Free The Origin by Wilette Youkey

in his head jumbled and found he couldn’t even string together a two-word sentence. He found himself wishing that she was also capable of reading minds. It would have made his life so much easier.
    “You look like hell, Daniel,” she said, her voice as biting as the wind.
    He ran a palm down his bristly jaw. “I feel like I’ve been through hell.” His head was still pounding and he had hurt himself from moving too quickly back in the diner. He didn’t know if he even had it in him to explain.
    Olivia crossed her arms across her chest. “Well, are you going to start talking or are we just going to freeze out here?” He noticed that, though she wore a stern façade, her lips were beginning to tremble and she was hunching into her long, wool coat.
    Feeling a healthy dose of regret, Daniel took one step forward and gathered her into him. She was stiff, not yielding to his embrace, but he rested his chin on her head and sighed with contentment regardless.
    “I can’t tell you where I’ve been the past few days. Just know that I would have called you if I had been able,” he said into her hair. “I was, uh, tied up.”
    “You’ll tell me one day,” she said with utter confidence. Gently, she pushed away from his chest and looked up at him. “Just tell me this: did your disappearance have anything to do with that woman at the diner?”
    He was glad to finally have an answer. “No. She was just a stranger who wanted to talk.”
    “About what?” Her eyes narrowed.
    “About her dreams.” Which, technically, wasn’t a lie. In order to explain Coral’s abilities, he would first have to delve into his own, something he was definitely not prepared to do right that moment.
    “So you don’t know her? Some random woman just came up to you at a diner and started talking about her dreams?” Judging from the skeptical rise of one eyebrow, he guessed that she wasn’t buying what he was selling.
    “Yeah, she’s not quite right in the head.” Again, technically true.
    With a small sniff, Olivia reached into her black purse and withdrew an envelope. “Anyway, here’s the ticket. I was just coming to drop it off.”
    He blinked in surprise. “How do you know where I live?”
    “I have my ways. You’re not the only one with secrets, Daniel Johnson.” She walked off then paused, looking back over her shoulder. “We’ll talk later. After the performance,” she added.
    “Uh, sure,” he said, filled with dread at the thought of having to explain why he’d been missing for the past four days, and why he was then caught sitting across the table from a woman who claimed to see the future. And though he understood that he didn’t owe Olivia a thing – least of all, a debriefing on why he was such a freak – in his gut, he knew that he was bound to spill the beans sooner or later. He didn’t need a psychic to know that telling Olivia the truth about his secret nature was an inevitability.
     
    Daniel was a useless bag of glop for the rest of the day, only leaving the warmth of his bed to use the bathroom. He should have been searching for the drug lord and his minions, but what he should have been doing and what he actually felt like doing were two vastly different things. Vengeance would just have to wait another day.
    That night, however, he had recharged enough to make his way to the Lincoln Center, the home of the New York City Ballet, with one ticket to Swan Lake in hand. Once inside, he found his seat easily enough and was glad to discover that it was near the back of the auditorium, close to a door should he need to make an abrupt exit. He had awakened in that river without his balaclava, which meant that his identity had been compromised. Without knowing the extent of the drug lord’s reach, Daniel was taking a real risk by coming out to the ballet as he could be spotted and tailed. Which meant that he could not risk being seen with Olivia, at least, not until after he’d engineered an end to his