Page 197 of Maddening Fixation

Was she frightened?

Was she lying somewhere alone... waiting for me to save her?

I pressed trembling fingers against my mouth, fighting back the panic threatening to consume me.

Forty-eight hours.

That was all the time the Flynn patriarch had given me.

Forty-eight hours to choose between my mother’s life...

...and Romeo’s.

THE ENTIRE DAY PASSED in agonizing silence.

I couldn’t sit still.

I wandered from room to room, unable to focus on anything for more than a few seconds before my thoughts circled back to my mother.

Food tasted like ash in my mouth.

Even swallowing water felt like forcing down shards of glass.

Every few minutes, I reached for my phone and dialed the nurse’s number.

No answer.

By evening, I had called nearly two hundred times.

Every attempt ended the same way.

Voicemail.

The silence was becoming its own form of torture.

I had no idea whether my mother was alive.

The helplessness was suffocating.

Around nine that evening, I stepped onto the balcony overlooking the bungalow’s private garden.

The night air was cool against my skin, carrying the scent of damp earth and blooming jasmine, but even that couldn’t calm the storm raging inside me.

I wrapped my arms around myself and drew a slow, shaky breath.

It didn’t help.

My phone suddenly rang.

Egor.

I frowned at his name flashing across the screen.

Once upon a time, he had been my closest friend.

Someone I trusted with almost everything.

Now...