Dark Thief (The Two Sides of Me Book 2) (7 page)

Being startled awake brings my heart straight into my throat, and with only a hoarse rasp as an attempt to scream my panic is compounded. “Ms. Galloway I’m so sorry I didn’t mean to frighten you. Please wake up though it’s imperative we make sure you are safe.” Safe? Mr. Saint? What the hell is going on, where am I?  I try to focus in the dim light but my mind is thick with sleep and medication. 

“Miss, please you need to come with us.” Mr. Saint urges me again. I have no idea what he’s talking about and I search the sheets with one hand for my phone while he and another man I can’t see in the shadows wait for me to make some sort of decision. A few seconds of rooting around in the bed, keeping my eyes on Saint I find it and show it to him. “Ok you can bring your phone but we need to get out of here.” He reaches for me and I shrink away and text.
What’s going on? Where is Evan? Who’s that with you? And where are we going?
I pass the phone to him and he scans it quickly.

“Evan is having…an episode…he’s instructed us to take you to a safe area in this instance, Isaac is with me and we have an area of the house used for...oh just please come Mia it’s not safe here.” Isaac is here? When did that happen? Ok, I am really suspicious now, first of Mr. Saint pulling me out of bed in the night and second, what is this about Even’s
episode?
Third, what place is any safer than right here? Isaac steps forward into the light from the night table lamp.

“Mia please, I’ll explain in a minute we need to go!” Isaac says in a loud exaggerated whisper. “Ok.” I croak, hey I can make a noise, finally! I push back the heavy duvet and grab a silk robe Evan had left at the foot of the bed earlier, slip it on and side step both men when they try to guide me to the door. I’ll go but on my own terms. I motion Saint to exit first and Isaac to follow but Isaac won’t budge. “Mia I have to be behind you, it’s for your own protection.” Rolling my eyes I pass by him and he closes the door with a click that echoes down the long hall.

I have zero familiarity with this place so I blindly follow Mr. Saint down the stairs and then I hear him, he’s yelling and breaking glass, Evan, shit what’s going on? I stop abruptly and Isaac bumps into me. “Shit, sorry.”  I turn and face him toe to toe raising my eyebrows in question to him but he turns me around by my shoulders and guides me forward moving us away from Evan.  His yelling gets less and less audible as we enter a den.

Isaac moves to a desk on the far side and presses a button under it and a panel door, much like the hidden one in Evan’s Seattle office slides open. He motions for me to enter and I hesitate and back up a few steps. I don’t trust anyone anymore and going into what looks like a real actual panic room isn’t appealing at all. I shake my head and pull my robe around me tighter wrapping my arms around my waist.

This frustrates them to no end but I don’t fucking care. “Mia! Please, if you can trust anyone ever, it’s us right now.” Isaac says honestly panicked and Mr. Saint isn’t looking much calmer. I’m still so groggy, it couldn’t have been long ago that I went to sleep, what the hell is going on with Evan? “Ms. Galloway, there are closed circuit screens in the panic room you can observe Mr. Lawson and see what he’s doing, please we need to get you in there.” So it
is
a panic room, I thought so.

I begin to hear banging coming from down the hall and Evan’s voice again.  Something about his tone, the all-around vibe of him is off, it was his voice but sounded nothing like him and a small flame of fear ignites in my belly, just enough to move me into the panic room. Utter relief covers both men’s faces, they press a red button inside and the panel slides silently shut. I take a deep breath and hold it, closing my eyes I pray to God I’ve done the right thing.

Blowing out the breath I turn to see Mr. Saint has taken a seat behind a panel of screens showing every room in the house, exactly like the one in Seattle. Isaac reaches for me but I’m still involuntarily wary and I move just out of his reach so he points to a recliner type chair and I take a seat. The chair is leather and my gown is silk, I shudder from the contact when I sit and Isaac instantly goes looking for something to cover me with. There is a row of cupboards along the wall, all labeled perfectly.

Isaac retrieves an ultra-soft blanket from the one that says Linens. He doesn’t just hand it to me either, he opens it up and drapes it across my lap making sure it covers my feet. “Thank you.” I try out my abrasive thick whisper again. I sound terrible, maybe I should stick to texting for a little longer? “You’re welcome.”  He says. I text.
Now please tell me what’s going on, why is he yelling, why am I in here? And why do you have a panic room!
I pass the phone to Isaac, he reads, passes it back to me and sits on a stool next to me.

“Mia, this is going to be hard to hear but the Evan you know, well I don’t know how to say this but to just say it. He’s not the real Evan Lawson, not the one any of us know at least. He’s a dangerous man, lethal if you will, and prone to extreme outbursts of fury, like tonight and yesterday with you, I’m afraid. We all hoped he would be different with you, that his evil side wouldn’t surface anymore because of you. God we prayed the change in his personality was permanent, it would have made our lives so much easier. And everything was working out fine until yesterday when all of us, Evan included, realized you weren’t any safer than the rest of us. That’s why he made the new rules about sticking close to you when you were together, and to hide you if he showed the slightest bit of mood change.” 

I text.
What happened tonight to set him off? Has he always been this way or just recently?
“I don’t know Mia, I was working with him in his office and he just started getting more and more agitated until he wasn't making any sense at all.  The more I tried to reason with him the angrier he became. When he started breaking things I paged Mr. Saint, who was guarding your door and told him to get you ready to move.

This is bizarre. I feel like the president of the united states has been taken from bed after a terrorist threat and rushed to a nuclear bomb safe room in the white house. This house even
looks
like the fucking white house! This is insane, Evan needs help not abandonment, his tumor must be causing more confusion, more mood swings. I need a computer, I need access to his medical files and I really need a neurological specialist.  Damn I wish we were at home in Seattle!

“He told me you would want this.” Isaac hands me my iPad, I haven't seen this in a couple weeks. “And these.” Isaac passes me a stack of files with a clear envelope on top containing two SD cards. I can’t believe this, even when he’s not here, screaming in a fit of rage somewhere down the hall, he is reading my mind and giving me what I need, amazing. “Those are his medical files, all of the physicians he has seen and their diagnosis on one SD and the other he made me swear to make it very clear to you that you’re not to look at it unless…well unless he dies.” DOES NOT COMPUTE flashes before my eyes.

I can’t believe Isaac just spoke those words, did he really just say that? Look at it if he DIES? This is so fucked up, I’m not going to sit around here and wait for Evan to die. We need help. I’ll be fucking damned to hell if I stand by and watch while he slips away into oblivion as some psychopath that everyone is scared shitless of.

My Evan is the real Evan and I know it, I don’t care what anyone else says, I don’t care who he used to be. The kind loving, generous, tender man that I know is Evan, not this…this monster. I’m going to prove it and find someone to cure him, take that shit out of his head and bring him back to me. Nobody’s dying on my watch…especially Evan!

After the shock wears off, well the crippling shock at least. I don’t know that I’ll ever get over the shock of receiving a death SD card. I stand and let the blanket slide to the floor to my feet. I step over it to Mr. Saint’s side and bend over to peer at the screen he is watching, Evan in a rage. He’s in the bedroom we just came from pacing at the end of the bed, duvet and pillows thrown on the floor, no surface left undisturbed, lamps a clock and candles scattered everywhere.

It’s as if he were looking for me, didn’t find me and destroyed the room. I text Mr. Saint.
Has he done this to every room? Or just this one?
After shoving the phone under Saint’s nose he looks at it briefly and back to the screen where Evan continues to pace like a caged tiger. “He broke all the glass behind the bar in his other office, that’s when we came to get you, so no, not just this room.” He answers me in a flat tone and an even flatter effect.
I need to get out there.

That lights a spark under his ass. “No way in hell are you going through that door, I’ve only failed him once in 20 years and I’m not about to do it again!” Ok, so he’s going to be difficult about this, he must be forgetting I am in a relationship with an incredibly difficult man, I know how to deal with difficult! I’ll give him a few minutes of false reassurance while I look over Evan’s medical records and then I’m bolting.

Evan needs me, whichever one is out there, I feel like he’s searching for me. I should be terrified after what happened yesterday but all I can focus on is the man I love, in turmoil, held hostage in a mind that’s playing tricks on him, alone.  Maybe it’s the girlfriend in me or maybe it’s the nurse but something has me losing my mind right alongside Evan and I need to get to him before he hurts himself.  Even if it risks my own life. I sit back down, one eye on the screen and the other on one of Evan’s files.

Fuck, it’s hard to concentrate on two things at once but these stupid idiots have left him out there alone and if I don’t get to him and talk him down he’s going to hurt himself. Who knows what that tumor is doing inside of him. If it’s causing him to black out, strangle his girlfriend and turn into a bull charging through his own home destroying everything in his path, he could be at risk for any number of complications.

I skim his file, Pituitary Adenoma jumps off the page, my brain scrambles to remember just what kind of tumor that is. Ok, wait that’s not an inoperable tumor is it? No, I’m pretty sure those can be removed without problems, if it’s large enough though it can cause blindness and about a billion other serious side effects.  Why didn’t I look into this more when he was my patient?  I was too busy falling in love with him. Damn, damn, damn. I glance up to see Evan weaving back down the hall away from us holding his hands over his ears, he’s in pain.

Ok, I’ve gotta go, one more look at this file and I’m punching that red button on the wall and running like hell. One quick glance down and circled in red, there it is…massive vascular entanglement. I’m going to vomit. Jumping up I throw the files and SD cards on the floor fling the blanket off and promptly puke my guts up in a nearby trash can, God I hate throwing up.

This is it though, the guys are so taken by surprise with my puking that they are frozen momentarily.  I run for the door, jam my hand on that button, slide through and run for the desk button to close it behind me. Mr. Saint and Isaac watch me go in disbelief. I feel along the edge of the desk, press the button and whirl around in time to see it slide shut, two pissed off men clambering out of their seats and coming toward me.

I lock wild eyes with Isaac for a microsecond and then I’m scurrying, hampered by my bare but bandaged feet that are really starting to hurt now. I hear him, he’s not screaming anymore though, more like moaning. I can’t believe Saint and Isaac haven’t caught up to me yet. Tip toeing down the stairs I follow the sound of Evan’s muffled voice into, well I’m not exactly sure where I am. I think it’s a sort of a living room, sunroom combination. A semicircle of windows line the left with chairs and ottomans following the same pattern, if the sun were up you’d feel like you were sitting outside. To my right is a couch and an unlit fireplace.

Evan is sitting with his head in his hands, elbows on his knees. I realize suddenly that I have no plan. I wanted to come out here so bad but now what? I go for balls out and pad across the thick plush carpet in his direction. I have no way to communicate with him, my phone is back in the panic room but he hears me and raises his head staring straight forward, not turning in my direction. “I hear you, whoever you are. Leave me.” I freeze, leave me? What? He waits and I stay put, my heavy breathing the only sound now. “I said GO!” he yells and startles me so much I jump back and clench my hands into fists.

Frantically I shake my arms up and down to rid myself of the adrenaline rush that he’s given me, shit! I have no idea what to do now but stand my ground, so I do, and he’s aware of me but still he doesn’t turn. The room is really dark but he surely could see me if he would only look. Evan hates the dark, he would never sit here without a light on. M
y
Evan wouldn’t anyway. I’m still not sure what side of the mood pendulum we are swinging on right now.

I decide to try a whisper. I’ve made some successful yet awful attempts at speaking today, maybe it will work. “Evan?” Yep, scratchy but audible. “I said to fucking leave me!” he roars and I walk backward into an archway at the entrance of this room. Ok, I’m sure now, it’s evil Evan that’s in control now.

Just then Mr. Saint and Isaac creep around the corner toward me and I give them a “don’t you dare come near me look” and shake my head back and forth fiercely. I’m not going anywhere until this is figured out. They stop abruptly and glance in Evans direction and back at me. Isaac whispers “Mia please…” he looks at me pleading with his eyes but I repeat “no” with a head shake and he sighs heavily, too heavily.