Following Fabian by Holley Trent

seriously affected by negative energy. If she wasn’t careful, it did a little more than depressing her. It drained her.
    It seemed strange now that the two were partners, given Astrid’s cynical nature, and Astrid regularly broached her concerns about the pairing, but Maria put her at ease. “It’s okay. I’m used to you now. You’re the elephant in the room that I’ve rearranged the furniture around. It’s all good, lightning bug.”
    Astrid didn’t like being thought of as an elephant, but she got the gist.
    “I’ve been here six times in the past few weeks,” Agent Rodriguez continued. “It’s a bit of a dive, but the food’s good, and they’re not stingy with the coffee. The coffee at my motel is shit.”
    A man slipped into the booth next to Agent Rodriguez, and it took Astrid a moment for her eyes to convince her brain of what she was seeing. Her body sprang to high alert preemptively, and she balled her hands into fists under the table.
    No fuckin’ way . Instinctively, her fisted left hand went to the knife tucked into the back of her waistband.
    “What’s wrong? You just went tense,” Fabian projected.
    She swallowed and stared at the smiling newcomer, who was apparently Rodriguez’s associate.
    Agent Marsh. David Marsh. She didn’t need an introduction.
    Slowly, she pulled her left hand away from her back and planted that hand onto her lap, where it shook uncontrollably.
    Gritting her teeth, she wondered, how dare he smile at her? He had no right, after what he’d put her through.
    Once, they’d been in love, or at least she’d thought. He’d said he couldn’t handle her the way she was—that she must have been pushing him away on purpose because she didn’t know how to give .
    He was the reason she’d almost died in that hospital three years ago. He was the man who’d lied to her and enrolled her in the drug trial.
    The drug trial she’d thought was supposed to help her with stress was actually an experiment intended to make women like her, Dana, Sarah, Tamara, and Maria softer. It hadn’t worked, because the drug was a fucking joke. Poison.
    It’d turned her into what she was now: a freak of nature.
    Fabian wrapped his large hand around her shaking one under the table.
    “Dragon?”
    David beamed at her, but didn’t acknowledge her directly. He just groaned sarcastically at his partner as he shrugged off his coat. “God, you’re complaining about coffee again?” he ribbed with Rodriguez. “You think yours is shit? What’s worse than shit? That’s what my motel has. I don’t even have in-room coffee service like you do. I’ve got to go downstairs and get that gritty, burnt crap out of the lobby, and the woman at the front desk watches me like a hawk every time I step foot out of the elevator. I always feel like a schmuck for taking that fistful of sugar packets, but without it, it’s like drinking dirt. Why offer the coffee if it’s gonna taste like dirt?”
    He kept prattling on and on about the coffee while Agent Rodriguez debated whose beverage choices were really worse.
    Is this really happening? I should kill him where he sits. Stab him in the nuts.
    Fabian squeezed her hands again, and she closed her eyes, sighing, hoping she was adequately blocking him out of her thoughts. Maria would probably rock and chant at a moment like this, but Astrid had never found that calming. She needed to find some other way to expend the destructive energy bubbling up inside her.
    She wasn’t that woman anymore. She’d paid and paid and paid for what she’d done to David’s car all those years ago, and really? He’d brought her wrath onto himself. She was wired to be loyal and true.
    He was wired to be a cheating slutbag, apparently. At least he had been four years ago. What the fuck was he doing in the FBI? The agency must have had pretty damn low standards.
    Fabian gave Astrid yet another little nudge beneath the table, this time with his knee.
    “What’s wrong, dragon?