A part of him had always wanted to protect her. He still wanted to protect her, wanted to make sure no one hurt her.
“If only it were that simple.” So much sadness. “You and I, we’ve always been so different.” Her soft fingers pressed lightly against his chest. “At the Academy, you’d go for the victims first. You wanted to hear their sides, to help them get justice.”
And she’d gone for the killers. Hunting into their pasts, tearing apart their crime scenes.
“I know you look at crimes and you see victims, but—but with me,” the soft click of her swallow seemed too loud, “after a while, I wasn’t Romeo’s victim. After so much blood and so much death, I was just—just like him.”
“No.” Did she really believe that bullshit?
Her breath whispered out on a sigh. “I shouldn’t have left you,” she said again. “My fear almost got you killed.”
“No, some crazy a**hole attacked me. You didn’t do anything.” He’d be damned if he let her blame herself.
“I’m not going to be afraid of my past anymore. I want to tell you everything. I want you to know the truth about me. After everything we’ve been through, I owe you the truth.”
He’d wanted to know her secrets for so long, but he’d never wanted to cause her pain. Luke knew that right then she hurt, and he just wanted to make her pain stop. If he could, he’d take away all her pain. But there, in the darkness, with Monica in his arms, he just felt… helpless. And it f**king pissed him off. She shouldn’t have suffered. If he had Romeo in front of him then—he’d rip the bastard apart.
A small tremble shook her body, and she said, “When my mom found out that the Romeo killer had taken me, she killed herself.” Flat, brittle.
His fingers tightened around hers. “I-I know.” He remembered that part. The nurse. The single mom who’d blamed herself when her daughter never came home. After a month, when the cops had given up, when the news had continued running the stories about Romeo’s kills, Jennifer Hill had taken a bottle of pills and never woke up.
“I never knew my dad. He—he took off right before my mom had me. Said he couldn’t handle things. Well, that’s what she told me. And mom never lied to me.”
She was talking to him about her past, and he wouldn’t have moved right then even if Hyde had burst into the room. Nothing would have moved him.
“I got away, and I had no one to go home to.”
Shit, he hadn’t thought—
“I spent all those days fighting to stay alive, but there was no one waiting for me.” A brittle laugh. “There wasn’t even anyone looking for me. Do you know, when Hyde found me—”
Hyde? Oh, Christ, that’s right. His name had been in the Romeo file.
“He thought I was one of the other girls, Katherine Daniels. Katherine.” His eyes had adjusted again to the dark, and he saw the sad shake of her head against the pillow. “But Katherine never lived past her second day.”
What happened? He bit the words back because he wasn’t going to push her. Not now. He’d pushed enough.
“He was breaking by then. He’d always been breaking. The rage was too much. He couldn’t hurt them fast enough, when they screamed—it just made him angrier.”
So quiet. No emotion there.
“Romeo wanted his girls to love him. He wanted them to need him.”
Them, not me. “What did he want from you?”
Silence.
Shouldn’t have pushed. Why did I—
“The first thing he did, the thing he always did…” Her hand tugged free of his and rubbed behind her right shoulder. “He marked us. He shoved the iron against my skin—”
My now, not them. Because she wasn’t talking as Agent Davenport anymore. She was talking as the girl she’d been.
Mary Jane. He’d learned that name in his search.
“He said, ‘You’re mine.’ That’s all he said, and I could smell my flesh burning. But I didn’t scream, and I didn’t cry. Not then.” A swallow that he could hear in the darkness. “And I saw that he liked that. In his eyes, he-he was excited.”
Because he’d found someone strong enough to play his games.
“If you broke too soon, he killed you. I learned that, fast. He liked to hurt his girls. He said he was testing us. That we had to be worthy of him. Able to stand the pain.”
Luke kept his fingers light as they skimmed down her bare arm. Light, when he wanted to grab her and hold tight. But if he held too tight…
“I’d always been pretty good at reading people,” she told him. “Just one of those things. I’d pick up on body language, voice—don’t know how or why really—I just always did. And I-I started reading him.”
More than that. She’d gotten into his head.
“The first night I was there, he cut away my clothes. Branded me.” She took a ragged breath. “Then he beat me. Not with his fists—he didn’t like to touch us, not directly anyway. He had a pipe he liked to use.” Silence. “He broke my right arm with his first hit. After that…” A shudder. “Doesn’t really matter.”
Oh, shit, he shouldn’t ask, he shouldn’t, but he had to know. “Did he rape you?” Romeo had raped the other girls. But Mary Jane—that part hadn’t been in the file he’d accessed.
Her breath caught. “He strapped me to his table. An operating table. Pulled my legs apart—”
Christ, no, he didn’t want to hear this. Why had he asked? Why?
“He tied rope around my wrists and ankles so tight I bled.” His fingers dug into her arms. Kill him.
“But then he found out I was a virgin.” She exhaled and he felt the soft shudder of air against his throat. “And he liked that. Said it made me more his.” A humorless laugh.
“You’re not his.” Never were. Never would be. That bastard should have gotten the death penalty for this twisted shit, and Louisiana usually wasn’t a state to hesitate. But Romeo had a way of working women, even women on juries.
“He didn’t break my hymen.” Said clinically, coldly, as if she were distancing herself again. “When he realized—he pulled back and he smiled at me. He told me I was his good girl. His sweetheart.”
Luke always knew what to say to the victims. Knew how to comfort them, how to help them step away from the darkness, but he didn’t know what to say to her. And he sure didn’t know how to channel the rage boiling his blood. Helpless. Not her, him.
“After that night, he didn’t try to rape me again. He kept me locked in a freaking two-by-three-foot room, like I was some kind of dog. No windows, no light. He took me out to screw with my head, to show me what he’d done to the others so he could watch my reaction. Then he’d put me back.” The words came fast, tumbling out. “Every time he put me in there, I felt like he was burying me.”
Luke swallowed the lump that rose in his throat.
“I survived. I played his game, and he kept me alive.”
“And the others?” Had he made her watch as they died? Watched as he carved up their bodies?
“When he brought them down, I-I heard them. He kept them chained in his playroom.” Her head moved in a slow shake. “I told them not to scream when he hurt them. I pounded on the door and I told them.”
Christ.
“I told them not to show fear because that was what he wanted.” She trembled a bit in his arms. “I told them but they couldn’t stop screaming. He’d slice them, and I could hear their screams for hours, and I couldn’t get out to help them. I couldn’t get out, not unless Romeo came for me.”
He kissed her. Kissed her with the tenderness he should have shown her before. Her breath slipped into his mouth, and he stole it, giving her back his own with a sigh. His lips lingered on hers. Tasted the salt of tears.
Slowly, his head lifted. Silence then, thick and heavy in the air. He didn’t think she’d say anymore, didn’t think—
“After a while, he started letting me out of the closet. When no one else was there, he’d let me out and allow me to stay in his playroom. That’s what he called it.”
Her voice came stronger now, with anger boiling beneath the words. “There was a metal door at the top of the stairs. I tried to break that door down so many times. I couldn’t. He’d leave me down there for days, and I couldn’t get out. I was trapped there, and I knew I’d die there, just like the others.”
No. “You got out.”
“He left a knife behind.” Her hair was drying. The light lavender scent deepening. “I think it was a test. He’d been getting angrier and angrier with me. Telling me he knew what was inside of me. ‘Time for it to come out.’ I found that knife, I kept it, and I knew that the next time he turned his back on me, I’d kill him.” A brittle laugh. “Maybe that was the test. I think it was what he really wanted. To show that I was just like him.”
“You’re nothing like him.”
“I tried to kill him. I would have killed him, if Hyde hadn’t stopped me.”
Yeah, and maybe Hyde should have been a little slower on that pullback. Because if anyone deserved a chance for payback, it was Monica. “The bastard deserved to die.”
“He wanted me to be a killer. Just like him. He was pushing me, always pushing me, because he wanted me to cross that edge and be like him.” Her hand pressed against his chest. “And I became one.”
“No! You were a kid! Tortured by a sick freak—”
“I stopped being a kid the minute the door of his Corvette closed behind me. And when I left those woods, I was a killer. Even Hyde knew it.”
Aw, f**k. Her skin seemed so cold now. He pressed a kiss to her shoulder and dragged her closer, trying to warm her with his own flesh.
“Everyone but Hyde wanted to throw me in a psych ward and toss away the key.”
Luke squeezed his eyes shut.
“He wouldn’t let them.”
So he owed Hyde. Big time.
“Because he looked at me, and he knew what I was. And he knew he could use me.” Her voice held a brittle edge.
Luke hesitated. “You sure about that?” Maybe there’d been more to the story. Hyde seemed to really care about her, as much as he could care about anyone.
“He only asked me one question in the ambulance. Everyone else was shouting constantly at me, but he just wanted to know one thing.”
Luke waited. She’d tell him, just like she’d told him everything else.
“ ‘How did you get him to keep you alive?’ ” she murmured.
It would have been the million-dollar question. “And what did you say?”
“ ‘I got in his head. I became what he wanted, and I lived’.”
The profiler who knew the killers. The whispers that had always followed her were so dead on.
“The state put me into a group home, but Hyde—he wouldn’t let me go. He made sure I saw a shrink he’d picked out for me. Hyde had me in therapy for a couple of years. He visited me almost every day, and then he gave me a reason to keep living.”
Because she’d needed one.
“Hyde gave me a new name. He told me if I could pass the classes, pass all the tests, I could hunt monsters. I needed that. I needed to take control. To stop the killers and not let them screw with my head. This time, I’d be screwing with their minds.”
Get into a monster’s mind like no other.
“I thought the psych tests would be harder,” she said. “But by then, I knew all the answers. Knew exactly what to say. I wasn’t different anymore. I’d trained myself to fit in and to be whatever I needed to be.”
And she’d become cold. Untrusting. She’d locked herself away from the world because she was afraid someone would look past her perfect surface and see the monster inside.
But she didn’t understand—there wasn’t a monster inside.
He kissed her again. Deep this time. Harder, letting her feel his hunger and need because, yeah, he still craved her.
He wanted her just as badly as before, needed her just as much. Because Monica had a core of steel that had been forged from hellfire.
Monster? Not damn likely.
“Who knows?” he asked against her mouth.
“Hyde. You. A handful of higher-ups at the Bureau.”
But no one close to her. No friends. No lovers. A heavy burden for her to carry. “This why you cut tail and left me before?”
“It’s why I was going to leave you again.”
Damn.
“I’m not an easy person to be with, Luke. I—”
“Keep your gun under your pillow because you’re afraid of an attack. Keep the bathroom light on because you don’t want the darkness. Keep control with men because you don’t want to be weak with anyone ever again.” All the signs of a victim had been there. He’d seen them, but had never guessed just how terrible the crimes against her had been.
A little hum from her, then, “Yeah, that about covers it.”
A question nagged at his mind. “What was the first thing you did when you got clear of Hyde and those shrinks?”
“I got laid.”
He couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d slammed her fist into his jaw.
“Romeo wanted his good girl to kill, but he didn’t want her to f**k. So I f**ked. I found a man who wanted me, and I had sex because I wasn’t his.” Her fingers were still on Luke’s chest, curling over his heart. And he didn’t want to hear about her lovers, didn’t want to hear her say—
“If only it were that simple.” So much sadness. “You and I, we’ve always been so different.” Her soft fingers pressed lightly against his chest. “At the Academy, you’d go for the victims first. You wanted to hear their sides, to help them get justice.”
And she’d gone for the killers. Hunting into their pasts, tearing apart their crime scenes.
“I know you look at crimes and you see victims, but—but with me,” the soft click of her swallow seemed too loud, “after a while, I wasn’t Romeo’s victim. After so much blood and so much death, I was just—just like him.”
“No.” Did she really believe that bullshit?
Her breath whispered out on a sigh. “I shouldn’t have left you,” she said again. “My fear almost got you killed.”
“No, some crazy a**hole attacked me. You didn’t do anything.” He’d be damned if he let her blame herself.
“I’m not going to be afraid of my past anymore. I want to tell you everything. I want you to know the truth about me. After everything we’ve been through, I owe you the truth.”
He’d wanted to know her secrets for so long, but he’d never wanted to cause her pain. Luke knew that right then she hurt, and he just wanted to make her pain stop. If he could, he’d take away all her pain. But there, in the darkness, with Monica in his arms, he just felt… helpless. And it f**king pissed him off. She shouldn’t have suffered. If he had Romeo in front of him then—he’d rip the bastard apart.
A small tremble shook her body, and she said, “When my mom found out that the Romeo killer had taken me, she killed herself.” Flat, brittle.
His fingers tightened around hers. “I-I know.” He remembered that part. The nurse. The single mom who’d blamed herself when her daughter never came home. After a month, when the cops had given up, when the news had continued running the stories about Romeo’s kills, Jennifer Hill had taken a bottle of pills and never woke up.
“I never knew my dad. He—he took off right before my mom had me. Said he couldn’t handle things. Well, that’s what she told me. And mom never lied to me.”
She was talking to him about her past, and he wouldn’t have moved right then even if Hyde had burst into the room. Nothing would have moved him.
“I got away, and I had no one to go home to.”
Shit, he hadn’t thought—
“I spent all those days fighting to stay alive, but there was no one waiting for me.” A brittle laugh. “There wasn’t even anyone looking for me. Do you know, when Hyde found me—”
Hyde? Oh, Christ, that’s right. His name had been in the Romeo file.
“He thought I was one of the other girls, Katherine Daniels. Katherine.” His eyes had adjusted again to the dark, and he saw the sad shake of her head against the pillow. “But Katherine never lived past her second day.”
What happened? He bit the words back because he wasn’t going to push her. Not now. He’d pushed enough.
“He was breaking by then. He’d always been breaking. The rage was too much. He couldn’t hurt them fast enough, when they screamed—it just made him angrier.”
So quiet. No emotion there.
“Romeo wanted his girls to love him. He wanted them to need him.”
Them, not me. “What did he want from you?”
Silence.
Shouldn’t have pushed. Why did I—
“The first thing he did, the thing he always did…” Her hand tugged free of his and rubbed behind her right shoulder. “He marked us. He shoved the iron against my skin—”
My now, not them. Because she wasn’t talking as Agent Davenport anymore. She was talking as the girl she’d been.
Mary Jane. He’d learned that name in his search.
“He said, ‘You’re mine.’ That’s all he said, and I could smell my flesh burning. But I didn’t scream, and I didn’t cry. Not then.” A swallow that he could hear in the darkness. “And I saw that he liked that. In his eyes, he-he was excited.”
Because he’d found someone strong enough to play his games.
“If you broke too soon, he killed you. I learned that, fast. He liked to hurt his girls. He said he was testing us. That we had to be worthy of him. Able to stand the pain.”
Luke kept his fingers light as they skimmed down her bare arm. Light, when he wanted to grab her and hold tight. But if he held too tight…
“I’d always been pretty good at reading people,” she told him. “Just one of those things. I’d pick up on body language, voice—don’t know how or why really—I just always did. And I-I started reading him.”
More than that. She’d gotten into his head.
“The first night I was there, he cut away my clothes. Branded me.” She took a ragged breath. “Then he beat me. Not with his fists—he didn’t like to touch us, not directly anyway. He had a pipe he liked to use.” Silence. “He broke my right arm with his first hit. After that…” A shudder. “Doesn’t really matter.”
Oh, shit, he shouldn’t ask, he shouldn’t, but he had to know. “Did he rape you?” Romeo had raped the other girls. But Mary Jane—that part hadn’t been in the file he’d accessed.
Her breath caught. “He strapped me to his table. An operating table. Pulled my legs apart—”
Christ, no, he didn’t want to hear this. Why had he asked? Why?
“He tied rope around my wrists and ankles so tight I bled.” His fingers dug into her arms. Kill him.
“But then he found out I was a virgin.” She exhaled and he felt the soft shudder of air against his throat. “And he liked that. Said it made me more his.” A humorless laugh.
“You’re not his.” Never were. Never would be. That bastard should have gotten the death penalty for this twisted shit, and Louisiana usually wasn’t a state to hesitate. But Romeo had a way of working women, even women on juries.
“He didn’t break my hymen.” Said clinically, coldly, as if she were distancing herself again. “When he realized—he pulled back and he smiled at me. He told me I was his good girl. His sweetheart.”
Luke always knew what to say to the victims. Knew how to comfort them, how to help them step away from the darkness, but he didn’t know what to say to her. And he sure didn’t know how to channel the rage boiling his blood. Helpless. Not her, him.
“After that night, he didn’t try to rape me again. He kept me locked in a freaking two-by-three-foot room, like I was some kind of dog. No windows, no light. He took me out to screw with my head, to show me what he’d done to the others so he could watch my reaction. Then he’d put me back.” The words came fast, tumbling out. “Every time he put me in there, I felt like he was burying me.”
Luke swallowed the lump that rose in his throat.
“I survived. I played his game, and he kept me alive.”
“And the others?” Had he made her watch as they died? Watched as he carved up their bodies?
“When he brought them down, I-I heard them. He kept them chained in his playroom.” Her head moved in a slow shake. “I told them not to scream when he hurt them. I pounded on the door and I told them.”
Christ.
“I told them not to show fear because that was what he wanted.” She trembled a bit in his arms. “I told them but they couldn’t stop screaming. He’d slice them, and I could hear their screams for hours, and I couldn’t get out to help them. I couldn’t get out, not unless Romeo came for me.”
He kissed her. Kissed her with the tenderness he should have shown her before. Her breath slipped into his mouth, and he stole it, giving her back his own with a sigh. His lips lingered on hers. Tasted the salt of tears.
Slowly, his head lifted. Silence then, thick and heavy in the air. He didn’t think she’d say anymore, didn’t think—
“After a while, he started letting me out of the closet. When no one else was there, he’d let me out and allow me to stay in his playroom. That’s what he called it.”
Her voice came stronger now, with anger boiling beneath the words. “There was a metal door at the top of the stairs. I tried to break that door down so many times. I couldn’t. He’d leave me down there for days, and I couldn’t get out. I was trapped there, and I knew I’d die there, just like the others.”
No. “You got out.”
“He left a knife behind.” Her hair was drying. The light lavender scent deepening. “I think it was a test. He’d been getting angrier and angrier with me. Telling me he knew what was inside of me. ‘Time for it to come out.’ I found that knife, I kept it, and I knew that the next time he turned his back on me, I’d kill him.” A brittle laugh. “Maybe that was the test. I think it was what he really wanted. To show that I was just like him.”
“You’re nothing like him.”
“I tried to kill him. I would have killed him, if Hyde hadn’t stopped me.”
Yeah, and maybe Hyde should have been a little slower on that pullback. Because if anyone deserved a chance for payback, it was Monica. “The bastard deserved to die.”
“He wanted me to be a killer. Just like him. He was pushing me, always pushing me, because he wanted me to cross that edge and be like him.” Her hand pressed against his chest. “And I became one.”
“No! You were a kid! Tortured by a sick freak—”
“I stopped being a kid the minute the door of his Corvette closed behind me. And when I left those woods, I was a killer. Even Hyde knew it.”
Aw, f**k. Her skin seemed so cold now. He pressed a kiss to her shoulder and dragged her closer, trying to warm her with his own flesh.
“Everyone but Hyde wanted to throw me in a psych ward and toss away the key.”
Luke squeezed his eyes shut.
“He wouldn’t let them.”
So he owed Hyde. Big time.
“Because he looked at me, and he knew what I was. And he knew he could use me.” Her voice held a brittle edge.
Luke hesitated. “You sure about that?” Maybe there’d been more to the story. Hyde seemed to really care about her, as much as he could care about anyone.
“He only asked me one question in the ambulance. Everyone else was shouting constantly at me, but he just wanted to know one thing.”
Luke waited. She’d tell him, just like she’d told him everything else.
“ ‘How did you get him to keep you alive?’ ” she murmured.
It would have been the million-dollar question. “And what did you say?”
“ ‘I got in his head. I became what he wanted, and I lived’.”
The profiler who knew the killers. The whispers that had always followed her were so dead on.
“The state put me into a group home, but Hyde—he wouldn’t let me go. He made sure I saw a shrink he’d picked out for me. Hyde had me in therapy for a couple of years. He visited me almost every day, and then he gave me a reason to keep living.”
Because she’d needed one.
“Hyde gave me a new name. He told me if I could pass the classes, pass all the tests, I could hunt monsters. I needed that. I needed to take control. To stop the killers and not let them screw with my head. This time, I’d be screwing with their minds.”
Get into a monster’s mind like no other.
“I thought the psych tests would be harder,” she said. “But by then, I knew all the answers. Knew exactly what to say. I wasn’t different anymore. I’d trained myself to fit in and to be whatever I needed to be.”
And she’d become cold. Untrusting. She’d locked herself away from the world because she was afraid someone would look past her perfect surface and see the monster inside.
But she didn’t understand—there wasn’t a monster inside.
He kissed her again. Deep this time. Harder, letting her feel his hunger and need because, yeah, he still craved her.
He wanted her just as badly as before, needed her just as much. Because Monica had a core of steel that had been forged from hellfire.
Monster? Not damn likely.
“Who knows?” he asked against her mouth.
“Hyde. You. A handful of higher-ups at the Bureau.”
But no one close to her. No friends. No lovers. A heavy burden for her to carry. “This why you cut tail and left me before?”
“It’s why I was going to leave you again.”
Damn.
“I’m not an easy person to be with, Luke. I—”
“Keep your gun under your pillow because you’re afraid of an attack. Keep the bathroom light on because you don’t want the darkness. Keep control with men because you don’t want to be weak with anyone ever again.” All the signs of a victim had been there. He’d seen them, but had never guessed just how terrible the crimes against her had been.
A little hum from her, then, “Yeah, that about covers it.”
A question nagged at his mind. “What was the first thing you did when you got clear of Hyde and those shrinks?”
“I got laid.”
He couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d slammed her fist into his jaw.
“Romeo wanted his good girl to kill, but he didn’t want her to f**k. So I f**ked. I found a man who wanted me, and I had sex because I wasn’t his.” Her fingers were still on Luke’s chest, curling over his heart. And he didn’t want to hear about her lovers, didn’t want to hear her say—
