Page 44 of Beyond Reason

But I had no idea what had happened with Marshall, what happened with me. For all I knew, he was still knocking around in my head somewhere, capable of returning with something as simple as the stab of a needle. What I understood from my reading told me that if the drug was injected correctly, if nothing had gone wrong… then there was no reason for me to be worried.

If I’d been injected properly, Marshall had simply gone to sleep, hidden in whatever place the pasts existed. Maybe he was waiting for our next life so he could have a turn… or maybe he was simply gone, being formed into another person, another personality all together. Either way, it didn’t seem like he was dead exactly, but he wasn’t here any more. He couldn’t be brought back.

If the drug had been administered correctly.

I nearly put myself into another spiral of pain trying to remember exactly what had happened to bring me into this lifetime. While my own memories were there, trapped somewhere just beneath the surface, trying to remember what had happened to Marshall was one giant blank. Even trying to imagine it made me nauseated, brought me back to heat, to fire licking along my neck and burning my skin.

To two figures standing in the distance and watching the world around me burn.

I groaned and dropped my head to the desk in front of me. The injuries from my previous attack were healed enough that it didn’t immediately make my skull feel like it was about to burst, but I knew Axel would be angry if he saw me doing it.

He wasn’t going to see anything—I didn’t like looking at the contents of the flash drive while he was around, anyway. It would make him question things, make him suggest something like trying to find out more about Northman and the sham of an institute he’d been running.

A few careful searches on the internet told me that Heath Northman and all of his employees were dead. There’d been one lone survivor of the fatal incident that they’d marked down as a chemical explosion.

Marshall Lister. The name that wasn’t my name, printed there in newspaper articles for anyone who wanted to see. No wonder the people were hunting me down. The press had done a spectacular job of making sure that anyone who wanted to know would be aware I was alive and breathing, that I’d escaped a fire that was obviously meant to kill everyone involved with the project, and now I was… what?

The only person left alive with information that was vital? Did they think I knew more than this stupid flash drive did?

I snapped the computer shut and yanked the little rectangle from the machine with a frown. It was so much trouble for such a small thing—my entire life in danger, my entire world on high alert because some scientist wanted to do the right thing?

Or maybe he’d wanted to sell the information to the highest bidder.

Fuck, for all I knew, Marshall Lister was the one who’d started the fire to begin with, and he’d just been unfortunate enough to somehow fall victim to his own ploy and got stabbed with the drug he was trying to smuggle out.

That… didn’t feel right, though.

With a low grunt, I flopped back on the bed and stuck the drive into my pocket as Axel walked into the room.

“Are you okay in here? You’re grunting and groaning like someone’s either trying to kill you or fuck you. And since I’m not in here with you…” He trailed off with one brow arched, the clear implication that if someone was fucking me, he was going to kill them written across his features.

He was ridiculous, but that expression was enough to coax a smile out of me. It was hard to stay anxious when he was looking at me like that, harder still when he came and stuck his hand out. I slipped my fingers into his and let him pull me to my feet.

“C’mon. I’ve taken things a little easy on you while you’re healing up, but it’s about time we got back to it, isn’t it?”

I groaned—not that he wasn’t right. I had been slacking off, if you could count not being able to run because jostling myself made my head want to explode as slacking off… but it was time to get back to it.

It might not have been so miserable if Axel hadn’t been paranoid about us leaving the house. I felt cooped up—maybe I couldn’t remember much, but I knew I hadn’t been someone who hid inside and cowered from problems before.

The only reason that knowing who was after me would be useful was so I could hunt them down and kill them.

Since Axel didn’t want me to so much as step outside for a run, I had a feeling he wouldn’t be keen on the idea.

And I might have fought him on it—I still had intentions of fighting him on it—but I was healing. The haunted look on his face and the memory of tears streaking down his cheeks kept me in place.

For now.

“You know,” I started, and his eyes instantly narrowed. “They obviously knew that I was staying with you, or they wouldn’t have asked me if you knew anything.” I offered the sweetest smile I could manage. “Maybe we could just… go out? For a little bit? Before I die from a lack of vitamin D?”

“I can give you—”

“Do not finish that sentence if you want to keep breathing, Sunshine.”

“A multi-vitamin,” he said flatly and dropped my hand.

Oh.

Well.

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