Page 15 of Hunted

“Yeah, but what if you hadn’t? Or what if you have an episode and I can’t get to the meds for some reason?”

She frowned at him. “You worried about me? That’s kind of funny, seeing as how you’ve basically kidnapped me.”

“I rescued you. You’d be undergoing torture right now if I hadn’t— shit that was a stupid thing to say.” He glanced at her, trying to see if his idiotic words had triggered another episode, but she just rolled her eyes at him as if she knew. “Just tell me,” he said. “I’ll feel better.”

“God knows making you feeling better is my raison d’être.”

“Just tell me.” He liked that she’d snapped at him. It made him more confident in her ability to handle all this.

“If I don’t have a pill, I can usually convert myself. Methods that work are bearing down. If that doesn’t work, I slap an icepack on the back of my neck or the middle of my lower back, anyplace that it’s going to shock me with the cold. It’s the shock that helps. And then if all else fails, I can perform carotid massage, kind of squeezing off the blood supply to my brain for a couple of seconds. That usually does the trick.”

“That sounds horrible.”

“It’s not that bad. The episodes can be exhausting. And converting back to normal rhythm is scary, because I can feel it. There’s always a really severe tightening and pain in my heart, just for a second, like someone’s reaching inside and squeezing it with all their might. And then a little, thump-a-thump, and it’s back to beating normally again.”

“Isn’t there any way to fix it?”

“There’s a surgery. But I only have a couple of episodes a year. To me, that’s too little to justify letting a surgeon go digging around in my heart.”

“Amen to that.”

Sighing, she leaned back in her seat. He sensed her closing up again, like a flower when the sun goes down. He wanted to keep her talking. “Have you had it long?”

“Since my teens. It used to drive my father crazy, having to take time off work to run me to doctors and hospitals before we had a firm diagnosis.”

Romano noticed her hands clasping each other more tightly as she spoke. Her father sounded like a real piece of work. “So, stress brings it on?”

She shrugged, opening her eyes again, even looking at him for a second. “It’s one trigger. There are others. I’ve had it just happen in my sleep so …”

“Before I came, when was the last one?”

She closed her eyes. “The morning I found my father in his bed.”

Romano found himself envisioning her, alone in that oversized log cabin, finding her father that way. According to the information he’d been provided, she’d adored the man.

“I’m really sorry I brought that up,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

At least she was talking. When she talked, he could focus on her words, her tone. He could hear more than people said, picking up on inflections and shifts in volume and air to sound ratio. He’d always been able to do that. It had made him a better agent. Of course it wasn’t 100% accurate, but he considered it his superpower and he trusted it.

When she went silent, it was easy to start searching her eyes and imagining he could read every emotion in them. Way too easy.

Stress-induced, she’d said. Well, then, it was no wonder she’d had an attack. She’d certainly had some stress in the past few hours. But it couldn’t be helped. He had to get the formula, and he had to find, identify, and kill the international criminal known as Mr. White. Lexi and her heart be damned.

“So where is this safe-deposit box located, Lexi?” He asked just to see if she’d tell the truth, because he’d felt something off about that.

“New York.”

He nodded. “Right, right, I saw that. First National, right?”

She nodded.

“Which branch?”

“You didn’t see that on the receipt you found?”

“No.”

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