I’d always known my antisocial tendencies would bite me in the ass eventually.
I just hadn’t expected it to be quite like this.
The moth had found the light again, was beating its wings frantically against the hot bulb. I could hear it—the soft, desperate tap-tap-tap of its body hitting glass.
Stop that.
“What?” Tom leaned forward slightly.
I wasn’t aware that I’d spoken out loud.
“Nothing.” I pulled my attention back to him, drawing my knees to my chest. “What are you doing, Hayes?”
The use of his last name made something flicker across his expression—pain, maybe, or recognition that the distance between us had become insurmountable. We were no longer Tom and Shay, no longer lovers or even friends. We were captor and captive now. Detective and serial killer. The gulf between those positions was too wide to bridge.
“I’m trying to…” He ran a hand through his hair, messing it up even more. The gesture was achingly familiar. I’d seen him do it a hundred times when he was frustrated, when he was thinking, when he was trying to find the right words. “I need you to understand.”
He looked desperate, unraveling at the edges in a way that should have worried me. But it just made me feel tired. I couldn’t find it in myself to care anymore, couldn’t muster the energy for concern.
“That’s never going to happen.” I let my head fall back against the concrete wall, felt the cold roughness against my skull. “You might as well shoot me now and get it over with.”
There was a pause.
“Except that’s not your MO, is it? You don’t use guns. They are too impersonal, is that it?”
I kept my eyes on the ceiling, tracking the cracks in the concrete.
“Tell me what to do,” Tom said, his voice cracking slightly. “How can I convince you? What do you need to hear?”
He looked like a man drowning in open water, reaching for anything that might keep him afloat just a few seconds longer. Once upon a time, that would have triggered every protective instinct I had, made me want to gather him close and promiseeverything would be okay.
Now, I just felt numb.
“I’ll stop killing.” The words tumbled out of him in a rush, desperate and raw. “Would that be enough? If I stopped. If I promised never to do it again. If I—could you—”
I shook my head before he could finish, cutting off whatever plea he’d been building toward. “No, you won’t.”
“I will.” He took a step forward, then stopped himself, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. “I swear to you, Shay. I’ll never do it again.”
“You, you will,” I said it with absolute certainty, with the confidence of someone who’d spent years studying people like him. “I told you once, didn’t I? Back when I was still profiling the killer. Before I knew it was you. I said that they wouldn’t stop, not even if they messed up. Not even if they got close to being caught. That it’s just your nature.”
The moth had given up on the light temporarily, and was resting on the wall now. Its wings opened and closed slowly, rhythmically.
“You think you have a strong moral code that makes you better than the rest.” I kept my eyes on the moth, found it easier to say these things without looking at him. “You see yourself as some sort of vigilante, killing only the people who deserve it. You may even genuinely believe you’re doing the right thing. That you’re making the world a better place, one murder at a time.”
I paused, letting the words sink in.
“But the truth is, you only do it to feel better about yourself. To justify something you were going to do regardless. You kill because you like to kill. It’s as simple as that.”
When I finally looked at Tom, there was something raw andexposed in his gaze. Wounded. Like I’d reached inside his chest and yanked out something he’d kept carefully hidden, even from himself.
It made me want to reach out, cup his face in my hands. Made me want to take the words back, to comfort him in any way I knew how. To hug him, breathe in his scent and never let go.
I’d sooner kill myself than do that, however.
That impulse was just a fantasy, something that had never really existed in the first place. The Tom I’d loved—if I’d even loved him, if any of it had been real—was as much an illusion as everything else. A character he’d played. A mask he’d worn so convincingly I’d never thought to look beneath it.
The moth took flight again, and I tracked its movement with my eyes. Up toward the light, then away. Closer, then retreating. An endless, pointless dance that would only end one way.
