Released (Caged #3)(12)
“You blame your parents,” Tria said. “She wouldn’t tell her mother because of how your parents reacted.”
“She bled to death because of them!” I screamed. My eyes burned, and my jaw clenched at the thought. “If they had just supported us—realized we were trying to do the right thing, she’d still be alive! She might have still lost the baby, but Aimee would have been okay. She would have been okay!”
With Tria’s hand slowly moving over my cheek, I fell to the side with my head in her lap. I screamed into the fabric of the robe and let my tears soak through to her skin. I reached around to her back and held on as tightly as I could.
“I can’t let that happen to you, Tria!” I cried. “Please, Tria—please! Don’t do it! I can’t protect you from…from that! Please, please, Tria!”
“Liam, that’s not going to happen—”
“You don’t know!” I screamed as I gripped her again. “You can’t be sure. Tria—I can’t lose you! I can’t! I need you, Tria. I love you—I can’t lose you!”
She traced her fingers against my cheek, and I pushed myself up enough to wrap my arms around her shoulders and bring her to my chest.
“Please, Tria…I love you…don’t do this…please…”
“Liam, you need to calm down…”
“Please don’t…please…”
“Shh, baby…”
There was a lot of noise coming from the other room, but I ignored it and just held on for life and sanity.
“I love you…I can’t let that happen to you…”
“He’s in there,” I heard Yolanda say.
Three guys came into the room, and I clung to Tria as they tried to lift me up and get me onto one of those gurneys. As tempted as I was to just beat the everloving shit out of whoever was grabbing my arm, I was more interested in keeping my hold on Tria.
“Please don’t fight!” Tria said. “Let them help.”
“No!” I grabbed on and held her tighter.
“I’ll come with you,” she said. “I’ll even ride in the ambulance.”
She looked up at the EMT, and he nodded his head. Yolanda still had to threaten me a bit, but I finally let them load me up and strap me down. Tria stayed right next to me, holding my hand as I just let myself crash and burn inside my head.
I was never one to accept help, but I knew when I was in over my head.
Chapter 4—Make the Promise
“I wish he would have called before running off to find you.”
“Would it have mattered?”
“I might have been able to prepare him a little. He needs to consider some medication treatment along with therapy. I don’t think he realizes when he has a panic attack, and this one was definitely severe.”
“Is he going to be all right?”
“That’s up to him.”
Dr. Baynor’s and Tria’s voices mingled together inside my heavy head. I opened my eyes slowly to find myself in a very similar room—if not the exact same one—as the room I woke up in after surgery. Like the last time, my right arm itched where the IV entered my skin, but my left arm itched, too. It was a lot worse than the other one, and when I moved to scratch it, I remembered it was because I had been using again.
Slowly, the events of the past few days sloshed into the forefront of my mind.
“Welcome back,” Dr. Baynor said. He was smiling when I looked over to him. “Don’t talk yet. Give yourself a few minutes.”
He came to the side of the bed and injected something into the IV.
“It should help with the itching,” he said quietly. He nodded his head toward my arm and then picked up the cup of water beside the bed. He gave me a quick drink through the straw. “How’s that?”
“I…” I cleared my throat a couple of times. “I feel like I got run over.”
“Not surprising.”
I looked at Tria and tried to find some way for those “gateways to the soul” to give me some inclination as to where I stood right now, but they told me nothing.
“When can I go home?” I asked, and a little voice in my head wondered if I still had a home. “’Cause this place sucks ass.”
“You could consider vacationing in the Alps,” Baynor suggested. “How do you feel about skiing?”
“Would you be there?” I asked.
“Sure, I’ll tag along.”
“Forget it then.”
Baynor laughed, but Tria just fiddled with the strap on Hercules’ Humvee as Baynor explained a lot of shit about how I was suffering from anxiety attacks and that the one I had at Yolanda’s apartment was quite a major one.
“You can go home in the morning,” he told me. “I’m keeping you here for observation, and I want to start talking about treatment for both your anxiety and other issues. You can either cooperate, which means you walk out of here tomorrow, or you can bitch and moan and threaten me, and I’ll hold you for three days on a psych evaluation. Your pick.”
“Fucker,” I muttered.
He picked up my chart and poked around at it while Tria stood off to his side, down at the end of the bed. Our eyes met, but she dropped her gaze to the floor. After a minute, she looked back up at me.