Free Wolf Protector by Milly Taiden Page B

everyone in the department. That Erica was the profiler in the team, and she led every investigation with whatever she pieced together. No wonder they depended on her so much. She knew what happened, but it came at a pretty hefty price.
    She continued to pace to the door and back toward the bed, stopping only to look at him and then slowly turning away. “Yes. Only Brock knows what I can see. He’s…he’s aware I’m more than just a profiler.”
    Jealousy made his blood burn. She was his. His woman. His mate.
    “What’s the side effect of this…this ability of yours?” He knew sleepless nights were a given. She’d never looked as exhausted as she had in the past forty-eight hours.
    Face scrunched in thought, she hovered by the bed. “What do you mean side effects?”
    “What does it do to you to see what you see?”
    “Well…”
    It seemed she didn’t want to share, but he wasn’t stopping now. “I know you can’t sleep. So what else is there?”
    Erica turned away from him and spoke while walking back to the door. “It’s not that I can’t sleep. It’s that I keep seeing the victims in their last moments over and over again in my dreams. It doesn’t make for restful sleep to keep seeing that.”
    What the fuck? She wasn’t lying. Her words shocked him immobile. “You mean you don’t just see them that one time? You keep seeing the same thing over and over again?”
    “Kind of. The initial contact, the first time I see while touching something is a crisp, clear view, almost movie-like, and it gives great detail, if that’s what the victim saw. But after that…” She bit her lip in thought before continuing. “…I guess we can call it first touch, the images become distorted, blurry, and blend together to form flashes of cries and pain. Almost like a compressed set of layers of the entire event. It can be tiresome to keep trying to make the view as clear as it had been in first touch, but all you have is indistinct and confusing images. It muddles in my mind and gives me migraines.”
    He stared at her. Deep sorrow pierced his heart with every word out of her mouth. “How long do you see these visions for?”
    “It usually takes days, sometimes weeks, for it to stop.” She creased her nose, still not looking at him. “So when I see more than one in a short period of time it…it’s exhausting. I feel their pain over and over, and it drains me. Trying to shut out the screams and the visions takes a lot out of me.”
    Holy fuck. The woman was insane to keep her mouth shut all that time. He wondered if she was getting any time with the paranormal psychiatrist. Brock had made him go to therapy the time he’d tried to sink his claws into a predator who’d abducted a woman and kept her hidden from her family.
    “You mean to tell me you’ve been dealing with this on your own and you didn’t think to share it with me? I could’ve helped.”
    He was hurt that she suffered in silence. All the years they’d worked together and he had had no clue she had been going through that. It made him want to kick his own ass. If he hadn’t been so involved in trying to get into her pants, he would’ve noticed something sooner. Instead she’d always worked alongside Brock, and he, Ramirez, and Donovan had been the action team. It had never occurred to him that Erica was much more vulnerable than what she portrayed.
    The image she showed the world of a tough, bitchy profiler was just that: an image. Underneath it all she was suffering, and it hurt him to know that. He’d decided the moment he met her that he’d allow her to come to him when she was ready. It was clear she was his in his mind, but he would never push her. He was done waiting.
    She seemed confused by his anger. “How would you have helped?”
    His heart broke for her when he realized she was genuinely confounded. She’d been dealing with this on her own for so long she didn’t think someone giving her a shoulder to lean on or emotional