better. But I imagine, eventually, I would’ve had to go to the convict camp if the doctors couldn’t do anything.”
“Why didn’t you do that tostartwith?” he questioned, his tone offering gentleness where his words didn’t.
“Because I happen to like my job. Can you imagine what would happen if they found out I bonded with a randomconvict? I don’t think they’d trust me to work in emergency services anymore.”
Nolan grimaced. He knew I was right—he just wasn’t admitting it.
Wilder let out a low whistle. “Yeah, that would’ve caused quite the commotion. And it would’ve raised questions about why the hell Preston was at a bar, instead of at the camp where he was meant to be as a convict.”
“Considering how shitty I feel, I’m not currently concerned about whether or not that idiot gets in trouble,” I grumbled.
“Nor should you be,” Nolan said quickly. “Once we get to the bottom of this, I swear to God, I’m going to borrow that baseball bat of yours and take it to the back of his head.”
“Maybe let her do it,” Wilder suggested with a grin. “If you do it, you’ll actually kill him. She hasn’t got the upper-body strength—it’ll hurt like hell, but he won’t die.”
I turned to face him. “You seem awfully excited at the idea of me causing bodily harm to your pack mate…”
“Normally, I wouldn’t be, of course, but I think we can all agree these are extreme circumstances. His stupidity and lack of communication have put you in a terrible position. I’m allowed to be mad over that. Plus, I don’t want him to die, which is why I don’t want Nolan swinging the bat. I just want him to have a splitting headache.”
“So you’ve just been dealing with this for months and hoping it would go away?” Nolan asked, and that time, I could actually see the concern on his face.
“I planned a doctor’s appointment, but…yeah.” I nodded. “I kind of felt trapped, you know? How did you guys even find out about me?”
“Preston called us a week ago—he’d been trying to reach us for weeks—but he didn’t really know anything about you, so we’ve been looking for you for a while.”
“We got to town months after you bonded, and it took us three weeks to find the blonde omega who was struggling. You know, if he’d bothered to tell us you were a paramedic, we would’ve found you a lot quicker.”
“Why didn’thetell you?”
“Because he only managed to call us for a few minutes,” Nolan explained. “Most of the call was just frantic—begging, asking us to find you and make sure you were okay. He didn’t even tell us he was a convict, we found that out after getting to town and looking for him.”
“Oh.” I stilled for a moment, my mind lingering on the idea of Preston so frantic. “Couldn’t you just visit him to get more information?”
“Yes and no.” Wilder grimaced, wiggling his head. “Visitation is monitored, and we couldn’t exactly talk about the fact that he broke out and bonded with an omega. That shit would get him in a lot of trouble.”
“Okay. That makes sense,” I conceded, but this still felt so strange. “Don’t you guys have jobs you need to get back to, though? I don’t think you can just drop everything and stay here.”
Nolan sighed. “Technically, we do, but we’ve both taken a leave of absence to deal with this situation.”