The Alpha’s Enemy Claims His Human Mate Chapter 12

The Alpha’s Enemy Claims His Human Mate Chapter 12

## Elena

The car rolled out of the hospital parking lot and onto the river road, and the east side of the city lit up.

Killian sat across from me in the back seat with his legs crossed, his eyes on the window.

“Pretty, isn’t it,” he said.

I did not answer.

The face of the Ironbound Tower had turned into a moving mural. White, then gold, then a slow pale rose. Then letters, one at a time, unfurling across the glass in globes the size of streetlights.

– E.
– I.
– E.
– N.
– A.

My name. In hundred-foot letters. On the building Barrett had spent three years keeping his own name off.

It was, objectively, the most beautiful thing anyone had ever tried to give me.

My phone buzzed in my lap.

A notification. Sophia had posted.

I did not mean to look. I looked.

A photograph of the Tower, taken from a hospital rooftop. The letters already lit. One red-heart emoji under it. Nothing else.

The comments had already started.

omg Alpha did this for u??? 😂

she deserves a real Luna treatment

Ironbound’s first family fr 😂

Alpha Barrett is SO in love

I scrolled, flat-eyed, down six screens of it before I let the phone go face down on my thigh.

“Elena.” Killian’s voice was low. “Do you need a minute.”

“No,” I said.

“All right.”

He did not turn his head toward me while I put my face back in order. I had forgotten, too, what it was like to sit beside a man who let you keep your dignity without being asked.

The last letter faded from the tower.

“Drive on,” he said to the front. “We’re done here.”

Later I would only remember two things about the rest of the ride.

The two guards at a very high gate stepping forward to Killian’s car, scanning his face, and stepping back without a word.

And the logo, on the building at the end of the drive, that I had not laid my eyes on in three years.

**VITALIS CORP.**

I sat up in my chair.

“Killian.”

“Later,” he said.

He rolled me through a lobby I had walked across a thousand times as a graduate student, into an elevator I did not recognize, up to a floor that had been rebuilt since I was last here. He pushed me down a corridor lined with the kind of quiet carpet that institutions buy when they expect heads of state.

At the end of the hall were double doors.

He opened them.

The room on the other side had been dressed for a birthday.

A long table along the wall was laid with candles and flowers and cupcakes in pink paper cups. A paper banner hung across the ceiling in uneven children’s letters: HAPPY BIRTHDAY DR. ELENA. Three slightly deflated balloons leaned against the window.

Nobody was in it.

“Killian.”

“Happy birthday.” His voice was quiet. “In place of a light show over a skyline — I thought you might want an hour to celebrate your actual work.”

He did not know, yet, that I had been running from my own light show.

He had started to say, almost apologetically, “The arrangement is, I admit, a little less grand than what you must have been expecting —” when there was a scuffle at the door behind us.

A head poked around the frame. A boy, eight maybe, with the left side of his scalp shaved where a surgical scar ran from behind his ear to the top of his head.

He saw me. His whole face broke open.

“It’s really her!” he yelled over his shoulder. “Guys, it’s really her!”

Eight children spilled into the room.

A girl with a bad limp. A boy with two hearing aids. A very small one with a prosthetic hand she waved at me like a flag. A pair of twin sisters, one human, one wolf, both squealing. A skinny boy hanging back behind the rest.

They surrounded my chair.

“Dr. Elena!”

“You remembered my name!”

“I’m taller now. You told me I’d be taller.”

“She doesn’t remember you, Mason.”

“I She does!”

I stared.

I knew their faces the way I knew the back of my own hand.

Four winters ago, in the pediatric ward of the Vitalis research hospital, I had operated on six kids from a gene-disorder cluster that both wolf families and human families had given up on. The disease warped the spine first, then the lungs. The protocol was mine. The first six surgeries were mine.

I had lost track of every one of them the month I married Barrett.

“You —” My voice was a whisper. “You’re all —”

“We heard somebody important was getting a party here,” said the boy with the scar, very proud. “We heard it was you. So we made the banner.”

“We made the banner,” corrected the small one with the hand.

“Okay, fine. We made it.”

I looked at Killian.

He had moved against the wall by the door. His face was angled slightly away, like a man who was not going to plant himself in the center of a moment that was not about him.

“Killian.” It came out wet.

“Vitalis opened a residential pediatric unit the winter after you left,” he said to the window. “For children with your disorder. Human and wolf. Same floor. Same funding. Same standard of care. We’ve been continuing

your protocol since.”

I stared at him.

The girl with the limp climbed into my lap without asking, her small knees careful around my bandage, as though someone had briefed her.

“You kept going,” I said. “All this time.” I shook my head. “Thank you. I didn’t — I had no idea any of this existed.”

“I don’t make bad investments.” His gaze returned to me. “You were the one who proved it could be done. Every researcher before you said the disease was incurable. You were the one who didn’t accept that.”

He stepped forward.

He put one hand out, palm open, over the crowd of small heads between us.

“On behalf of Vitalis Corp,” he said, “I would like to extend a formal invitation. Come back to us. Finish the work.”

The room waited.

The girl in my lap looked up into my face.

“Doctor,” she said. “You’re crying.”

“I know,” I said.