Lovegame

by Tracy Wolff

  That’s news to me, and particularly interesting news considering I had done exactly the same thing when I was writing the book. “You know, it’s not surprising that you have nightmares. Immersing yourself that completely in the head of a psychopath—”

  “Do you have nightmares?” she interrupts, eyes wide and shadowed. “You go deeper than I ever did.”

  If only she knew. I close my eyes for a second, try to banish the thought. “Sometimes, yeah. Less now than I used to when…”

  “When you were an analyst.”

  “Yes.”

  She nods, falls silent. I take her silence as an opportunity to continue on with my last line of questioning. “How about any tingling in your extremities? Your hands and feet? When you’re not hyperventilating, I mean.”

  She looks startled. “No. Of course not.”

  “Do you know what day it is? And what street you live on?”

  “It’s Saturday and I gave you this address only a few hours ago!”

  “Hey, don’t get all defensive on me. I’m just covering the bases so I can prove that what’s happening here isn’t on you.”

  She freezes then, her whole body going so still that for a moment I’m afraid that she’s actually stopped breathing. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean you’re not crazy. And while I’m not a medical doctor, you don’t seem to have any symptoms that might indicate a serious neurological problem—”

  “So not sick and not crazy,” she breathes with a sigh of relief. “At least according to you.”

  I lift a brow at her. “For someone who wanted my opinion so badly, you don’t seem very ready to believe it.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just…how can you say for certain that I’m not losing my mind? Or that I don’t have another personality running around in my head somewhere?”

  “Because no conversation I’ve ever had with you has ever given me the idea that that’s the case.” I pause, let my words sink in. “Why? Do you think you have another personality?”

  “No, of course not. But people don’t just forget what I’ve forgotten.”

  “They do if it never happened and they have nothing to remember.” I grab on to both of her hands, hold them tightly in my own. “Look, Veronica, I’ve spent my entire adult life studying diseased minds. I’ve been in the heads of schizophrenics and people with bi-polar disease or multiple personality disorder or suicide-inducing depressions. I’ve studied narcissists and sociopaths and I’ve seen what all of them can do, when pushed. That’s not you.”

  “But you don’t know—”

  “I do know! You’re an amazing actress, but no one’s that good.”

  She smiles for the first time in too long. “It’s funny. I had that same thought about you just a few minutes ago.”

  “That I’m an amazing actress?” I repeat, largely to make her laugh. I grin when it works.

  “That no one is this good.”

  “Right? And even if someone else is, I’m not, so…” I take her hands, bring first one to my lips and then the other, reveling in the feel of her soft skin under the roughness of my thumbs. “We’re going to figure this out, sweetheart, I promise you. And when we do, you’ll know once and for all that this isn’t on you. You’re not going crazy.”

  “Then what is going on? Because this stuff is happening and if I’m not doing it…”

  “Sometimes the simplest answer is also the best. If you’re not doing it, then somebody else is.”

  “You say that so matter-of-factly.”

  “Do I? Believe me, I don’t feel matter-of-fact about it.” In fact, I’m fucking furious. Enraged. I want to find whoever is fucking with her and make them suffer the way she’d been suffering for days. “I’m going to take care of this for you.”

  “How?”

  By hunting down whoever felt like they had a right to do this and making them regret it. “By analyzing the data. It’s what I’m good at, after all.” I might not be a behavioral analyst anymore, but my FBI training is not something I’m ever going to forget.

  She studies my face for long seconds, like she’s looking for something there. Maybe truth. Maybe competence. Maybe an assurance I’m only too willing to give her. I can’t tell, and right now I don’t particularly care. Not when she drains her brandy and curls into my arms like she really does trust me. Like all her words to the contrary are just that. Words. For a man with my past, it means more than I can ever explain to her.

  Long minutes pass as I hold her tight to my chest, rocking her back and forth in as soothing a manner as I can muster. Outside the huge picture windows that make up three of the family room walls, the sun is slowly coming to life over the Pacific. Huge and orange and dazzling, it looks like it’s setting fire to the very water it’s rising over and I have the nonsensical urge to reach through the glass and touch it. To try to hold a little bit of that brilliance in my hands.

  I know it won’t work, but the urge is there all the same. Much as it is with Veronica, who is another brilliant, brightly burning flame. And like the sun, I can already feel her slipping through my fingers.

  I tighten my arms around her at the thought, hold on to her with everything I have inside of me. Long minutes pass as she stays curled against me, her head on my chest. Her arms wrapped around my shoulders.

  It’s quiet and sweet and exactly what the two of us need right now.

  After a while, I’m half-convinced she’s asleep and I shift a little, trying to make her more comfortable. But she grabs on to me like a limpet, refuses to move so much as an inch. And I let her because I’m in no hurry to let go of her, either. Not after going the whole day without feeling her against me like this.

  “Ian?” A few more minutes have passed and I’m floating now in that nebulous state halfway between waking and sleep. But something about the way she says my name has me coming to attention.

  “Yes, sweetheart?” I ask, even though my built-in radar is going off and I’ve already figured out what she’s going to say.

  “You promised that if I talked to you, you’d share something with me, too.”

  I stiffen despite knowing it was coming; the warning I give myself to stay cool and calm getting buried under the natural tension that comes with having to talk about my own past. “That’s not exactly what I said. But, yeah, we can talk if you’re not too tired. Or we can go to bed and talk about this when we both wake up.”

  I know which avenue I’m rooting for, but Veronica didn’t get where she is today by not being persistent. So even as I present the options, I’m struggling to wake up faster, to sit taller and think quicker. Telling this story takes more than I’ve got inside me on a regular day, let alone after a night like the one we’ve just had.

  But trust is trust and a promise is a promise. She shared herself with me. I can do no less with her. As for the feeling that I’m slicing myself open with a dull spoon…surely it will fade once I get this over with.

  Though the story is always there at the front of my mind—it’s not like I’ve been able to ignore it or go around it or forget it, no matter how hard I’ve tried through the years—it still takes me a while to find the words. To make my lips form the unfamiliar shapes. And even when I do find them, even when they start pouring out of my mouth like poison, they taste rusty and unfamiliar. Like the lock I’ve kept on them for so long has somehow melted into them. Somehow turned them metallic and dirty and bitter. So, so bitter.

  “First off, what happened in my hotel room yesterday morning…it really did have nothing to do with you. You were perfect, amazing.” I cup her cheek, stroke my thumb over her impossibly high cheekbones. “I’ve never wanted a woman the way I wanted you that night. The way I want you still.”

  “You don’t need to say that.”

  “I don’t need to say anything,” I counter. “But it’s the truth. If we’re going to try to build this trust thing between us, I owe you that much, don’t you think?”

  It’s a rhetorica
l question and I don’t wait for her to answer before I continue on. If I pause too long, I’m afraid I’ll never get the words out.

  “So, I feel like I have to preface this by saying that I’ve never had sex like that before. So raw. So devastating. So hot. And I’ve never let myself even think about doing to another woman what I did to you.

  “Even as I was doing it, there was a voice inside of me telling me to stop. Telling me that I was getting too close to the edge, too close to the line I’d set myself years ago. I ignored the voice, the warnings—how could I not when you were so responsive, so beautiful, so goddamn perfect? I ignored it all and I stepped over a line I swore I’d never cross. I hurt you—”

  “You didn’t!” She sits up abruptly as she says it, half-passionate, half-distraught. “You gave me more pleasure than I’ve ever felt before.”

  “And more bruises.” Once again, I trace a finger over the one on her jaw. “Anyway, I woke up in the morning and saw what I’d done…and it freaked me out. Hell, it sent me into a panic. I’d behaved like an animal, had ravaged and bruised and spanked you. And worse, as I lay there looking at you, there was a part of me that wanted to do it all over again. That’s why I kicked you out. Not because I didn’t want you, but because I did. Too much.”

  “There’s no such thing as too much,” she tells me as her long, delicate fingers stroke softly over my back, my chest. And though I’m telling this story, though I’m in the middle of revealing my darkest secret—my biggest shame—my body still responds to her. My breathing quickens, my dick goes hard and my hands ache to touch, to caress.

  But I know if I do we’re going to end up right back where we were at this time yesterday and I don’t want to go there. Not right now. Not when there’s still so much for her to understand.

  And so I grab on to her hands and press soft kisses to her palms before sandwiching them between my own. “I can’t do this if you touch me,” I admit as I gently squeeze them. “There’s no way I’ll be able to get out everything I need to say to you.”

  For a second, she looks like she’s going to argue, but in the end she doesn’t. She just squeezes my hands in return, burrows closer into my chest.

  I take a deep breath and continue, though it’s the last thing I want to do. “I didn’t just accidentally become a behavioral analyst for the FBI. I mean, obviously, you have to work hard and have some pretty impressive credentials to get the job, but that’s not what I mean. A lot of the people I worked with had started out wanting to be field agents or psychologists or police detectives. Very few of them ever actually set out to be profilers. I mean, who volunteers to crawl inside the minds of some of society’s most depraved individuals and tries to see the world the way that they see it? It’s not a pretty place and usually, the FBI picks profilers and analysts from agents who have a knack for the job, who see things a little differently than the others. But that’s not how I got the job.”

  Her eyes are wide as they search my face, but her voice and her hands are steady when she says, “You went after it. From the beginning.”

  Fuck. This is harder than I thought it would be and I never once imagined it would be anything less than excruciating. “I did, yes.”

  More silence as I try to form the words, try to force them out. But how do I say this? How do I just thrust it out into the open when I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to hide it?

  Veronica takes the choice out of my hands when she cups my face between her palms and looks deep into my eyes. “Tell me,” she says.

  And so I do, the words spilling out of me in fits and starts.

  “My brother is in prison in Texas, and has been for most of my adult life. He’s awaiting execution for three counts of first-degree murder. He’s committed more, they think, but those are the three they could actually get him for.”

  She stiffens against me as soon as I drop the bombshell. I wait for her to pull away, to walk away, but she doesn’t. So I give her a minute to assimilate and then I continue. “He killed three UT college students over a period of six months. All female. He kidnapped them, raped them, tortured them, and then killed them in the most inhumane ways possible.

  “He was good at it, too. I mean like, really good at destroying evidence and disposing of the bodies. It’s one of the reasons the authorities are so certain that he’s committed other murders. Because these ones were so clean it was hard to imagine this was his first time.”

  “But he got caught anyway.”

  “He did. But it was a fluke. The only reason they caught him at all was because there was a witness where there shouldn’t have been one at three in the morning and she saw him dumping the body of the third girl. She hid, but was smart enough to take a photo of his license plate as he drove away. There was no evidence on the body at all, nothing but that photograph to prove that he was connected to it all. But when they got the warrant and got to the house he was renting…he hadn’t had a chance to clean it up yet. It was a regular little shop of horrors.”

  I close my eyes, try not to remember what I saw when I looked up the case after joining the FBI. Because we were his family, they’d kept as much of the case evidence from us as they could. But once I was at Quantico, once I had access to the files, I hadn’t been able to stop myself from looking. And now those images are branded in my head, the coroner’s report of what Jason did to those girls written in indelible ink on my soul even all these years later. I’ve had years to come to grips with the fact that he did it, but knowing something’s true doesn’t always make it easier to accept. Sometimes it makes it harder, especially when the authorities looked at him for other murders in the years preceding his arrest—all of which fit his M.O. to a tee—but were never able to gather enough evidence to try him.

  “The FBI identified two other women they think he killed,” I tell Veronica, who is sitting so still in my arms that I’d think she’d turned to stone if I couldn’t still feel her breathing. “But when I was with them, I looked into a number of other unsolved cases that fit his general M.O., and found three more I’m almost positive were him, too. That’s eight women who died because of my brother. Eight women who suffered horribly, who probably hoped and prayed and pleaded to be saved from him. And five of them will never get justice. Five families will never know who did such terrible things to them.”

  “Did you tell the others—”

  “I did, yes. I sent the three cases I found to both my superiors in the FBI and to the local authorities, but none of those murders were in Texas. And since Texas had him dead to rights on a murder one–death penalty rap, the D.A. fought to keep him there. And I get it. I do. She wasn’t about to risk sending him somewhere else and having them hold on to him—especially since two of the states where he committed murder weren’t capital punishment states. They weren’t going to risk sending him anywhere that might be able to hold on to him and stall their death penalty conviction. So, the cases weren’t reopened and Jason was never tried. Instead, he’s sitting in Huntsville waiting for a lethal injection and I’m out here, trying…” I break off with a shake of my head, not sure what I want to say anymore. Not sure, even, what I’m trying to do.

  “You’re out here trying to make up for his crimes even though nothing he did was your fault.” Her voice is a little shaky, her pupils blown in shock. But the hands that hold me are steady.

  “He’s my brother. My older brother, but still my brother. And he was always a little off, always a little meaner than he had to be. We should have known, should have guessed what he was capable of and—”

  “How exactly were you supposed to do that?” she demands. “Were you working for the FBI when he committed those murders?”

  “No. He’s nine years older than I am. I was ten when he committed his first murder. Of course, we didn’t know it then. We wouldn’t know about it for almost ten more years.”

  “Just in time for you to change your college major and go into the FBI?”

  “Something like that, yeah.
” All the old memories are crowding in now and I shake my head in a futile attempt to clear it. “My parents didn’t get it. They couldn’t understand why I would want to have anything to do with the organization that arrested my brother. That helped convict him in a trial that would eventually end up taking his life, too. But it wasn’t the same for them, you know? They didn’t understand that I needed to understand. That I needed to figure out how he could go so wrong when…”

  “When you hadn’t, despite having the same genetics and background.”

  Fuck. I can’t believe how well she gets me. No one has ever gotten me like this before, just so instinctively. Like she can get inside my head as easily as I can get inside everyone else’s. Everyone’s, that is, but hers.

  “It wasn’t that I hadn’t,” I tell her as the anguish of those first few years boils up inside me. “It was that I was terrified that I would. I look just like him, you know. I mean, just like him. So much so that when we were young, people used to call me Jason’s mini-me. We had the same parents, the same genetics, the same upbringing. Fuck, for a long time we even had the same interests. And then he went and did all those things and I…I didn’t understand how he could do it. How he could be so sadistic, so evil, when we came from the same place. The same people. And there was a part of me that was terrified—that’s terrified still—that I have that same darkness in me, too. That if Jason can do these things, then maybe I’m capable of it as well.”

  “No.” Veronica grabs my shoulders, squeezes tight. “You aren’t.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “I do know that. And so do all the people you worked with. You were a behavior analyst for the FBI, for God’s sake. You worked with some of the best investigative minds in the world—and, I’m assuming, you also had fairly regular psychiatric testing. If they accepted that that wasn’t in you, then I think you need to do the same thing.”