Fight, Flight, or Freeze: The Healer's Story
Chapter 342: What Was Real?

Chapter 342: What Was Real?

My entire body trembled to the point where even my teeth were chattering. It felt so real. I thought it was real.

But now I was questioning everything.

What was real? What was fake?

I didn’t know, but I also didn’t think it mattered.

Reality would be what I wanted it to be.

Rip reached forward, and I cringed when the warmth of his hand penetrated my cold flesh. He pulled quickly back, a look of confusion on his face as if he didn’t know what was going on.

However, that was the same look that he had made when Alpha had snapped his neck.

I bolted out of bed, not caring about waking up anyone. Tripping over the blankets that were wrapped around my legs, I practically crawled to the bathroom.

Making it to the toilet, my stomach emptied itself.

"Little Bird, you are scaring me; what’s going on?" asked Rip softly as I felt him behind me, pulling my hair out of my face. I closed my eyes as I vomited yet again, but the only thing I could see was Rip’s head in my arms.

"Talk to us, Little Fox, what is going on? What did you see?" asked Ye Yao Zu, kneeling between the toilet and bathtub in the hotel bathroom.

I opened my mouth to answer him, but I couldn’t. My throat felt raw as I forced myself to swallow.

"See?" I asked, resting my cheek against the toilet seat.

"Here," grunted Bai Long Qiang, bringing in a thick blanket and wrapping it around my shoulders. "We are here. We aren’t leaving. You take your time, and when you can, let us know what happened."

"You are here?" I asked as I stared off in the distance. I just wanted to melt into a puddle of nothingness, my body doing nothing but trembling.

"We are," assured Fan Teng Fei. I could hear his voice, but I couldn’t see him.

"How do I know that?" I softly questioned. It felt so frigging real. I could smell the blood from my men. I could feel the bars of the cage as it dug into my side. I could see the light fading from Rip’s eyes. I could taste my own fear and hear my own screams.

How was that not real?

I let out a low moan and tilted my head just enough to get the bile coming up into the toilet and not over me.

"How do you know that?" repeated Ye Yao Zu as his face came within inches of mine. I wanted to warn him that my breath probably didn’t smell the greatest right now, but I didn’t want to.

I didn’t see the moment he died, but I saw his body parts. And yet...

With a trembling hand, I reached up to touch his face. Maybe it was easier with him because I hadn’t seen it.

"It was so real," I whispered to him. "How do I know that I haven’t gone completely insane?"

There was silence in the bathroom, and I don’t think I was the only one holding my breath, waiting for Ye Yao Zu’s answer.

"If you don’t know, then you need to trust us to be able to tell you," replied Si Dong, not waiting for the other man’s answer. "And if you need more assurance, then you tell us that too, and we will do whatever it is that you need for us to believe us. And if even that doesn’t work, then you don’t need to care. Whether you have gone insane or are completely normal, we will still love you more than life itself."

His words caused tears to roll down my face, but I didn’t bother to wipe them away.

"It doesn’t matter?" I asked. It seemed like one of those important things. But this wasn’t the first time I had questioned my mind.

"Not even a little," smiled Si Dong.

"You died," I said suddenly, the words pulled out of me. I cringed but refused to back down. "All of you died."

"How?" grunted Rip. Leave it to the Reaver to get down to the brass tacks.

"Alpha," I sighed. I looked around as much as I could without moving my head from the seat.

I expected them to argue with me, that the Alpha had been killed months ago. That it was just a dream.

But they didn’t do any of that.

"Where?" asked Cheng Bo Jing. For the first time, I raised my head to see each one of my men squished into the bathroom.

"The base. We gave Hu Wen Cheng and Zhao Jun Jie our plan, and then we left for the base," I expanded. My eyes went to Bai Long Qiang, and I swallowed what I was going to say. "Things happened, and we split up. The Alpha found me and hung me up from a cage in the middle of a room. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t access my powers."

"I am going to assume that I had something to do with the ’things happened’ part of this," chuckled Bai Long Qiang as he let out a long sigh. "You need to tell me how I fucked things up. What you saw in your vision cannot happen."

Taking in a deep breath, I slowly let it out. I closed my eyes briefly, but as soon as I did, I could see Rip’s head in my hands.

"It’s okay," Bai Long Qiang assured me. Whatever it is, we can handle it like we do everything else... together."

"The base was littered with bodies," I started, going back to staring out into space, but Ye Yao Zu shifted so that all I could see was him. It wasn’t until that second that I realized that I was still touching his face.

Fuck, this vision has really screwed with me.

"We went into the main building, and you wanted us to split up."

Cheng Bo Jing nodded his head. "It would cover the most amount of territory in the least amount of time," he agreed. "But I am going to assume that that was the beginning of the end?"

I nodded my head. "We split up into groups of two, and I went with Bai Long Qiang."