(Blood and Bone, #2) Sin and Swoon (5 page)

If someone tampers with that, they can change the entire outcome, including the patient’s experience.

“Where’s Dash?” I ask again in my croaking voice.

She pauses. “What the bloody hell are you on about?”

“Dash!” I shout with my croaking voice.

The door opens, revealing his worried gray-green eyes. “Jane?”

“What did you do?”

He blushes, and I can see the guilt all over his face.

I glance over at the wall of two-way mirrors and manage to speak about the facts I have gleaned thus far. “The bad guy might be a professor, but I suspect he was never her teacher. The man we are looking for could be a teacher at the university in Seattle—start there. Literature maybe. Or associated with the lit department.” I turn back, glaring at Dash. “You messed with something. You made a change in my story. Your face flashed, and one second you were Rory and the next you were you. I made up a lie in her mind to cover, but she could close up on me if she gets scared.”

He winces—so subtle that I barely catch it. He licks his lips, and I see the guilt everywhere, plastered across him. Even the way he leans against the door frame and nods at Angie, like he’s dismissing her, lacks all of his usual confidence. She hurries out, shooting me a look and brushing past him. I struggle with the strength in me coming back after a fifteen-minute slumber that felt like days.

“I didn’t—”

“Don’t lie.” I climb off the bed and stagger to him. “I have a setup. I have a way it goes. I let her lead me, and this made it more like it was me leading her.”

He wrinkles his nose. “I didn’t think it was a big deal. I hate being the bad guy. You make me the bad guy every time. I hate it. In your mind I have raped and killed and been a full-fledged psychotic. Imagine if I made
you
some kind of evil in my mind?” He offers a soft look. “I don’t want your subconscious to see me, your future husband, as a murderer or a pedophile or a serial killer. I don’t want to be that in your head.” His eyes lower to the floor. “Or your heart.”

I wince too, far more annoyed that he knows the secret to my success. It’s as if he’s seen behind the curtain. He’s seen the friggin’ wizard. In a tone that expresses the level of my annoyance, I mutter, “You’ve basically wasted my time. Now I have to go back in and try to convince her that everything is normal in her changing mind. If she panics, she shuts it down. Not to mention, she isn’t exactly getting healthier here. She needs to go back to the hospital.”

“We have a better medical team here than any hospital. She’s fine.” He sighs. “Pick someone else to do the dirty work.”

“No. How did you even do it?”

He grins. “I didn’t.”

“How?” I growl.

“Changed the recording.” He chuckles like it’s nothing, but we both know it’s something.

I nod. “I gathered, jackass. When I woke to your voice in my head, I knew instantly the recording was changed and it was your fault, but how did you change my plans and her visions at the same time?”

He clears his throat and glances at the girl on the bed next to mine. “Changed both of your recordings to a different repetition. For you we read the triggers and the hints you knew, describing the scenery and campus and city, just like we always do. But then we added Rory’s name in like a subliminal message the way you do with mine. It switches between me reading and Rory reading to confuse you. In the part where you describe him, I described Rory. It works every time to get you into the person’s mind and to ensure they open up to you. So I figured, why not subliminal messages to you to pick a different bad guy? I thought about using a random guy you don’t even know, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to send you in blind. Then you could panic inside of her. But when we started making the new recording, Rory volunteered. It was a subtle change, my description for Rory’s. It didn’t seem like a big deal.”

“Messing with my head isn’t the big deal. But you said you messed with her recording, the one that has soft sounds and makes my voice a comfort and lets her relax and let me in? You know better than I do that her recording is the key. Hers lets me in and makes her trust me. She has to hear my voice, hear me speaking and describing myself, so when I get inside of her mind I am a familiar face.” I squeeze my eyes shut. “You changed the words to change my plans, but really all you did was show her new faces to pin the crime on. I have to be able to see who she’s trying to show me, which is why I use your face. For me it’s the constant. Rory is always a brother or a side story. I need her to show me the bad guy. And guess what, genius? She doesn’t want to see his face. She doesn’t want to let me see. Can’t you imagine why?”

“I know, Jane. I taught you all of this. One face isn’t a big change. It’s a very minor change—just so that the man you would love wouldn’t be the man who took Ashley. I wanted it to be that maybe I would be the hero who saved you.” A slight smile twitches on his lips.

“You wanted to be the hero?” The words leave my lips in a breathless tone that mocks him, even though his words are sort of sweet.

“I did.” He glances down, folding his arms. “I hate that I’m always the bad guy. I’ve read through the files, the other seven mind runs you did. I am always the bad guy.”

I bite my lips, completely scared of what I am about to say. In a moment of clarity and possibly hand-of-God action, I pause and stare at the wall of mirrors before us. “Can we take a quick walk?”

He sighs and makes for the door. I can see he wants to say more, but he doesn’t. He saunters through, sulking almost. It’s the strangest experience for me, but I honestly fear the things he thinks of me. Not that I haven’t spent my entire life wondering and worrying what people think, but with him it’s everything. He does normal things like reads the paper while he eats or sorts the contents of our house, which I notice are rapidly growing since he moved in with me. Everything is expanding, creating clutter in our house as we become a couple—a thing—an entity. I try to look busy like he does, wiping counters and sorting papers, but I don’t know how to look busy and yet still watch him for his reactions to things. Every move he makes is natural. Where my movements are deliberate. I copy him and others like a sociopath might. Because regardless of always making him the bad guy, I am the one most likely to be a psycho, I am the one who is detached and damaged. He is the epitome of normal.

Following him out into the hall feels natural, as does the annoyance in his meddling in my run through her mind. But the part that feels forced is wanting to talk about why he can’t interfere with my mind run.

I don’t want to talk about it, but I have to. Even if it will embarrass me.

He folds his arms, cocks an eyebrow, and clenches his jaw. He has no idea how hot I think his annoyed face is. It brings a girlish smile to my lips, making me immediately feel like a schoolgirl. “Why do you always make me be the bad guy? Are you unhappy?”

And there it is. The difference between us. He can just ask, but I can’t just answer.

“Do you want me to be a bad guy? Do you want us to fight more?”

I grimace, wishing the words would just fall out. I’m not the simpering mess he makes me. “No.” How do I explain without sounding like a sissy?

“What then? Why can’t you just use a random guy as the bad guy?” His tone is impatient, which somehow always makes me feel like a child.

“I need to be safe when I’m in there.” It’s the best I have for an explanation. “The people in their heads are what nightmares are made of, but it is impossible for me to have a nightmare with you as the bad person.”

He pauses, stopping himself from saying whatever he was about to. The answer pleases him. I can see the look on his face. “Safe?”

“You are the safe bad guy. If you’re him, I’m not scared, not truly. Not in my heart. You could do anything, and I would never be scared. Except maybe leave, I suppose. If you left me I would be scared.”

“Leave? Are you crazy?” He melts as every one of his muscles loses its tension. “So you want me to be the bad guy to keep you safe in there?”

I nod, hating that I’ve shown him this piece of it all, but loving the smile that’s spreading across his lips. “So you want us to be the way we are? We don’t have to change it up? You aren’t bored? You don’t want me to be a bad guy?”

“Of course not.” I shake my head slowly, unsure of the reaction.
Is he mocking me? Or is he high?
Clearly he hasn’t ever thought about what it’s like for a girl to meet a guy like him. I could never be bored, except when I take the job with the profiling section, but that won’t ever be about him.

He scoops me up, pressing my lips against his. I sigh into the kiss, wishing we could stay here, but knowing I have to have the answer. I need the happy ending. I need to know why and who and where. His tongue lazily slips into my mouth as his hand lowers, gripping my butt cheek. “Tell me.”

I have to close my eyes to say it, because it’s like wishing when you blow out a candle; if you peek, the wish is broken. “I love you.”

Dash smiles, changing the way his lips sit against mine. “I love you more.”

I smile back, scared of the thing I’m about to say. “Except I made you the safe guy way before we ever dated. So clearly, I love you more, Benjamin Dash.”

He shakes his head. “See you after?”

“Yup.” We kiss once more before he puts me down. I turn, waving backward and stalking back into the room where the small girl is slumbering after being brought in with severe hypothermia and more broken bones than anyone would think they had in their body. What a way to spend Thanksgiving weekend, dying in a medical lab while being experimented on.

I climb back onto the table as Angie comes hurrying back in. “I need ya to focus, Jane. This is going to be a quick reinsertion. A third time in the same girl is unheard of.” She leans forward, whispering, “And between me and you, we don’t think she’s going to make it. She’s being switched to life support. Her brain activity flashes only when yer in there. She’s a vegetable, and I don’t know how easy it’s going to be to go rooting around in a dying girl.”

I give her a look. “You know it feels different this time. Like I know too much going in. So maybe it’s that she’s brain-dead, and I’m just making up the story.”

She turns back to the large mirror where everyone is watching. “Right, and I suppose having a jackarse mess with the recording because his moronic friend pointed out he’s always the bad guy doesn’t help. Does it?”

“Rory brought that to Dash’s attention?” I whisper and shake my head, looking at the glass. I’m sure my face betrays the fact I don’t understand what she means, I don’t understand why he would do that to me, he’s my partner.

She rolls her eyes. “Och, ya dinna think that Dr. Charming found that information all on his own, did ya?” She leans in, whispering so they can’t hear us. “I’ll whip Rory later for ya. He’s really just a meddling old woman in that sexy body of his.” She winks and attaches the monitors to my chest and head. “Must be some of that Irish treachery brewing in those veins.”

I swallow hard. “Why would he do that? He was the only person who knew everything.”

“Welp, I imagine he thinks he was trying to help, doesn’t want ya two to break up. Says he’s never seen either of ya so happy. Not sure what he would know on the subject, scowling bastard.”

A nervous smile crosses my lips as I lie back, wishing he’d keep his greasy paws off my damned records, but at least Dash knows the truth of it. Something Rory and his snooping won’t find in my records. I never wrote down why I made my bad guy the way I did. No one knows that Dash makes me feel safe. Well, except for Dash, thank God. The odd bit of vulnerability with him isn’t so horrid.

I close my eyes, giving a loud sigh.

5. Professor Charming

 T
he cold air stings a bit on my nose, not frosty but windy and bitter. I close the window to suffer through the smell of hairspray in the dorm. I hate the coastline. I prefer to be inland, where the wind has less of the damp ocean in it. The cold salt water makes the very worst wind I’ve ever felt.

“You meeting him after class?” Angie asks from her bed, where she’s curling her red ringlets.

I sigh, not sure of the answer. “I guess. He’s sort of asked me to go away for the weekend.”

Her jaw drops. “What?”

I nod. “He’s got a cabin or something, a family vacation spot. It’s a few hours from here, rugged and romantic, apparently.”

“Then what’s the problem?” She gives me a dubious look.

“Something I can’t shake. He’s just
too
awesome. He speaks slowly, with purpose, and enunciates every word. He’s handsome in a way that makes me sweat. He’s sweet, he cares about everything I say, and remembers every tiny detail.” My eyes lower. “It’s like he isn’t real. He hasn’t even tried anything with me. He’s always a gentleman. We’ve been on like ten dates and only kissed.”

She scoffs. “Och, this is the honeymoon. All men are on their best behavior for the first year. It goes to shite then. Then it’s a quick shag and they got one eye on the football game while they do it.”

A laugh and a snort slip from my lips. “It just feels like too much for eighteen, don’t you think? He’s overwhelming for someone like me.”