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Franzen.
Yes.
That was it.
What he’d done to her. What he hadn’t done to her. The needy, hot mess her mind and body had become because of obsessing over it, to the point she was nearly crawling out of her own skin…
To the point she’d fallen prey to fear like this.
Let those bastards, whoever the hell they were, take her into this hell again. A trembling, terrified zombie, trapped in a torment she swore she’d never enter again. She’d served her penance here already—starting on the day she had to tell her son his father was never coming home again.
Fate had noted her vow. And honored it.
Until yesterday afternoon, when the bastard screwed the entire planet at once—a catastrophe she’d accepted with surreal serenity, even to her own mind, until just now, when looking at Ronnie’s frantic notes, and recognizing the delayed reaction shock had kept from her.
Not anymore.
It was all sinking in.
Completely.
Ruthlessly.
Shooting down the vortex of her exhausted mind, directly into the core of her consciousness. Reminding her, inside one freezing minute, that hell wasn’t brimstone and flames. It was ice—and fear.
And solitude.
Isolation that claimed even more of her in its frosty fist. Choked the air from her throat. Yanked her down, sliding against the wall, until she curled to the floor in a ball of shivering aloneness.
No.
No.
She couldn’t do this.
She had to get through this.
Had to fight her way back…
To what?
To what?
She crawled across the floor, dragging herself to the shower and popping the stall door back. A weak laugh broke through—that was a good sign, right?—when she saw the embossed letters for the temperature controls. This had all started with her actually thinking she needed a cold shower. Her only obsession now was cranking this shit as hot as it would let her.
She had to get through this.
She was stronger than this.
But even as the spray hit her, warming every second, her legs didn’t reinvigorate to stand. Her body wouldn’t cooperate with her will. The heat just seemed to open more vortices now, into which her heart melted…and her grief poured.
Beneath the pelting heat, she curled into a new ball. As the water soaked her clothes then her body, she let the pain drench her defenses—
And topple them.
