For years, she’d imagined what it would be like to have a conversation with him. Even from her first glimpse of him as a child on the TV, she’d recognized something in his eyes. Her eyes had that same scarred look. The look of having experienced something so painful that it marked more than their bodies—it left gaping wounds on their souls. There was an unspoken solidarity in their shared pain.
But in all her fantasies of connecting with the only other person who knew firsthand the evils of Killion, she’d never once thought there’d be this much silence.
Obviously, it was going to be up to her to make the first move.
“You know”—she cleared her throat, trying to go for a friendly tone—“over the years I had thought about finding you. It always seemed like we had a bad bond of sorts. I just never did it because I didn’t know how you’d react.”
That got his attention. He raised his gaze to meet hers, the hard angles of his face easing just a bit.
He looked at the scar on her neck while he spoke. “I’d thought about the same thing.” His words were spoken with a tentative quality, as if he worried about her response. “But I always wondered if I would remind you of…” He didn’t say the name.
“You look similar to him on the surface, but I see beyond the surface to you.” She emphasized the word you. Wanted him to understand she didn’t equate him with his father. “You also look different to me somehow. Maybe it’s your eyes. Maybe it’s how you look at me. So different than he did.” She held her hand out to him. “Nice to meet you, Cain. I’m Mercy.”
One second. Two. Three. Four. Five… Finally he stepped toward her and grasped her hand in his. His grip was firm and dry, his skin rough and wonderful, his touch magnetic and hypnotizing. She got lost in the sensation of total connection. Of there being no boundaries between them, almost as if their skin, muscle, and bones had melded together into one—
He yanked his hand away from her so suddenly that hers was left out there in midair, still holding the shadow of where his had been. Something was wrong. She just didn’t know him well enough to understand.
He aimed his eyes toward the floor again. “You’ve been pretty sick. You went through the vomit stage. The fever stage. The drunk, flirty stage was my personal favorite.” A smile almost grabbed hold of his lips, but missed. “The crying stage.” He sucked in a breath and spoke while he exhaled. “The scared-of-me stage.”
The way he said those last words made him sound more like a little boy trying to be brave than six feet of hard-muscled male—who also happened to resemble a serial killer. His tone made her want to reach out to him and offer comfort, but he was so skittish with her that she didn’t dare.
“This”—he gestured with his head to indicate her and the cabin—“wasn’t my intention. It was all because of Liz. She—”
“Liz?” The nurse had always been the only staff member Mercy trusted. “How do you know Liz?”
“I know her from when I was a child.”
Of course. Killion had been the custodian at the Center, a fact Dr. Payne never allowed her to forget.
“We’ve kept in contact over the years. She’s my…” He stopped like he was searching for the right word. “Friend. Anyway, I’m a consultant for the FBI. Almost a week ago, I found a link between a current case and yours.”
It wasn’t like he’d suddenly started speaking a foreign language, but Mercy couldn’t quite wrap her mind around what he was saying. And he knew it. He’d stopped speaking, his gaze searching her face for…something she couldn’t name, something she didn’t understand.
She fought to find the words she needed to say. “Killion is in prison.” When she said the name, Cain flinched as if she’d slapped him.
“Yes, he is, but we still needed to speak with you.” Still, Cain wouldn’t look at her. Did she look that terrible?
She listened as he explained how MacNeil Anderson—she remembered him from all those years ago—had tried to talk with her, but Dr. Payne had denied him. So Cain had sought Liz’s go-around-the-rules help. “When Liz wheeled you out the door”—he shook his head—“it was pretty plain what Dr. Payne had done to you.”
As he told her all the ways Dr. Payne had hurt her, Mercy’s mind searched for some memory to attach to those events, but it kept coming up with a big, fat nothing. And yet she didn’t doubt Cain for a moment. Dr. Payne had been playing a game with her the entire time she’d been on Ward B. Because of her internal warning system, she’d always managed to stay one move ahead of him. Until he suddenly ended the game and she was the loser.
“So, I feel bad because of the withdrawals, the shock treatments, and Dr. Payne hitting me.” She was glad she couldn’t remember it.
“Yeah.”
Withdrawals. Shock treatments. Dr. Payne. She’d heard her own words, and suddenly they added up to one terrible question. Was Cain acting uneasy because he assumed her gray matter was malfunctioning? She’d spent the last two years of her life locked in a psychiatric facility. That didn’t happen to normal people. Not that she was perfectly normal, but she wasn’t batshit, bananas, or bonkers. But then Dr. Payne always told her that crazy people don’t know they were crazy. What did that asshole know?
“I’m not crazy. I didn’t belong in there.”
His brows dipped low over his beautiful eyes. “Never said you did.”
“Really. I’m not crazy. I don’t know how it happened, but someone did something to get me locked in there. I spent the first six months shouting about how I wasn’t nuts. Finally, I decided to change my strategy. Go along to get along. When in Rome and all that crap. I cooperated. I did every damned thing they asked of me, and still it wasn’t enough to get me out of there.”
“How did you end up in there?”
“No joke, the cops showed up, and right behind them were the men in white coats, and right behind them was Dr. Payne.”
“Why was he there the day they took you? Had you met him before then?”
“I’d never seen him before in my life.”