Her tongue felt heavy and she pried it from the roof of her mouth to utter her reply with complete dejection. “There’s no doubt in my mind. My cat won’t shut up about it.”
He scrubbed a hand over the stubble on his chin then pushed away from the wall, reaching for her upper arm and squeezing it gently.
Eve took comfort from the gesture.
Hawk met her gaze and held it. “I’m so sorry. I wish there was something I could say to make this better.”
“And I’m grateful for it, but nothing that anyone could say could make this any better. He’s aViper, Hawk. And what if he…?”
“Don’t say it. Don’t even think it. I don’t believe it could be him.”
“Yeah?” Vitriol swelled in her and she glared past him down the deserted corridor. “Well, that makes one of us because I don’t believe anything right now, anything at all.”
Chapter Four
Liam
Liam watched as the female agent ran from the room, her hand covering her mouth. He had the weirdest urge to run after her to make sure she was okay, but he fought the crazy impulse. He was pretty sure after this morning, if he went chasing after a lone female, one of the agents would pull out a gun and shoot him. Instead, he gazed around the room, unsure what to do with himself. He wrang his hands and paced, the voice in his head louder than it had been in weeks.
Follow her! Follow! Follow!It chanted. Liam did his best to ignore the voice, but it wasn’t easy.
Follow! Mate!
Mate? What in the hell was it talking about now? Liam shook his head, getting annoyed with himself. He was back to thinking of the voice as a separate entity again, but the doctors had told him that could be detrimental to him controlling his illness. The voice didn’t belong to someone or something else. It was his mind playing tricks on him, causing these delusions. He needed to remember that.
If he convinced himself that someone else was talking to him and that he didn’t actually have a mental illness, he would stop taking his meds again. And no good could come from that. When he was off his medication, he could be a danger to himself and those around him—at least, that was what the doctors had told him. The last thing he wanted to do was to put that beautiful petite FBI agent in any danger. If he was to harm her, he really would have succumbed to the monster hiding within him, proving that what everyone thought of him was true. And he didn’t want it to be true. He didn’t want to be a monster.
He wanted… Well, it didn’t matter what he wanted. Not anymore.
The front door slammed, and he figured the first agents that had been watching him had left. It was hardly a surprise that they hadn’t come to say goodbye to him. Why would they? They were hardly buddies. They’d made it perfectly clear what they thought of him.
When the new agents came back into the room, Liam wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans then approached them. His gaze was glued to the beautiful female agent, and he couldn’t have torn it from her if his life had depended on it.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Her pretty face scrunched into a scowl and though he’d seen it on other faces as they looked at him probably a hundred times, when her lips curled upward into a sneer, it was like taking a punch to the gut. It wounded him.
“What’s it to you?” she shot back.
What indeed.
Liam straightened his shoulders and lifted his chin, determined not to show how much her coldness had affected him. In honesty, it wasn’t the first time a pretty girl had shot him down, so why should this one be any different? Of course, calling her merely pretty would be like saying the Dodge Tomahawk was fairly fast.
He held her gaze for a moment longer, then turned his back and walked to the window, looking out at the quiet street now bathed in the shadow of night. But even as he stood there with an outward appearance of calm, inside he was in turmoil. His stomach clenched and the voice in his mind roared at him.
No! Mate! Go to mate! Mate! Mate! Mate!
“Shut up!” Liam roared, so loud he thought he saw the glass in the windowpane in front of him rattle.
“What the hell, man?” the male agent said.
Liam spun around, his eyes wide. “I, umm, I’m sorry, I didn’t…”
His meds! Shit, he hadn’t taken them today. And he must be overdue by now. No wonder he was losing it. He crossed to the table where he’d left them, but stained wooden surface was empty. Panic blossomed in his chest, threatening to drown him from the inside. He needed his meds. Now.
“Fuck! Where are they?”
His breathing came quicker as he spun, trying to locate them. The two agents were watching him with matching wary expressions.Shewas watching him freaking out, and look like a damn idiot, and that only made his panic worse until he was gasping for air.
