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“Holy shit.” Her voice was low as she clasped her hands together.
I took a couple steps toward the bed, a
nd Lia jumped up and moved to press her back to the wall. Her eyes were wide and distrustful, and the palms of her hands pressed against the drywall. With my chest tightening around my heart and lungs, I stopped moving.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I reminded her.
“How do I know that?”
I closed my eyes for a moment and was reminded of our night at the cabin when it was clear she was thinking similar thoughts only without any knowledge to back them up.
“If I was going to kill you, you’d be dead,” I reminded her.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t.”
I watched her carefully—the subtle way she kept looking toward the door, the way she was balancing up on the balls of her feet, the positioning of her hips. Her fear had sent her into complete flight mode. If I hadn’t been standing between her and the door, she would have bolted.
Inside of myself, I didn’t think it would have felt any different than if someone had reached inside my chest with one of those hand-held mixers running on high power. Everything inside me was churning painfully, and my muscles were so tight, I could barely breathe. Someone with logic on their side would have recognized it as the same emotion as Lia’s but with the opposite response; all I could feel was anger.
“Why would I tell you all this shit just to kill you off? You think I fucking liked talking about this, huh? You think I wanted to? I’ve never talked to anyone about any of that shit unless I was under direct fucking orders. Never.”
I was nearly panting, and there was pressure behind my eyes I was finding difficult to hold back. I wasn’t even sure what was happening in my head; it all just felt bad.
She’s going to leave.
Lia’s arms were wrapped around her stomach, and she was pushing herself against the wall now—anything to get farther away from me. Everything inside of me wanted to grab my Beretta and start shooting the shit out of something—anything. There was some kind of geyser just under my skin, trying to find the weakest point to break through in a gush of steam and boiling rage.
I managed to take in an audible breath, and I tried to let it out slowly. Lia tensed even more, and I wanted to turn the damn gun on myself for scaring her so much. It wasn’t what I wanted. I would have been the first to admit that I didn’t really know exactly what I wanted, but this definitely wasn’t it.
I dropped my ass onto the bed and my head onto the palms of my hands. I pushed at my eye sockets to try to relieve the pressure there a bit and ignored the fact that my hands ended up a little damp.
Turning my head to the side, I looked over at her. Lia’s posture had relaxed a little, but she still kept glancing at the door.
“I can’t let you just walk out,” I said. “I’ll take you somewhere, but I can’t let you go out there on your own.”
“You really are serious about all of this,” Lia said—part statement, part question.
“Yeah, it’s all true. I don’t have any reason to lie to you about this, do I?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t.”
She nodded, and her eyes moved to stare at me for several silent minutes.
“I need a little time,” she said softly. “I need to think for a minute.”
Lia moved slowly around the corner of the wall, watching me the entire time, to the bathroom where she shut herself in. I heard the click of the lock right after the door closed and dropped my head back into my hands.
I’d been wrong. Telling her everything was a stupid fucking idea. Not only was she never going to have anything to do with me again, but having knowledge of the few facts I had revealed was enough to get her on someone’s watch list and very possibly just decide she wasn’t worth the risk and take her out.
No, it was too late to avoid that anyway. She’d been with me enough, had even seen at the prison with me, and was already in that kind of danger. I’d already fucked her over just by being around her. If someone picked her up and questioned her yesterday, she wouldn’t have been able to tell them anything, but they wouldn’t have believed her.
I’d fucked this up as much as I possibly could have, and at the end of the day, she was still going to be gone, and except for Odin, I was going to be alone again. I’d be back to fucking hookers, having no one I could really talk to, and just counting the days until my sleep-deprived state took me back into total meltdown.
