I stayed up until two in the morning, sitting on the couch with my phone on the coffee table, waiting for Sterling and Briggs to call, waiting for them to tell us what they’d found in that bathroom.
Maintenance issues, the bouncer had said. You didn’t call the FBI for maintenance.
My mind went to the UNSUB. You do everything to a timetable. You’re not going to stop. You’re going to kill one a day, every day, until we catch you.
“Can’t sleep?” a voice asked me quietly. I looked up to see Dean silhouetted in the doorway. He was wearing a threadbare white T-shirt, thin enough and tight enough that I could see the steady rise and fall of his chest underneath.
“Can’t sleep,” I echoed. You can’t, either, I thought. A light sheen of sweat on Dean’s face told me that he’d been doing sit-ups or push-ups or some other form of physical exercise punishing enough in repetition to quiet the whispers in his own memories.
The things his serial killer father had told him again and again.
“I keep thinking about the fact that there was probably a body in that bathroom,” I said, sharing the source of my sleepless night to keep him from dwelling on his own. “I keep thinking that Briggs and Sterling are going to call.”
Dean stepped out of the shadows. “We’re allowed to work active cases.” He moved toward me. “That doesn’t mean they’re obligated to use us.”
Dean was telling himself that, as much as telling me. When I profiled, it was like stepping into someone else’s shoes. When Dean profiled, he gave in to a pattern of thought his early experiences had ingrained in him, a darkness he kept under lock and key. Neither one of us was good at pulling back. Neither one of us was good at waiting.
“I just keep thinking about the first three victims,” I said, my voice rough in my throat. “I keep thinking that if we hadn’t gone to dinner, if we’d worked harder, if I’d…”
“If you’d done what?”
I could feel the heat of Dean’s body beside me.
“Something.” The word tore its way out of my mouth.
Agent Sterling had told me once that I was the biggest liability on the team because I was the one who really felt things. Michael and Lia were experts in masking their emotions and forcing themselves not to care. Dean had lived through horrors at the age of twelve that had convinced him that he was a ticking time bomb, that if he really felt things, he might turn into a monster like his father. And though Sloane wore her heart on her sleeve, she would always see patterns first and people second.
But I felt the loss of every victim. I felt my own lack every time an UNSUB killed, because every time that I didn’t stop it, every time I didn’t see it coming, every time I got there too late—
“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.”
