I’m the fiend who seduces and corrupts.

With less than three hours till sunrise, I brought her instead to a place where she could hear her thoughts. She needs to assess the line between good and bad, right and wrong—or draw her own.

I place her on the vanity stool in the center of the marble room, leaving her only long enough to collect the supplies. One good thing about a hoarder’s house? It has more than one needs.

As I set a candle on the vanity top, she says, “You discovered the mine shaft the first day we were here.” Not quite an accusation.

“Technically,” I say, uncapping the disinfectant, “I only discovered the mine on a map. I found the cellar access to the mine this morning while you and the team of feds cataloged the library.”

She nods absently. She’s still partially under the influence of the Rohypnol Devyn used to subdue her, but her logical mind can’t stop analyzing, processing.

The digital mapping software the FBI use to search the town and surrounding area doesn’t incorporate the old mines that were sealed off nearly a hundred years ago. One shaft of the mine which leads right to Landry’s mansion, and that can be viewed on the old maps in the library. A convenient way to stay hidden for years. Devyn had her very own meditation cave for her and her higher men.

“You knew where to find them,” she says, referring to the victims, the accusation more assertive in her voice now.

“I knew where to look,” I admit. “Potentially.”

“You were prolonging the case.”

“Yes.” I set the rubbing alcohol on the floor and brace my hands on her thighs. “And I won’t feel bad about that. For wanting to be with you, to have more time. Those people are lost, but they don’t need to be found, Halen. You knew that at the ravine.”

She searches my face, trying to see past the mask of a killer in her pursuit for truth.

“Did you know it was Devyn?”

I hesitate. “No. Not for sure. I suspected everyone in this town, as I’m sure you did.”

She lowers her head, drawing the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Figuring it out sooner wouldn’t have changed the outcome.”

“Logically, probably not.” I grab the cloth. “But it would have prevented a deeper connection to her, that feeling of betrayal.”

She looks away, trying not to feel the hurt. “That’s enough.”

I make a sound of agreement. Then, rising to my feet, I head toward the clawfoot tub and twist the brass handle. Water pours from the faucet spout, and I wet the cloth before I switch the lever to the overhead shower and draw the opaque curtain closed.

When I kneel before her on the stool, I say, “Give me your arm.”

Halen delays, clearing her hair from her face, before she finally relents. “I’m not broken,” she says, thrusting her arm from beneath the blanket. “You don’t need to stitch me back together.”

Her words strike deeper than any physical wound, her anger a mix of regret and humility. She allowed herself to trust and was betrayed, but she lays the blame on herself.

“I don’t want to fix you,” I say, taking her wrist in hand, a deviant enticed by the feel of rope burn on her delicate skin. “My motivation to mend your wound is entirely selfish.”

Steam thickens the room, the flickering lowlight of the candle flame softening the darkness between us.

Her swallow drags along the fine column of her throat as I stretch out her arm. My gaze drops to the crude gash torn into her flesh. The first two words of the scripted tattoo have been bitten away, destroyed.

A burn hotter than the searing flames of the underworld coils my viscera.

“She wasn’t…herself.” The hardness in her tone tempers, her words meant to diffuse my climbing fury at the woman who Halen still feels a kinship with.

“She tried to eat you,” I remind her, finding her hazel eyes amid the faint lighting. “Devyn is intelligent. Despite the fact I may hold a mote of respect for her devotion to the teachers and not the hacks, she made a choice to blatantly misconstrue a dogma for her own selfish reasons.”

“Kallum…”

I take her weary use of my name as a request to drop the matter.

“Hmm.” With delicate pressure, I begin cleaning her wound. For now, I’ll give her the time she needs to find her balance. But my clemency is temporary.

Halen demanded I spare Alister in his office, and I obeyed without question, regardless of the fact I was seconds from tearing his still-beating heart from his chest. She couldn’t live with herself if I ended Devyn, so for my muse, I let the priestess live. I let her flee into the night, taking our secrets with her. She’s still a threat.

Anything my muse asks of me, I do willingly. That’s how the muse works, after all. We must surrender to it, our incarnate force of inspiration, our guiding intuition.

But there will be a moment to come when I can’t surrender. When the ask is too high, the sacrifice one I won’t be able to make.

While her thoughts churn deeper, keeping her mind busy, I use the damp cloth to sanitize the gashed flesh. Then I sterilize the needle in the open flame of the candle before I thread the eye, prepping to stitch her wound.

As the needle pierces her skin, I lift my eyes to measure her response to the pain. Her gaze snags on mine. “Nerve damage,” she explains. “From the car accident. I don’t feel much. There…”

I rest my fingers along her inner forearm as I suture. Like the scar tissue dulling her senses, she wants to mute her emotional pain. Devyn went for the hurt by impairing the armor Halen uses to shield her psychological wounds from herself.

Her rising desire to replace that hurt with physical pain practically strangles me, and I have to grit my teeth not to deliver on command.

“I received an email,” Halen says, blessing me with a distraction. “I had requested a copy of your juvenile file.”

Needle held over her arm, I bring my gaze to hers.

“I didn’t read the email,” she says. “I deleted it.”

I let the silence stretch as I begin the second stitch.

Halen inhales a sharp breath, her forearm tensing. “You said at the ravine that family are willfully ignorant, that they refuse to see how dangerous loved ones can be—”

“I got my eyes from my father,” I say, pulling the thread taut. “Heterochromia, a trait passed down. There’s nothing insightful to learn here, little Halen. Just an unoriginal story about a bastard with impossible expectations. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I felt relieved, knowing he wouldn’t be around much longer. That my mother would have peace, that I’d be free of his constant pressures to achieve, to be him. But then I realized…” I halt my actions to look into her beautiful face. “Every time I stared in the mirror, it was his eyes staring back.”

The spray of the shower hums in the quiet stillness of the room before she says, “How dangerous was he?”

I lower my gaze and begin the final stitch. “Dangerous enough that I didn’t want him able to see my mother in his last days…days spent in a toxic vacuum of his self-loathing and vile reprimands. Dangerous enough that I stabbed his eyes out with his twenty-four karat gold pen so he’d be buried without them, and I’d never have to see him in the mirror again.”

I tie off the stitch and lean down to snap the thread with my teeth, placing a kiss over the black stitches before I draw upright.

She tucks her arm under the blanket. “Thank you,” she says, her words holding a deeper meaning to my offered truth.

I nod once. “I told you, sweetness. All you ever have to do is ask. No need to waste resources.”

But she did, and her actions speak so much louder than her words. Despite her obsession to prove I’m her serial killer, she deleted potentially damning evidence to reaffirm her theories.

And she wants me to know.

“All right,” she says. “Now tell me everything else.”