If I hadn’t interrupted, you would have beaten your hands raw. That knowledge spurred me into action. A minute later, I was back with a clean towel and a basin of water.
“Sit,” I said. When Dean didn’t move, I fixed him with a look and repeated the order. Physically, I resembled my mother, but when given proper motivation, I could do a decent impression of my paternal grandmother. A person butted heads with Nonna at his or her own risk.
Taking in the stubborn set of my jaw, Dean sat down on the workout bench. He held out his hand for the towel. I ignored him and knelt, dipping the towel into the water.
“Hand,” I said.
“Cassie—”
“Hand,” I repeated. I felt him ready to refuse, but somehow, his hand found its way to mine. Slowly, I turned it over. Carefully, gingerly, I cleaned the blood from his knuckles, coaxing the towel along sinew and bone. The water was lukewarm, but heat spread through my body as my thumb trailed lightly over his skin.
I put down his left hand and started in on the right. Neither of us said anything. I didn’t even look at him. I kept my eyes fixed on his fingers, his knuckles, the scar that ran along the length of his thumb.
“I hurt you.” Dean broke the silence. I could feel the moment slipping away. I wanted it back, so ferociously it surprised me.
I don’t want to want this. I wanted everything to stay the same. I could do this. I’d been doing this. Nothing had to change.
I put Dean’s hand down. “You didn’t hurt me,” I told him firmly. “You grabbed my wrist.” I pushed up my sleeve and brandished my right arm as proof. Next to his tan, my skin was almost unbearably fair. “No marks. No bruises. Nothing. I’m fine.”
“You were lucky,” Dean said. “I was…somewhere else.”
“I know.” The night before, when Agent Sterling’s arrival had sent me into a tailspin, he’d been the one to break the hold that somewhere else had on me. Dean held my gaze for a moment, and understanding flickered in his eyes.
“You blame yourself for what happened with Agent Locke.” Dean was a profiler, the same as me. He could climb into my head as easily as I could climb into his. “To the girls Locke killed, to Michael, to me.”
I didn’t reply.
“It wasn’t your fault, Cassie. You couldn’t have known.” Opposite me, Dean swallowed hard. My eyes traced the movement of his Adam’s apple. His lips parted, and he spoke. “My father made me watch.”
Those whispered words carried the power of a gunshot, but I didn’t react. If I said anything, if I breathed, if I so much as moved, Dean would clam up again.
“I found out what he was doing, and he made me watch.”
What were we doing, trading secrets? Trading guilt? What he’d just told me was so much bigger than anything I could have told him. He was drowning, and I didn’t know how to pull him out. The two of us sat there in silence, him on the workout bench, me on the floor. I wanted to touch him, but I didn’t. I wanted to tell him it would be okay, but I didn’t. I pictured the girl we’d seen on the news.
The dead girl.
Dean could whale away on a punching bag until the skin on his knuckles was gone. We could trade confessions that no one should ever have to make. But none of that could change the fact that Dean wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep until this case was closed—and neither would I.
The next morning, after tossing and turning most of the night, I woke to find a face hovering three inches above my own. I jerked backward in bed, and Sloane blinked at me.
“Hypothetically speaking,” she said, as if it were perfectly normal to bend over a bed and stare at someone until they woke up, “would constructing a model of the crime scene we saw on the video yesterday qualify as intruding on Dean’s space?”
I opened my mouth to tell Sloane that she was intruding on my space, but then processed her question. “Hypothetically speaking,” I said, stifling a yawn and sitting up in bed, “have you already reconstructed the crime scene in question?”
“That is a definite possibility.” Her hair was tousled and sticking up at odd angles. There were dark circles under her eyes.
“Did you sleep at all last night?” I asked her.
“I was trying to figure out how the killer managed to pose the girl’s body without being seen,” Sloane said, which both was and wasn’t an answer to my question. When Sloane got absorbed in something, the rest of the world ceased to exist. “I have a theory.”
She tugged on the ends of her white-blond hair. I could practically see her waiting for me to snap at her, to tell her that she was handling the situation with Dean wrong. She knew she was different from other people, and I was realizing, bit by bit, that somewhere along the line, someone—or maybe multiple someones—had conditioned her to believe that different, her kind of different, was wrong.
“Let me get dressed,” I told her. “Then you can tell me your theory.”