Page 80 of Killing Me Softly

The word hit like a bullet to the chest.

Jack’s voice was clipped, procedural, but his eyes… his eyes held it all. “With a belt.”

Aaron’s knees buckled. The street tilted, floodlights searing into his retinas, and suddenly Kenny was there, catching him before he hit the ground.

Jack yanked off his gloves and tossed them into an evidence bin. “Take him back to my place.Notyours. I need forensics in there. If she’s been in your house, we need to find prints. Anything. I’ll call ahead to Fraser. Let him know you’re on your way. And I’ll have an officer posted at the door.”

Aaron heard nothing else.

It all dissolved. Jack’s voice, the crime scene, the sterile efficiency of people cataloguing Taylor’s death like another case instead of a person. A shitty person, yeah, but still a fuckingperson. And his only crime was to have got involved with Aaron. His limbs disconnected from his body and Kenny’s arms around him were the only thing tethering him to reality. He let himself be led.Dragged.Carried through the blur of sirens and rain-slicked pavement and flashing lights.

Because what was the point of fighting anymore?

What was the point of anything?

Everything he touched was doomed.

Chapter sixteen

A Cure For Minds Unwell

Kenny had never wanted to wrap someone in Teflon, lock them away from the world, and run away with them as much as he did Aaron right then.

Sitting next to him on the sofa in Jack’s living room, Aaron was barely there. A shadow of himself. A hollowed-out spectre of guilt and grief wrapped in silence. Mostly guilt. Kenny had seen this before. Had studied it. Written papers on it. Given fucking lectures on it. Survivors of traumatic events often wrestled with misplaced responsibility, an inflated sense of control over things they could never have stopped. Survivor’s guilt, cognitive distortion, self-directed blame. Aaron was cycling through them all. And Kenny could see it happening in real time.

Taylor wasn’t deadbecauseof Aaron. Not really. But try telling that to the mind of someone who’d spent his entire life believing he carried the sins that came before him. And Kenny had seen Aaron rage,fight, refuse to be a victim, but he was now watching him collapse inward.

The worst of it? Kenny couldn’t even say I told you so.

Not aboutthis.

Because this was the ripple effect. The video last year Taylor had naively put out into the world had caused this. The sensationalisedclaims that had spread like a disease across social media, turning Taylor into a name attached to a scandal rather than a person had been the catalyst. Kenny had known it would. Maybe he hadn’t predicted this exact outcome. Hadn’t foreseen that it would coax Child A from the shadows. Not when he’d believed she was safely confined to a psychiatric unit for the rest of her life. Hadn’t imagined it would give her access to a past she should never have found. But he’d known one thing for certain.Reckless narratives have consequences.

And now, that consequence was lying cold in a forensics lab, his last moments reduced to the fine details of cause of death and time of asphyxiation.

Yet people still didn’tfuckinglearn.

A shuffle in the doorway broke the suffocating silence. Fraser, looking as though he didn’t know what the hell had just landed on his doorstep, poked his head in. With a faded hoodie and shorts, he’d been mid-workout when they’d knocked on his door.

“Can I get either of you anything?” His voice was cautious, as if speaking too loudly might shatter the already fragile air in the room. “Tea. Coffee? Something stronger?”

Aaron didn’t even react.

Kenny swallowed the bitter lump in his throat. “Don’t suppose you have whisky?”

“I’m a Scot, Kenny. ‘Course I have fucking whisky. Ice?”

“No. Neat.”

Fraser nodded to Aaron. “For him?”

Kenny glimpsed the insular, ghost-like form Aaron had retreated into. The stillness wasn’t just grief. It was catatonia by self-preservation. He wasn’t spiralling outward, wasn’t raging, wasn’t throwing things or breaking down. He was folding in.Compressing into himself in a way Kenny had only ever seen in patients who’d run out of ways to cope. And for the first time in his life, Kenny—the psychologist, the profiler, the man who built his career on knowing what to say to pull people back from the brink—didn’t know how to reach him.

So he tried the only thing he could think of.

“Do you have JD by any chance?”

Fraser hesitated before nodding. “Sure.”

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