Page 80 of Dream a Little Dream

Aaronwaslying.

“So, howdidyou find out?” he asked instead. “About me? Your parents? The case?”

“Was in a halfway house at sixteen when my last foster placement broke down. A lot of my paperwork went mysteriously missing after then.” Aaron rolled his eyes. “Restrictions lifted. Another name change and from there, things got tied up in bureaucracy and no one knew who was handling my protected person’s case. Found out more stuff. One of those things was you.”

“Why did you change your name?”

Aaron snorted, a dark, humourless laugh escaping. “I was…fucking some bloke. Told him who I was. He freaked. I got…battered. Then shipped off, name changed again, ‘for safety.’” He threw up air quotes with a bitter smirk. “Sent to London because there’s a place already full of crazy cases like mine. I could blend in, as long as I talked and looked like someone else.”

Aaron faltered for a moment, and he looked directly at Kenny, eyes darker, deeper. “So, yeah, I set my path to meeting you from there. Had to apply to your course on the down low. Pretty sure if the authorities knew it was me, aHowell, they’d shove me somewhere deep underground. But I’m an adult now. Technically, no longer theirs to worry about.”

“Why did you want to be onmycourse?”

“To find out.”

Kenny waited. Then, “To find out what?”

“If I’m like them.”

Kenny couldn’t answer that. Not yet, anyhow.

So he allowed Aaron to fill in the blanks.

“What happened at Inferno, though? That’s just fate, right? Surely you have some psycho theories on how that encounter happened?”

“Wouldn’t call it fate.” Kenny scratched his chin. “Maybe there’s something in two broken souls needing the same thing, at the same time, then searching for it in the same place. No matter how statistically unlikely it is.”

“Two broken souls finding each other, huh?” Aaron breathed out a soft chuckle. “How poetic.” He titled his head. “What broke you, doc?”

Kenny didn’t answer at first. Couldn’t. His past felt like something he had to keep buried, too personal to give up. But Aaron was laying everything out, unmasked. How could he do any less?

“My twin sister was raped and killed when she was fourteen. Here. In Ryston.”

Aaron froze, eyes widening. Then, stoic and pitiless, he said, “Was it Frank?”

“Unconfirmed.”

A heavy silence fell between them, overflowing with grief and shared pain, until Aaron broke it with a single word. Sincere, soft, and entirely unexpected, “Sorry.”

Kenny had to wait a moment to compose himself. The apology felt real. As though Aaron took full responsibility. It wasn’t his fault. Obviously. He wouldn’t have even been born when Kenny’s sister met her gruesome end. And despite his theories and consistent searching for the truth, for her killer,no concrete evidence pointed to the Howells. It was more a hunch and the improbable coincidence that more than one psychopathic sexual deviant had been in Jessica’s vicinity at the same time as the Howells were prolific with their crimes.

Still, it felt validating.

“How much do you know about what happened in that house?” Kenny redirected the focus, as always, away from himself. Away from the vulnerability he wasn’t ready to confront.

Aaron shrugged, but there was something in the way his shoulders moved, like he was dodging more than the question itself. “Nothing.”

Kenny waited for the dam to overflow.

“Seriously,” Aaron chuckled, calling Kenny out on his techniques, “I’ve had a lot of people poking inside this head and they found nada.”

“You haven’t hadme.”

A slow smirk curved on Aaron’s lips. “Something I’ve been trying to rectify.”

Kenny’s breath hitched, the unspoken desire tightening. But he had to break that. Tear it apart. Before it tore them both, limb from limb. “In yourhead,” he clarified, trying to rein in the attraction pulsing beneath his skin.

“Also not entirely true.” That playful defiance threading through his voice was heavy with unacknowledged conviction. “Look, I know nothing. As far as I knew, I had the most perfect childhood. Treated like a prince. Yeah, so I was occasionally locked in a cupboard and medicated to sleep, but even that isn’t a bad memory. Mum used to sing to me. Taught me the piano. I was her…precious.”

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