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Again she nodded. But she said nothing to elaborate. What else was there for her to say?

He shifted his weight to one foot, hooked his hands on his hips in challenge and flattened his mouth into a tight line. “Peaches, that was no panic attack. That was transglobal, thermodynamic warfare.”

She made a face at him. “Oh, stop it with the hyper-bole.” Although, now that she studied him more closely, she realized there was a big red spot on his cheek. “Look, I said I was sorry,” she said again. “It’s not like it’s something I can control. And usually it’s not that bad.”

“Just what is it then?”

She sighed. She wished she could tell him. At least in terms that wouldn’t make her sound weak and timid and nuts. Unfortunately, over the past several years, Avery had pretty much come to the conclusion that she was weak and timid and nuts. Which made her even more reluctant to tell him the truth.

In spite of that, she told him, “I wasn’t trying to be coy or uncooperative earlier when I told you I couldn’t go anywhere with you. I was telling you the truth. I can’t leave my apartment. Not without some serious preparation first.”

“What, like you need to make sure you have your wallet and house keys and a token for the subway?” he asked sarcastically.

“No. I can’t go out, because…” She sighed, resigned to revealing more of herself than she wanted him to know, because there was no other way to make him understand. “Because I have agoraphobia.”

He eyed her dubiously, “Which is what?” he asked. “Fear of the outdoors, right? But you weren’t outside yet when you went psycho.”

She tried to sit up, remembered that she was strapped down, so fell back against the cot with an exasperated sound. Honestly. Talk about overkill. So she’d roughed him up and called him a leper. So she’d nearly given someone a concussion. So she’d taken a couple of nurses out of commission. Like that didn’t happen every day in some boroughs of New York.

She tugged meaningfully at her restraints. “Let me up, will you?” she pleaded. “I’m fine now. I swear.”

“What you are is completely whack,” he countered. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

“Once or twice,” she said softly. Then, more forcefully, “I’m fine,” she repeated. She jerked at the restraints again. “Get me out of these things. Let me up. Please.”

Although he obviously didn’t believe her, he bent over her and, after a moment’s hesitation, cautiously unfastened one of her wrist restraints. But he waited before loosening any more, apparently wanting to take this thing slowly, in case she was still a little, oh, homicidal. After another moment, evidently satisfied that she wasn’t going to go all Hannibal Lecter on him again—probably—he carefully freed one of the ankle restraints, too. Then the other. Then finally the last, on her other wrist. Then he took a giant step backward and positioned himself near the door.

Where was she anyway? she wondered as she folded herself into a sitting position on the edge of the cot. It wasn’t quite a padded cell, but it was a tiny white room, empty save the cot on which she had been restrained, and there was a window in the door for observation from the other side. He’d mentioned nurses, so she must be in a hospital of some kind. God, she couldn’t even remember how she’d gotten here.

“What time is it?” she asked.

He flicked his wrist to glance at his watch, returning his attention to Avery in less than a nanosecond. “It’s ten after two.”

“A.m. or p.m.?”

“It’s two-ten in the morning,” he said. “You’ve been here for about an hour. But it took me and my partner almost an hour to get you here.”

Avery nodded, waiting for the panic to rise again, because she wasn’t in normal surroundings where she felt safe. Not that she ever really felt entirely safe in her normal surroundings. But nothing happened. She was a bit edgy, to be sure, but who wouldn’t be upon one’s discovery that one was in a strange place and couldn’t remember how one had arrived there? Not to mention when there was a man like Santiago Dixon staring at one as if one had just emerged from a pea pod from outer space?

“And just where is here?” she asked.

“You’re in an OPUS facility,” he told her.

Well, at least it wasn’t Bellevue.

“An OPUS psychiatric facility,” he clarified.

Oh. So it was Bellevue. Only without all the glamour and accountability.

She looked down at her attire, at the loud pajama bottoms and ragged purple sweatshirt. There was a rip in one sleeve that hadn’t been there before. One of her socks was missing, and the toenails of her one bare foot were painted five different colors. No telling how that had happened. The lost sock, she meant, since she had painted her toenails herself. One of her braids had come almost completely frayed. She looked at Dixon again, at the mark on his face for which she was responsible. She was lucky they’d only put her in restraints. Any other place would have performed a full frontal lobotomy by now.

Still, she wasn’t panicking here. The small, bare room didn’t frighten her the way most new surroundings did. And neither did Dixon’s presence in it. That had to be significant somehow, but she was too exhausted at the moment to try and figure it out.

“So tell me about this agoraphobia you have,” he said.

Avery reached for the unraveling braid and freed what little of it was still intact, then finger-combed her hair as best she could before going about the motions of plaiting it again. “Clinically,” she said as she wove the strands back together and avoided his gaze, “it’s defined as anxiety about being in a place or situation from which escape might be difficult or in which help may not be available in the event of having an unexpected panic attack or paniclike symptoms.”

“In layman’s terms?” he asked.

“It means I’m terrified of being someplace where I don’t feel safe,” she said simply. “And the only place I feel safe is my home. So anytime I have to leave my home, I am literally crippled by fear.”

What Avery didn’t add was that her agoraphobia had appeared after her release from prison and was a direct result of her incarceration. As bad as it had been to have her freedom revoked, in prison, for the first time in her life, she’d felt oddly safe. Strangely content. There was a strict system and regimen to life inside that had appealed to her. Everything was scheduled and everything went according to plan. Everyone was equal. The only thing that had been expected of her was that she stay out of trouble. And living in a place like that, Avery had felt no desire to get into trouble.

Not as she had growing up in East Hampton, where society’s strict rules—which had never made any sense to her—had dictated she behave in ways she didn’t want to behave. Growing up in the Hamptons, she had never felt like a worthwhile part of society, and because of that she had rebelled. Constantly. To her family she had always been a troublemaker. Behind bars, though…

As crazy as it sounded, behind bars Avery had felt free for the first time. Free to be herself. Free to say and think and feel what she wanted. Her activities had been curtailed, to be sure. But her mind and her emotions had been liberated. No one had censored her for her feelings or her thoughts or her dreams or her desires. No one had been disappointed by what went on in her head or offended by the things that came out of her mouth. On the contrary, she’d had friends inside, people who liked her because of who she was. And who she was was one of them—a person who wanted the world to work the way it was supposed to, and who had been disappointed by the workings of the world.

Not that there hadn’t been bad people in prison. Certainly there were a lot of women at Rupert Halloran who deserved to be behind bars and who were a genuine menace to society. But the ones to whom Avery had gravitated had been like her—victims of circumstance, women who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, women who had gotten involved with men they shouldn’t have. They’d understood Avery. Even when they discovered she came from a privileged background, they still understood her. And they liked her. And they considered her their equal. Prison was the only place where she had felt like a useful part of a meaningful society. Maybe it hadn’t been the kind of society that society appreciated. But Avery had appreciated it. And she’d been happy there.

Upon her release, though, once she returned to “acceptable” society, she discovered that where before she had felt uncomfortable, now she was genuinely frightened. In fact, she was terrified of acceptable society. Not just of all the rules, but of all the people, too. There were so many people on the outside, and there were so many different ways to go and be and live. Too many expectations on her. Too many societal dictates to follow. Too many choices. Too much freedom. Too much everything.

And Avery was completely alone in the world once she left prison. Her family had stopped speaking to her the minute they learned of her arrest, had turned their backs on her throughout her trial and incarceration. They’d made it clear—through their attorneys—that she would never, ever, have contact with them again. She was still entitled to her trust fund—alas, there was nothing they could do about that, since Great-Grandfather Nesbitt had set it up in a way that no one but Avery could touch it after she turned eighteen. But she must take her money and run, her family’s attorneys told her, and never return to her family. Because they’d made clear, too, that they weren’t her family anymore.

So she took her money—all fifteen million dollars of it—and ran to a condo on Central Park West. There, she could look out her window at society and observe it from a distance, where it was safe, and never have to be a part of it. Little by little, over the years that followed, Avery stopped leaving her apartment. Whenever she needed something, she shopped online and had things delivered. She called Eastern Star Earth-friendly Market, who happily brought her groceries to her front door. The only time she ventured out was if she or Skittles needed to see a doctor. But on those occasions, she began steeling herself for the torment days, even weeks, in advance, shoring herself up to face a ruthless, unforgiving populace, even if only for an hour or two. And then, just to be on the safe side, she got completely snookered before heading out the door. Because the outside world was much too scary, much too menacing. It wasn’t safe, the way prison was.

“You’re joking.”

When she first heard him speak, Avery thought Dixon was reading her mind. Then she realized what he didn’t believe was that she couldn’t leave home without being incapacitated by fear. This from a man who sported an abraded cheek—never mind who had just released her from leather restraints—after trying to take her for a little ride.

Now, she thought, might be a good time to change the subject.

“Why am I here?” she asked.

Dixon studied Avery Nesbitt in silence, wondering whether or not he should believe her about being terrified of reality. On one hand, she was just flaky enough that he could buy it. On the other hand, she had been corresponding with Sorcerer for a month, and God knew what he’d put her up to.

Still, it was hard to fake the kind of mania that had consumed her when he’d tried to carry her out of her apartment. Dixon was pissed off at himself for how he’d handled that. Or rather, how he hadn’t handled it. Not just that he hadn’t tried any harder to talk to her and explain the situation before resorting to physical removal, but that he’d been so unprepared when she’d gone off the way she had.

But she’d gone off so suddenly and so quickly and with such a powerful detonation, he hadn’t known what to do. Nowhere in his investigation of her had he seen any evidence of her having been formally trained in martial arts. Even her prison file had no record of her ever having participated in any kind of altercation. But the minute he’d tried to remove her from her home, she’d attacked. Viciously.

And damn, she fought dirty.

Of course, he’d eventually realized that she was too sloppy, chaotic and desperate to be trained in martial arts. But he hadn’t been able to figure out what exactly she was doing. When Cowboy heard the commotion coming over his headset, he’d responded to render aid. Between the two of them, they’d managed to wrestle her into a service elevator and then the surveillance van, which Cowboy had parked in the alley behind the building.

But no sooner had they slammed the door shut behind themselves than did Avery go limp in Dixon’s arms. Her eyes had remained open and she had been breathing—though rapidly enough that he’d worried she might hyperventilate—but mentally she’d completely checked out. It was spooky how she shut down the way she did.

She’d begun fighting again when he’d tried to remove her from the van. Ultimately it had taken a half hour—and a half dozen orderlies and nurses—to get her into the restraints. They’d said it was for her own safety, but Dixon suspected it was more for theirs. He hadn’t left her side once since then. He’d been worried about her, something that frankly had surprised him. He’d wanted to be sure she was okay. That had surprised him, too. Now evidently she was okay. So why wasn’t he relaxing?

Maybe, he thought, because he was beginning to realize that okay for Avery Nesbitt wasn’t in any way okay.