Her pen pauses. She adjusts her glasses and starts writing again.
“Tell me more about him.”
“What’s there to tell?” I ask, watching her hand move across the page.
She stops writing. Slowly, she looks up at me.Reallylooks at me this time.
“How did he die?”
Her eyes are jade green, shifting with the light. Dark gray rims them, flecked with deeper green and a faint hint of brown near the center.
“Suffocation,” I say.
“How did that make you feel?” she asks.
My gaze drifts to her mouth, tracing the shape of her lips as she waits. I have wanted them from the first moment I saw her. Rules are the only thing that ever stopped me.
“Good,” I say.
“Mhm.” She murmurs it and writes the word down, pen scratching softly against the paper.
“What about you, Doctor?” I ask.
She pauses. “What about me?”
“Your relationship with your father,” I say, a smile pulling at one corner of my mouth.
Her posture stiffens. She presses her palms flat against the notebook and looks at me fully now. Her eyes widen, brows drawing together. I struck a nerve. I know we are not here to talk about her. She came for answers, for the mind of the man who shook the nation.
While she searches for reasons to fix me enough to put me on trial, I am undoing her, piece by piece.
“Mr. Mercer,” she says, clearing her throat, “we are not here to discuss my family or me. We are here to understand you, your mind, and to find answers to why you came to murder. The families deserve that.”
I lean back in my chair and stare up at the ceiling. Laughter spills out of me, bouncing off the walls until the room seems smaller.
“Well,” I say, still chuckling. “Doctor,” I lower my head and meet her gaze again. “I know exactly why I killed them.”
She swallows. I watch it slide down her throat, along that elegant neck still dusted with the perfume of sandalwood and vanilla.
“Why?” she asks.
Her voice is thin.
“Because I could.”
She lifts a hand to her neck, suddenly aware of my stare. Her fingers brush the skin lightly, a nervous habit she can’t stop. She shifts in her chair, and the movement tells me more than her silence ever could.
“Do you have urges to kill?” she asks.
I nod, the smirk never leaving my face.
“Do you have urges to kill me?”
Her breathing turns shallow. Her lips part as she waits for my answer.
I laugh again, louder this time. “You think I want to kill you?”
She straightens, forcing control back into her posture. “I think you have urges you feel compelled to satisfy,” she says. Her voice wavers, then steadies. “And that gives you a sense of fulfillment.”
