Lost Souls - Book 2 "Convergence"

Chapter 14 - Friday, September 25th

Marcus sat at his desk, staring blankly at an invoice that might as well have been written in hieroglyphics for all that he was absorbing from it. He kept tapping his pen on the piece of paper as if doing so would shake the all the little black symbols into some sort of alignment that would make them legible. He hated doing paperwork on a good day but tonight, his brain was scrambled like a two-egg omelette and he couldn't focus to save his life. His beast had co-opted his attention span and stubbornly kept it oriented on one thing...Tabitha, such that the need for her had settled like an impossible pressure surrounding his heart.

Where was she right now? What was she doing? He selfishly prayed that she was going out of her mind for want of him as he was doing for her. It would only be fair, goddammit.

Shuffling the papers before him, Marcus blew out a breath and opened his tired eyes wider, blinking them several times in a vain attempt to clear the buckets of sand that coated his eyeballs so that he could get some work done. His gaze wandered to his left where his cell sat like an executioner waiting with his axe raised and that irritating pressure in his chest increased to the point where his aching ventricles struggled to expand enough to pump his blood. The compulsion to check for new messages ate at him even though he knew that none had been received.

He knew this because he'd already checked...a dozen times or more in the last two hours and the answer had always been the same. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Fucking radio silence.

He glanced at its depressingly dark screen, willing a text from Petra to appear, and the knot in his stomach tightened another notch as his phone did a fantastic impression of a door stop.

Nothing doing, god damn it to hell.

Where the fuck was she? He'd heard absolutely, fucking nothing from Petra all week and Marcus was ready to start punching holes in every wall he could find to keep from exploding in frustration.

When the days had dragged on without a word, he'd started bugging Diego to find out what the status was with his girl. He must have gotten on the guy's ass because by Wednesday, he'd threatened him with bodily harm if he asked him one more time. And contacting Petra was out of the question too. Apparently, she was tackling something big at her job and wouldn't appreciate being disturbed.

Not to mention the possessive fucker would rip his balls off and use them to play pool with if he bothered her anyway.

Diego just didn't appreciate the level of stress both he and Cooper were under. 

Asshole.

Marcus just had to give her time. But fuck! It was Friday. The Gala was tomorrow and dammit, he still hadn't heard whether or not Petra had managed to convince Tabitha to come.

Would he be seeing his angel tomorrow or not? The suspense was driving him crazy.

His hand slid across his desk, angling for his phone and acting without his conscious consent. Marcus grunted, snatching it away at the last minute and grabbed for his half-empty coffee cup as if it had been his intended target all along. Picking the cup up as a distraction, he peered into it and grimaced, his nose wrinkling in disgust as he placed it back down on his desk. The coffee had gone stone cold, the sheen shimmering on the surface reminding him of a pool of old motor oil. With a huff of annoyance, he grabbed the cup, marched into his private bathroom and dumped the nasty contents down the sink. His anxious stomach didn't need to deal with that crap on top of the caustic soup already churning its merry way into giving him an ulcer.

Turning on the tap, Marcus swirled some water in the cup, dumped it out and set it on the counter. Cupping his hands under the frigid stream, he leaned over the sink and splashed water on his face, scrubbing his hands over his cheeks and eyes until the skin went numb from the cold. It didn't cool the heat beneath his skin a single degree. He raised his head, opening his eyes to stare at his reflection in the mirror, water dripping from his jawline and long, black hair. The desperation he saw there had his stomach cramping and his heart imploding.