Obsession Untamed (Feral Warriors #2)(36)

Tighe shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ll find her.”

Lyon’s hands fisted on the table in front of him. “I don’t like that you don’t have control of her mind.”

Tighe’s teeth ground together, his temper sparking. “I said, I’m working on it.”

“I don’t have to tell you how dangerous it is to have an FBI agent searching for us, knowing what we are.”

“She doesn’t have a clue what we are.”

“Maybe not, yet. But she’s an investigator. And I have to believe she’s already seen things that have her questioning who you are. What you are. Am I wrong?”

“No. You’re not wrong.”

“Contain this threat, Stripes. However you have to do it. If you can’t, we will.”

Tighe heard the promise in his chief’s words. The threat. Because there was only one way anyone else could contain this.

By killing Delaney Randall.

Deep inside, the tiger raised its head and growled.

“Whatever we do, we have to do it fast,” Hawke said. “I called the Shaman and talked to him about those streaks in your eyes, Tighe.”

Tighe lifted a brow. “And?”

Hawke’s jaw clenched, his expression grim. “Your soul’s beginning to disintegrate. Once your eyes are fully black, there won’t be anything left of you in either body. Until then, there’s still hope we can put you back together again.”

But his time was running out.

Delaney sat on the edge of the bed while the blood-pressure cuff contracted around her arm.

“How do you feel?” Dr. Jensen asked for the fiftieth time. The doctor was a short, round woman with a tight cap of salt-and-pepper hair and shrewd blue eyes.

“Fine.” Like her heart had been ripped out of her chest.

“Good. All your vital signs are normal.” The doctor removed the cuff. “We’ll have the lab results back in the morning. I’d offer you something to help you sleep tonight, but until we know if they drugged you, I don’t dare give you anything.”

Delaney shook her head. “I don’t need it.” The last thing she wanted was to be in a deep, unnatural sleep if one of Tighe’s men found a way to track her.

Just the thought of Tighe made her jaw tighten with anger. Her eyes began to grow hot, stinging with unshed tears. He shouldn’t have run. He shouldn’t have died.

God, what an idiot she was to care.

Dr. Jensen said good night and closed the bedroom door behind her, leaving Delaney alone in the master suite of the FBI safe house. Phil had arranged for her to stay under a doctor’s supervision until they figured out if she had, indeed, been drugged. In addition to Dr. Jensen, there were two highly trained guards inside with her and another two outside in case Tighe’s brother, or others in his organization, came after her.

Until they understood what she’d stumbled into, they weren’t taking any chances.

The only one she knew wouldn’t come for her was Tighe himself.

She pressed the heel of her hand tight against her chest, trying to ease the awful ache. The tears she’d held at bay all day finally got the better of her, and she sank onto the bed, letting them go. Her tears turned to sobs as she cried, grieving for a man she’d never understood and barely even known. She couldn’t regret her own actions, because she’d done what she had to do, but she could…and did…regret the outcome. She hated that Tighe had been so involved in illegal activities that he’d sacrificed his life rather than be taken in for questioning.

Lying back, tears rolling, she ached with loss. In some inexplicable way, they’d connected. She’d sensed a goodness in him, seen it in the man who’d been so intent on rescuing a little girl, he’d stumbled into the FBI’s trap. And he’d understood her, maybe better than she understood herself. He’d claimed she sought the killers out of revenge. And she did. She absolutely did. But it was more than that, she could see that now. Somewhere in the back of her head was a belief held from childhood that if she could just catch the man who’d killed her mom, she could make it all right again. She could get rid of the ache she’d lived with all these years once and for all.

But that ache was so much more than righteous retribution. It was loss and grief. Betrayal.

Loneliness.

Once the tears started, tears she hadn’t shed in years, she couldn’t stop them. She cried for Tighe, and for the mother she still missed, and for the children whose own mothers had been stolen from them by a man Delaney couldn’t catch. But mostly she cried for herself, for the loneliness that pressed in harder every day. A loneliness she hadn’t even known she felt until a handsome, mercurial, strangely gentle man made it disappear.

A man who would never touch her again.

She didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until pain tore through her head with the force of a sledgehammer, slamming her awake with a breath-stealing gasp. She needed to call for Dr. Jensen. But before she could utter a sound, the darkness rushed up to envelop her. As the dark fog of agony stole her away, a single name screamed through her mind.

Tighe!

As Tighe stood in the war room, Delaney’s cry tore through his head. He froze.

“Stripes! What’s happening? Another vision?”

“Yes.” He grabbed for the wall as blackness stole his sight. He saw Delaney lying on a bed, still and silent, her cheeks streaked with tears. His heart clenched, that warmth in his mind that connected with her throbbed with pain. Terrible pain.