“If you’d done something,” Dean said softly, “your mother might still be alive.”
I knew what kept Dean up at night, and he knew what I was thinking before I did. He knew why I felt the weight of blood on my hands every time we lost a victim because I wasn’t smart or fast enough.
“I know it’s stupid.” My throat closed in around the words. “I know what happened to my mom wasn’t my fault.”
Dean picked up my hand, holding it in his, sheltering it in his.
“I know it, Dean, but I don’t believe it. I won’t ever believe it.”
“Believe me,” he said simply.
I laid my hand flat on his chest. His hand closed around mine, holding on to it and on to me.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Dean said.
I could feel him willing me to believe that. My fingers curled inward, his shirt bunching in my hand as I pulled him toward me. My mouth came down over his.
The harder I kissed him, the harder he kissed back. The closer we were, the closer I needed him to be.
You can’t sleep, and I can’t sleep, and we’re here, in the dead of night—
I caught his lip in my teeth.
Dean was gentle. Dean was sweet. Dean was self-contained and always in control—but tonight, he buried his hands in my hair and pulled my head back. He captured my mouth with his.
Believe me, he’d said.
I believed that he knew what it was like to be broken. I believed that I wasn’t broken to him.
“You’re still thinking about what you saw downstairs.” Dean ran his fingers gently through my hair, my head on his chest. The threadbare fabric of his shirt was soft against my cheek, the victim of too many washes.
I stared at the ceiling. “I am.” The sound of his heartbeat filled the silence. I wondered if he could hear the sound of mine. “Assuming the Majesty’s ‘maintenance issue’ really was another body, that’s four murders in four days.”
What happens on day five? We both knew the answer to that question.
“Why the Fibonacci sequence?” I asked instead.
“Maybe I’m the type of person who needs things to add up,” Dean said. “Each number in the Fibonacci sequence is the sum of the two previous numbers. Maybe what I’m doing is part of a pattern—each kill exceeding the last.”
“Do you like it?” I wondered out loud. “What you’re doing? Does it bring you joy?”
Dean’s fingers stilled in my hair.
Does it bring you joy?
I realized, then, how that question would have sounded to Dean. I sat up and turned to face him.
“You’re nothing like him, Dean.”
I ran my hand along his jaw. Dean’s greatest fear was that he had something of his father in him. Psychopathy. Sadism.
“I know that,” he told me.
You know it, I thought, but you don’t believe it.
“Believe me,” I whispered.
He cupped a hand around my neck, and he nodded—just once, just a little. My chest tightened, but inside me, something else gave.
You’re nothing like your father.
What happened to my mother wasn’t my fault.
My heart in my throat, I stood. I went to get the drive with my mother’s files on it. And then I walked back and pressed it into his hand.
“You open the files,” I told him, my voice dropping to a lower pitch as it got caught in my throat. “You open them, because I can’t.”
The skeleton is wrapped in a royal blue shawl.
I sat in front of the computer with Dean beside me, scrolling from one picture to the next, my finger feeling heavier with each click.
There’s a long-dead flower pressed into the bones of her left hand.
The necklace is around her neck, the chain tangled in her rib cage.
Empty sockets stared back at me from a skull devoid of human flesh. I stared at the contours, waiting for a spark of recognition, but all I felt was bile rising in the back of my throat.
You removed the flesh from her bones. Forensic analysis suggested the removal had been done post mortem, but that was cold comfort. You destroyed her. You eradicated her.
Dean brought his hand to rest on the back of my neck. I’m here.
I swallowed back the wave of nausea that threatened to overwhelm me. Once. Twice. Three times—and then I scrolled on to the next picture. There were dozens of them: pictures of the dirt road on which she’d been buried. Pictures of the construction equipment that had uncovered a plain wooden casket.
You wrapped her bones in a blanket. You buried her with flowers. You gave her a coffin….
I forced myself to breathe and switched from the pictures to reading the official report.
According to the medical examiner, there was a notch on the outside of one of her arm bones, a defensive wound where a knife had literally cut her to the bone. Laboratory results indicated that the bones had been treated with some kind of chemical prior to burial. That made the remains hard to date, but crime scene analysis put the time of burial within days of my mother’s disappearance.
You killed her, then you erased her. No skin on the bones. No hair on her head. Nothing.
Dean’s fingers kneaded gently at the muscles at the back of my neck. I turned my gaze from the computer screen to him. “What do you see?”
“Care.” Dean paused. “Honor. Remorse.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I didn’t want to know if the killer had felt remorse. I didn’t care that she’d mattered enough to him that he hadn’t just flung her body down in some hole.