Trapped (Caged #2)(63)

“This has nothing to do with them!” I yelled. The tender hold I had on the big red sanity balloon faltered, and the balloon’s string went tight as a gust of hurricane-like winds grabbed hold of it.

“It does if you don’t want…don’t want…” Tria tried to take a deep breath, halting her words.

“No!” I yelled. “You are not going to do this! I’m not going to let this happen to you!”

“I am!” she screamed back at me. “You don’t get to make this decision, Liam. I do. I am having this baby, and if you don’t want it, I will just find someone else who does!”

The image of Tria in the bathroom filled my mind, complete with blood, screaming, police sirens, meat, a black plastic bag, and a tiny coffin. The vision was all shoved into the little bitty room where we stood beside each other this morning to brush our teeth. The images and memories were so overwhelming that the idea of her finding someone else didn’t even enter the picture.

The wind picked up, the thin string broke, and I plummeted.

I grabbed the closest thing to me that wasn’t Tria, picked it up, and threw it against the wall. It ended up being the coffee table, and papers, books, and the little pen-shaped pregnancy test went flying. Tria screeched in surprise, but I was too far gone to stop.

There was too much in my head—floods of memories reappearing, and I wasn’t prepared. I couldn’t handle them.

“Liam, I’m pregnant.”

“Not funny, Aimee.”

“I’m not kidding.”

It was all happening again.

Nearly ripping the still-open door from its hinges, I turned and ran out of the apartment.

*****

Sometime later, I barely registered that I was on the subway.

There were some vague memories of hunting around in my jacket pocket for my transit card to shove into the slot to get on the train, but very little recollection of anything outside of my own thoughts once I made my way to the seat at the very back and plopped down. There was too much else going on in my brain for me to consider my surroundings. I didn’t really know where I was or what I was doing. There just weren’t enough cycles left in my mind to deal with it.

Tria was pregnant.

I shoved the palms of my hands into my eye sockets to try to keep myself from seeing Tria on the bathroom floor, covered in blood. The kind of panic it brought into my chest and stomach had me doubled over in the seat. If I lost her…if I lost Tria…

I clenched my hands into fists and squeezed my eyes shut.

I wouldn’t survive. I couldn’t go through all of that again, and I wouldn’t. If something happened to her, I’d head straight for the area of town just south of where we live now, spend whatever money I had on smack, and start banging one after another. I’d make sure there was no way anyone could get me to the hospital on time.

A choking sound came from my throat, and I tried to swallow a couple of times, which just induced a wave of nausea. My back and neck were sweating; my head was pounding in my temples, and the images in my head kept flittering back and forth between memories of Aimee and the same memories replaced with Tria’s face in her stead.

I desperately wanted to go back to being numb.

My stomach clenched, and I pounded my fists on the side of the seat next to me. Part of my mind registered people getting up and moving away from me as the subway continued down its underground passage, but I ignored them. I also ignored it when the train reached the end of the line and started traveling back the way it had come.

I couldn’t let all of this happen again. I couldn’t let it all happen to Tria, not when I knew what might transpire. As a kid, I had been ignorant of the dangers, but now I knew better. I had to make sure she didn’t go through with it.

Not your choice.

I continued to pound on the seats with my fists, and more people moved away.

She was taking the choice away from me. She wasn’t allowing me any say in it at all. How was that fair?

Some drunk stumbled down the middle of the subway car, running into other people, and completely incapable of hanging onto the handrails. He made his way to the back where I sat and looked down at me.

“You’re in my seat!” he exclaimed.

I looked up at him, saw the look of absolute indignation on his face, and laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound, either.

“Go f*ck yourself!” I said.

The dude swayed a bit before taking a step closer to me. He dropped his voice a little, lower and quieter.

“I said you’re in my seat,” he repeated.

“And I told you to go f*ck yourself.”

He narrowed his eyes, and his hand disappeared inside his nasty brown jacket. He sneered at me, and then pulled a silver blade from his pocket. Right in front of my eyes, his face began to change. His skin darkened, and his hair went from dirty blond to black. Glancing back to his face, the dark, flat brown of Keith Harrison’s eyes gazed back at me.

I lost it.

He probably didn’t even realize he had been hit before he was on his back with me slamming his hand into the bottom part of the subway car’s handrail. The knife flew from his fingers, and I released his hand so I could punch him with both fists.

It felt f*cking great, too, even though his head was hurting my knuckles. Actually, that made it even better—it gave me something to focus on other than what was going on in my head. It gave the other people on the train something to focus on, too, which ultimately led to security making their way to the back car, screaming and yelling at people to get out of the way. I didn’t pay any attention as they approached and tried to pull me off the guy.