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I… didn’t know what to say.
“I saw Theo for the first time and I just knew… he was mine.” She focused her eyes on me once again. “Then you kept talking to him.”
Then I kept talking to him?
What?
“I’m sorry, Shondra,” I apologized.
I mean, what else could I do?
I wasn’t the one in the wrong here.
Obviously Crazy Cathy was.
And why did she have a hammer?
I kept talking to Theo?
What in the hell did that mean?
“You’re not sorry.” She sniffed. “You’re trying to get out of what’s about to happen.”
I didn’t know what she had planned for me, but I knew that I couldn’t let her do what I thought she was going to do. And what I thought she was going to do had a lot to do with that hammer in her hand.
My biggest hope was that she was hanging up a picture, which I highly doubted seeing as the one time I’d asked Shondra if she had a hammer I could borrow at the office, she told me she didn’t hang her own stuff up. Maintenance did. Why the hell would she have a hammer?
No, I could only see one reason why she had a hammer in her hand, and that wasn’t going to end well for me.
Meaning I had to try to distract her.
“Theo and I aren’t together anymore,” I tried. “Never were. He always had a thing for my sister, and he could never get over her enough to even look at me.”
“He does not have a thing for your sister,” she hissed. “He has a thing for me!”
Okay, don’t mention anybody but her being with Theo. Noted.
“Yes, yes.” I nodded, placating her. “You. You’re having his baby.”
She narrowed her eyes but nodded her head as if she agreed with that statement.
“I am having his baby.” She looked wired. “I had to go off all my meds. The ones that I was on weren’t safe for the fetus.”
The fetus, not the baby.
Jesus Christ.
“Theo treated me like I was normal.” She smiled. “We had a little hiccup there when you actually came to a social function. But then you moved away, and it all worked out. Theo found out that he was going to be a father. Then we came home. But now you’re in our home. You need to leave. We can’t even get a duplex here, where he wants to live, because they rented out the last one to you. Why are you everywhere?”
I had no idea how to proceed.
With a normal, sane person, I might be able to accomplish it.
But Jesus, she was neither normal nor sane.
I’d realized that over the time that I’d worked with her the last year.
There was no ‘normal’ when it came to Shondra.
There was one time that she’d freaked out over a freakin’ pen that I’d borrowed.
Like, full-on, fuming, ‘I’m telling everyone that I can that you’re a stealer’ kind of freaked out. I hadn’t stolen the pen. I’d picked it up in the hallway and given it to reception. When I’d come to sign some paperwork, the pen had been given back to me to do so. Shondra had walked by and freaked the fuck out, filed a complaint on me for stealing to the boss.
Hell, if I hadn’t had video evidence—the moron boss of mine had at least had videos of the incident—then I would’ve had Shondra down my throat over a fucking pen.
“I’ll leave. Right now,” I promised.
“Oh, you’ll leave.” She raised her hammer, made contact with something over my shoulder, and then smiled.
Everything went black.
***
Dax
“Hello?” I answered, unsure if I should or not.
“Umm,” Rachelle said hesitantly. “I came by to apologize. To tell you… some things. And… well… there was a really loud bang in your house. You’re… you’re okay, aren’t you?”
I frowned, my hands going to my thighs as I pinched the phone between my shoulder and my cheek.
“I’m fine,” I stated.
“Just… I think you should come check it out,” she said. “And hurry. Because the guy mowing the lawn next to your house is staring at me like I’m a rat, and I don’t want him to hurt me.”
Derek.
Or maybe Ford.
I wasn’t sure which guy she was talking about mowing the lawn.
He could be mowing Rowen’s place, and that would be Derek. But it could also be my neighbor on the opposite side of me, and that was Ford.
Either way, I had no doubt that they were staring at her suspiciously.
They knew who she was.
Everybody did.
I looked at my watch, then gave a heads up to Foster, our team leader, that I was leaving.
Receiving the nod of ‘okay’ in return, I headed out the door and started down the steps that would lead to the cruisers in the back lot.
Walking past Theo on my way out, I heard him talking on the phone. “Shondra,” he was saying urgently into the phone. “This is not fucking funny.”
