Gage forced a smile but shook his head. “I can’t. I’m still on the case. The missing girls, remember? I got to keep working on it as long as there’s a girl missing. She’s still in danger.”
“Ah, come on, man, you can take one night off,” Cash argued.
“No, I really can’t,” Gage said, even though he already felt so woozy from the booze that he knew it was likely he was just going to go home and crash. “I got to go. See you later, bud.”
He staggered to his feet and walked out into the main room, ignoring the several people who called out to him, trying to get him to join their various celebrations, as he headed out back into the cold night. As Gage walked back to the subway stop, he couldn’t help but feel a weird paranoid sensation climbing up his back, his hairs standing on edge like someone was watching him or following him. Every time he turned around, he couldn’t spot anything, but he still couldn’t shake the anxious feeling that something wasn’t right.
When he collapsed into bed a half hour later, he could still smell the distinct scent of Fiona’s body. It smelled like home. It smelled like loss. It smelled like love. It smelled like everything he’d never get to touch ever again.
Chapter Twenty
By the time Fiona and Carl made it back to his hotel room, she was pretty fucking furious, to put it lightly. She’d stayed silent on the car ride over, letting the emotions simmer inside her, trying to keep them locked inside, as deep as possible. But as soon as they stepped into a private place, she could feel them rise to the surface like a soufflé, spilling over until she just clenched her fists, standing across the room from Carl and staring at him with fire burning in her eyes.
“What?” he barked at her, obviously aware that she wasn’t happy with him, to say the least.
“You know what,” Fiona said, hardening her tone as much as she could, even if some small part of her still trembled in fear at the idea of confronting this man. She’d worked so hard to hide all the bad sides of herself from him. She’d tried so hard to keep him from knowing all the dirty parts of her. But for now, she couldn’t hold it back. Maybe it was working on the case, maybe it was being back in the city. Or maybe it was being around Gage again, letting his own fire influence her to wake up inside, to fight back. She’d have to analyze herself more later on, but for now, she crossed her arms across her chest, gritting her teeth and hardening her jaw as she stared across the room at Carl.
“No, let’s talk about it. Let’s be healthy about this,” Carl said. Fiona barely kept herself from flinching as a result of the “h-word,” as she referred to it inside her head. It was like a bomb waiting to go off at any moment, an accusation wrapped up in pretty paper. The implication was clear to her. She wasn’t healthy. She wasn’t normal. She wasn’t right. She knew all this about herself, and she really didn’t need Carl telling her what she already hated about the way she functioned. “What’d I do wrong, exactly?” Carl asked.
Fiona sighed and pushed her hair back from her forehead, yanking a little at the roots, using the pain to anchor herself to her body. She couldn’t afford to dissociate at the moment, not when Carl was poised for the attack. “You’re acting like you own me or something, like you get to tell me what to do, what to feel, how to react. The whole reason…” She huffed her breath out again, summoning up the courage to finish her sentence. “The whole reason I started dating you was because you weren’t like this. You don’t control me. You let me live how I want. Why are you changing now?”
“Oh, that’s rich. That’s fucking rich,” Carl said, beginning to pace back and forth across the hotel room, shaking his head at her. “You come here and play nicey-nice with your ex and I’m the bad guy? What the fucking shit is wrong with your brain, Fiona, huh? What the hell went wrong that wired you to act this way? Because I’ll tell you what, it’s not normal. It’s not healthy. It’s not what I proposed to.”
“I don’t care if it’s what you proposed to or not,” Fiona said, even though a little part of that statement was a lie. “It’s who I am, who I really am, when I’m not pretending to be a good girl.” The last two words stung her tongue, making her feel sick inside, like all of her organs were balling up, shrinking away from what she’d just said. The kidnapper’s words, haunting her like she was still tied up in that basement.
“What the fuck are you even talking about?” Carl retorted, his face screwing up in confusion. He stepped forward, grabbing Fiona’s shoulders and shaking her a little bit. “Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? What the hell happened to you to make you this way?”