“Wake up, Li. Come out of it.”
Liam focused. He was in Eve’s room. Fuck. He wiped the sweat away. It was dripping down his brow and into his eyes. He was standing up. He’d been lying down. Confusion. He hated the feeling. One minute he’d been back there hearing that phone ringing and the next he was here doing god only knew what.
“You were trying to get out the window, Li. You seemed very intent on throwing yourself out the window.” Eve was out of breath, her normally perfect clothes askew. There was a fine tremble in her hands.
“Did I try to hurt you?” Fuck all. It was the last thing he wanted to do. Eve was his friend. She was trying to help him, and if he hurt her he would never forgive himself. Hadn’t he hurt enough people he cared about in his time? Why wouldn’t he ever learn?
She shook her head. “No. You did not. Liam, you didn’t hurt me. You were just trying to get out the window for some reason. I had to stop you, and it was a near thing.” She took a long breath. “I think you’re close to something.”
Yes. He was close to losing his bloody mind. He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I got further this time.”
Eve reached out, taking his hand in hers. “You were much more in control for longer. It will get better. But next time I think we should invite someone with a little more upper-body strength to sit in.”
He gave her hand a squeeze and then backed away. “I don’t think so.”
“Why? Li, Ian wouldn’t judge you for something that happened years ago. If I know Ian, he probably knows more than he’s saying. He wouldn’t have brought you on board if he didn’t trust you.”
“If Ian knows something, why wouldn’t he bloody well tell me?” Ian didn’t know a thing. He couldn’t possibly. If he knew, Ian would have told him. Ian was the one damn person in the world he trusted completely. Ian had saved him when all evidence was against him.
Eve found her way back to her chair on shaky legs. “If Ian didn’t think you were ready he might have kept it from you. I’m not saying he knows a damn thing, Li. I’m just saying that he likely looked into the incident even if you asked him not to.”
He hadn’t. Liam had looked into it himself, calling on a few people he trusted, but all he’d been able to discover was that he and Rory were missing and considered dead.
And all he remembered about the whole bloody affair before Eve had started her therapy was waking up in the water with blood on his hands and the memory of those boots. He’d been able to remember the dead girl and Rory’s body and that the bonds were gone.
He’d woken up face down and nearly drowning with no recollection of how he’d gotten there. One minute he’d been staring at his brother’s boots and the next he’d been in the water.
After he’d gotten out of the water and realized just how fucked he was, he’d called Ian Taggart.
Eight hours later, he’d been on a plane to the States.
Liam sat down, making a few decisions. “If Ian knows something, then he had a reason to keep it from me. He probably didn’t think I was ready to know. He was the one who helped me find the building I’d been in, and he was the one who found out it had exploded that very morning.”
Eve leaned forward, intelligence radiating from her eyes. “I think you knew the building was going to explode. That’s why you were trying to get out tonight.”
“Well none of us bought the newspaper’s explanation of a gas leak,” Liam said. “I tried to run down ten leads and they all ended in nothing. No one had any idea where the bonds had gone. If they were used, it was with complete discretion. The arms dealer we were trying to take down mysteriously vanished off the face of the earth.”
“You’ve never told me why you didn’t contact your SAS group and attempt to explain what happened.”
That was easy. “I don’t know what happened. Not really. I think someone drugged my drink and after that it’s all hazy. They think I died. I thought it best to leave it at that. I tried for the first couple of years to figure out what had happened and then little by little I just gave up. I think there’s a part of me that has always wondered.”
“Li, you did not kill that girl.”
Her face still haunted him. He’d found out her name much, much later, but it was her face that came to him every night. “It was my rope. What if I did it in a drug-induced haze? What if I killed them all?”
“If you killed them all then you would know where the bonds were. It’s too coincidental. You were set up as the fall guy. Someone stole the bonds and you were supposed to be arrested, but they’d done their job too well. The SAS decided you died in the blast, too. They likely think the bonds were destroyed, and they might have been.”