Despite running for what felt like forever, he wasn’t out of breath and his legs weren’t tired. He didn’t even have a stitch in his side or cramp in his feet, but then he’d always had a little bit more in the tank than most men he knew. He’d always been able to run faster and had more stamina—had always been that little bit stronger, too. Unfortunately, that was where the similarities between himself and other men he knew ended.
Liam’s life had been spiraling out of control for as long as he could remember.
The stupid stunts with Silas—the stealing, the drugs, the gun in that liquor store. Yeah, he had a lot to run from. He’d done some dumb shit, and one day, it was going to catch up with him.
He ducked his head, ran harder, ran faster. Just kept running.
There’d been a time, once, when he’d walked away from it. The garage, the apprenticeship. He held onto those months as his feet slapped against the damp asphalt. Honest work. Good work. The sense of belonging.
But he hadn’t. He’d never belonged there. Not for one minute. It had been a lie, because that was the life of a good person, and he was not a good person. He was a criminal. A predator.
And nothing he did could take that back.
No matter how hard he ran. No matter how hard he tried. There were some things you couldn’t outrun.
The Vipers had welcomed him back. Running with a pack of criminals, of people like him. Yeah, that was where he belonged.
He sucked in another deep breath, aware with some part of his mind that not many people could keep up with him this long. He was fit, fitter than most of the cops and rival gang members who’d ever tried to chase him down. This pursuer was relentless.
He ducked his head, grit his teeth, and pumped his legs harder.
It wasn’t just his crimes he couldn’t outrun, or the half dozen foster homes he’d fallen through.
Liam had been diagnosed with early onset schizophrenia at aged thirteen. Meds, they claimed, would control it, but he hated them. They dulled his senses, but they didn’t get rid of his delusions—didn’t stop the voice in his head. Nothing had ever silenced that for longer than a day or two.
Except the fear. The fear and the adrenaline, the danger of running with the Vipers. When he was high on the adrenaline and the wrongness of it all, there was no room to think of anything else.
The gang did just about anything illegal to make their money including protection rackets, theft, drugs, and loan sharking. They operated very much like a modern-day mafia. The Vipers had become wealthy over the years and would lend money with huge interest rates. And when Liam went knocking on people’s doors, they paid what they owed. And if they didn’t, he chased them down andmadethem.
But he wasn’t the one doing the chasing right now.
And there were some things he couldn’t condone, not even to find his own twisted version of peace.
The problem was that the longer he was in the Vipers, the less he could ignore what was going on around him. The more money they made, the worse they became. It had got to the stage where Liam had literally heard it all. Violent assaults, rape, even murder, and he simply didn’t have the stomach for it—he couldn’t even stand hearing half of the stuff that went on, God forbid if he would have had to have witnessed any of it. And Silas had been pushing him to do more, to do things that Liam didn’t want to do.
And it wasn’t as if he could just walk away from that life because once you were a Viper, the only ‘out’ was the kind that came with a body bag. The people in that gang knew too much, and Liam knew more than most. And so, he had done the only thing he could think of to ensure thathisout involved him still breathing—he’d gone to the FBI. He’d struck a deal. He knew they had shit on him, though how much, he wasn’t sure, so he’d agreed to testify against the gang, and against Silas, and had been given immunity from prosecution and the promise of going into the witness protection scheme where he intended to leave this life behind him once and for all.
He’d even reconciled himself to seeing another doctor about his schizophrenia in the hopes that there were some other meds they could try him on that would finally take away his delusions. Take away that voice…
Running flat out now, Liam checked over his shoulder, but the man was still following him, and he knew he couldn’t keep this up forever. He couldn’t run all night. He had to be a man about it, had to turn around and face his enemy. He didn’t even know who was following him, but it must have been one of the Vipers.
Liam stopped running and when he looked down, he was surprised to find a knife in his hand, its blade glinting in the light from the streetlight up above. The blade looked sharp—lethal. Liam didn’t want to use it but as he spun around, he knew he had no choice. He had to protect himself. He tried to make out the face of the man who had been chasing him, but as he neared, Liam realized it wasn’t a man at all, it was a huge black cat—a panther. It leapt for him, and Liam raised his hand to protect himself, but the knife was gone and in its place his fingers had morphed into claws that looked even sharper than the knife. But it was too late. The cat was flying through the air and as it reached him, Liam opened his mouth and screamed.
As he jolted awake, the scream died in his lungs and just as he sat up in bed, the bedroom door flew open and Jack, one of the FBI agents who had been guarding him, burst into the room, his gun drawn.
“What the fuck?” Jack said, looking around for signs of threat and evidently finding none.
“Bad dream,” Liam mumbled.
The special agent glared at him. “You get nightmares and scream like a girl often?”
Liam shrugged. “Now and again.”
The special agent’s lips twisted into a sneer. “Can’t say I’m surprised you don’t sleep easy with all the shit you and your buddies have seen and done. In fact, I’m surprised you can sleep at all.”
Liam just stared at the man without replying. He was used to people looking at him like dirt. He couldn’t say he was all that surprised by it. Being in the Vipers had dulled his senses somewhat to half of the things that went on, but evenhehadn’t been able to hide the revulsion on his face when he’d heard what some of the gang members had done.
“I was just coming to wake you, anyway,” Jack said. “Me and Leo have been reassigned. You’ll have new agents watching you until the trial.”
