Face Your Fears

Chapter 7

Hadley gave me a look as we ate breakfast together almost two weeks after that little hospital incident.

Immediately my guard went up.

Not that I hadn't been on pins and needles the day I found out Hadley was pregnant and Death decided to pay us a visit. I was still having trouble wrapping my mind around the entire thing.

A guy showing up out of the blue, telling me I had to face all of my fears? Death showing up and basically announcing that my wife, our unborn child and I had a bounty on our heads?

Would you believe it?

I wanted desperately to believe that this was some sort of joke, that I had somehow hallucinated the entire thing. That would certainly make everything a whole hell of a lot easier.

The one time I had brought that up to Hadley, though, she had burst into tears, called me an asshole and claimed that I didn't have enough trust in her.

I'd been so alarmed I'd sort of just stood there in the middle of the kitchen and looked at her in amazement until she stopped crying. And then she threw her arms around me in a furiously tight hug and that was that.

I had no idea what to expect with this whole pregnancy thing, but it was certainly turning out to be a bit more difficult than I had originally thought.

Hadley wasn't usually an emotional person. Whenever she usually got even the slightest bit infuriated it was accompanied with all the fires of Hell, but I could count on one hand the number of times I'd seen her cry. Now I was lucky if she managed to go a few hours without her sobbing buckets of tears.

Her shoelaces broke? Tears.

Her toast burnt? Tears.

She didn't wash her favorite bra? Tears.

This had happened so many times I quickly learned to just pull her into my arms and wait until she stopped.

And not only was that a handful to deal with, but there was also the fact that I had the notion that this Havoc person would immediately be after my hide, and for the past few weeks there had been...absolutely nothing.

When I say absolutely nothing, I mean it - a big, fat nothing.

There were no strange occurrences or anybody showing up in the apartment, demanding I shout out everything I was afraid of. Hadley was perfectly fine, the baby was perfectly fine, I was perfectly fine. Everyone was perfectly fine.

Hell, even work was going smoothly for the both of us. I'd had no cancellations or technical difficulties and almost every shot I'd taken had come out completely perfect. Hadley hadn't had any cases that made her want to rip her hair out, which was definitely saying something.

So why wasn't anything happening?

It wasn't as if I wanted something terrible to happen or anything. I just wanted to get this the hell over with.

I'd had enough of looking over my shoulder at every turn and corner of the streets. Waking up drenched in sweat because of some inexplicable nightmare. Randomly checking up on Hadley during the day or going to see if she was all right whenever she went to lay down for a nap.

"Why are you staring at me like that?" I asked Hadley, a little wary for the answer.

Hadley shrugged, picking at a bit of leftover eggs on her plate. "I was just wondering..."