“You didn’t have information that was vital.”
“But you did.”
“Nothing pertinent to you.”
“It would have been pertinent to know you were raped! By five now very dead women!”
Silence split the air.
His fingers hurt from their grip. “And your question? Are you going to ask it now?”
Her heavy breathing filled the room. Strange, as he wondered if he would ever draw breath again.
“Those women. You knew them. You had every reason to want them dead.”
“That isn’t much of a question.”
Her chest rose and fell, rose and fell.She wasn’t going to ask. A strange sense of unreality gripped him. A feeling that he had been in this situation before, but standing on the other side. Unable to ask Jeremy. Unable to bear the answer. Unable to do anything except run away.
“They raped you.”
He hated that word. The harsh sound of the longa. The way thepformed between puckered lips.
“Debatable, as I said before.” He tried to keep his voice light, desperately fought against the emptiness in his head, in his gut.
“Not debatable. Not from Abigail Winstead’s own hand.”
“A madwoman’s rambles?”
“Mad? Quite possibly. Rambles? I think not.”
“You put too much stock in that book. Obsessed by it.”
“Little wonder, when the object of it was with me all the time. Sleeping at my side.”
“I seem to recall my bed being the one we shared.”
Her color rose, angry and embarrassed. “I knew there was something about the book that called to me. Something in it I should read.”
He buried his horror, his anger, beneath shallow disinterest. “I didn’t realize you were into the perverse.”
The pain and self-hatred not quite hidden as intended.
She reached out a hand to him and withdrew it just as quickly. Comfort automatically given, then consciously taken away.
He smiled bitterly. “Believe me, I don’t need your comfort.”
He watched her try to physically calm herself and it made him even angrier. She took a deep breath. “What they did was wrong.”
“Spare me your pity. I hardly need it, any more than I need anything else from you.” The tragedy of spite.
She looked down, pulled shaky hands together, then straightened her shoulders. “Very well.”
“Yourquestion, Miss Winters?” he bit out.
Her eyes connected with his. “Did you murder those women?”
He waited a few beats. “If not me, then who else?”
