Page 34 of Twelve
Why was it so much harder to accept that there were other traumas whose effects had formed me just as much?
“Quentin Nichols had a sister.” I leaned back against the headboard, my fingers intertwining themselves with Dean’s. It was easier—always—to talk about someone other than myself. “She killed herself when she was eighteen. Quentin was four years younger.”
“He was there.” Dean didn’t make that a question.
“His family blamed him for not being able to stop it.” That was what I’d been able to piece together, after the fact. “According to people who knew him, Nichols always said that was why he went into crisis negotiation—to save lives. But in reality…” I closed my eyes, just for a moment, knowing that Dean deserved more than me talking about the case because it was easier than addressing the elephant in the room.
“In reality,” I continued, opening my eyes to his deep brown ones, “Nichols convinced himself that hehadsaved his sister. He was there for her, in the end. He told her it was okay. He let her go.”
Dean’s head tilted down toward mine. “He gave her what mercy he could.”
Dean and I had always acknowledged that to do what we did, a person needed a bit of monster in them. That was why he understood Nichols, why I could see the motive and understand it myself.
“I killed my mother.” I’d said those words to Mackenzie’s psychologist. I could say them to Dean now. “I was holding the knife. I felt it go into her chest.”
“You couldn’t stop it,” Dean told me. “The knife was in your hands. Her fingers wrapped around yours.”
I laid my hand on his chest. There was a spot, just inside the rib cage…
“You need to talk to someone,” Dean told me.
I closed my eyes. “I know.” For almost a minute, I sat there, listening to the sound of his heart, feeling it beat beneath my palm.
“Best part of this case.” Dean always knew exactly when I’d reached my limit, exactly how to distract me. He laid his hand on my chest. I could feel the warmth of it through my thin white T-shirt. I could feel him feeling my heartbeat.
“The best part of this case was Mackenzie.” I didn’t even have to think about my answer. “Before she came in—she danced.”
She was going to survive, just like she always had.
“You talked to her parents?” Dean asked.
I nodded. “She’ll come to us when she’s fifteen—if she still wants to.”
Mackenzie’s parents were hedging their bets on their daughter joining the Naturals program, but the profiler in me knew that their daughter wouldn’t change her mind about this. She’d spend the next three years convincing them that normal wasn’t an option.
Not for her.
Not anymore.
Without warning, Dean’s mouth descended over mine. I rose up to meet him, my hands on either side of his face, my legs wrapping themselves around his body.
I wasn’t normal.
Neither was he.
“The new girl can’t have my room.” The voice that issued that statement was completely matter-of-fact and utterly unbothered by what Dean and I were up to on the bed.
We split apart.
Laurel tilted her head to one side. “Do you prefer the screams,” she asked Dean softly, “or the blood?”
There was a single beat of silence, and then Lia sauntered into the room behind my little sister.
“I give that a nine out of ten for delivery,” Lia told Laurel. “But a ten for creepy content.”
Laurel shrugged, her expression unchanging. “I try.”
Most of the time, Laurel triednotto be creepy—and failed. But my sister was strangely at ease with Lia, who was already training her to use her unnatural solemnity to her advantageandto spot lies.
