Page 107 of Fragile Sanctuary

She looked down at me, adding shades of color to the image she had of me in her mind. “How long did you work there?”

“Almost five years.”

Rho gripped my hands tighter. “You probably saw a lot of awful things.”

My mouth went dry, but I forced the words out anyway. “I did. But I didn’t see enough.”

She frowned, curiosity brimming in those soulful eyes.

“I didn’t let it in. I should’ve. But I turned off that part of myself. I saw crimes as data and not the human beings behind it.”

“That makes complete sense. How could you? If you let yourself truly see that day in and day out, you’d drown in grief. It was a self-protection mechanism.”

That was Rho. Always seeing the best in everyone, in me. But she gave me too much leeway, too much grace. “I’m sure that was part of it. But there’s an ugly piece, too.”

Rho kept a grip on my hands and didn’t look away.

It took everything to hold her gaze as I continued. “I thought I was hot shit. It was like my mind was made for profiling. I saw connections no one else did. Things that led to more case closures than people with a decade or more on the job.”

I gripped her hands harder, needing to feel the contact with thehere and now. “I got cocky. Wrote a few books. Got some press attention. Kept working cases.”

“Anson,” Rho said quietly. “There’s nothing wrong with being good at your job.”

“Maybe not. But I was a dick. Thought I knew everything.”

“And something happened,” she whispered.

I moved my head up and down in the barest nod. “We started working a case of serial murders that crossed state lines. Everywhere from the Southwest up the coast to the Pacific Northwest. All women. Restrained. Ligature marks on their ankles, wrists, and necks. But the cause of death was always the severing of their carotid.”

There was the tiniest jerk of Rho’s hands. A jolt of shock. “He slit their throats.”

“Yes. But every time he did, he mailed a letter to local law enforcement. A clue. Agame.”

Rho’s expression was everything I should’ve felt about the case but didn’t. “That’s awful.”

“He gets a thrill out of it. It’s almost sexual for him, that cat-and-mouse back-and-forth. Each note had a word game. Clues that gave a letter, and the letters gave a location. They started calling him The Hangman.”

“And that location was where the body would be,” Rho finished for me.

“Yes.” I traced more circles on the backs of her hands, a swirl of my callused fingertips against the smooth silk of her skin. “I was good at his game. Too good. We gave one press conference, and something I said during it tipped him off that I was the one solving his riddles.”

Rho gripped my hands so hard I’d likely have bruises tomorrow. “He fixated on you.”

My throat worked as I swallowed. “The clues started being sent to the BAU and addressed to me. I should’ve known he’d dig. He sent letters to the victims’ families afterward, notes that told us he’d watched them. Interviews, social media posts. He tracked them because he got off on their pain. The emotional torture of the loved ones was as much of a high as the physical.”

She shuddered against me. “Anson…”

“I was stupid thinking I wouldn’t end up as a target, that I was out of his reach. I’d used my middle name as my last when I published my book and never went public with my last name at press conferences. I thought that would be enough.”

Fear swirled in Rho’s eyes, dulling the gold to a deep amber. “What did he do?”

“Found my family. My sister. Grabbed her outside the hospital she worked at in Portland. Kept her for twenty-four hours. Then he sliced her throat and sent me the clue to find her. We didn’t even know she was missing. She always worked crazy shifts as an ER nurse. I didn’t know that he was terrorizing her for a full day,slicingher throat, because I was too caught up in my own bullshit.”

“Anson,” she rasped. “Tell me they got him. That they put him away for the rest of his life.”

I shook my head, the agony digging deeper at yet another failure. “No idea where he is. Cases are still open, but he went quiet when I quit the bureau.” I swallowed hard, trying to choke back the pain. “I’d already gotten my sister killed, and when my father had a heart attack three months later, I knew I killed him, too. My mom thinks so. Said as much at Dad’s funeral.”

Rho only held my hands tighter, not wavering. But tears brimmed in her eyes. “Youdidn’t do this, Anson.”

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