A brief smile touched his lips, and he covered her smal , warm hands with his. “He was on a kind of antidepressant that caused impotence. Al the pieces fit. We thought we had our guy.”
“You didn’t.” The words came out a whisper, and a tiny shiver went through her.
“No.” He snorted. In retrospect, he should have seen it, should have understood the case would get personal when he couldn’t get a clear precog read on anything. “Instead, we just pissed the real kil er off by giving credit to someone else.”
She didn’t ask how this related to his wife, but he could feel her going rigid behind him, knew she’d already guessed what had happened to Laura. Bile burned the back of his throat, threatening to choke him.
Cold spread through him, freezing around his heart. Gods, he didn’t know if he could say it. Didn’t know if he could force out the words he’d never said to anyone. So he told her about his wife, instead of what had ended her life. That much, at least, he could manage.
“Laura, she was a Fae artist, you know? She had that stereotypical flakiness. Hel , she owned it, played it up. Frustrated the hel out of me, sometimes, but that was just her.” A sigh eased out of him. They’d been so young, so damn sure of themselves. “She forgot to set the warding spel s on the house. Wasn’t the first time.” And he’d given her hel about it every time, but Laura was Laura was Laura. She’d apologized, promised to remember, and then a week or two would go by and he’d come home to an unprotected house.
He was silent so long, lost in his own thoughts, that he jerked when Chloe spoke. “Who did it if it wasn’t the guy you arrested?”
“His twin sister. That was how he’d known about the crime scenes. She told him.”
“A woman did that? To other women?” Her palms flattened against his stomach, and he could feel the deep breath she dragged into her lungs. He heard the trained medical professional in her voice next. “That’s a fairly rare psychopathic trait to find in women.”
He nodded even though he doubted she could see it. “They were both abused as kids by their father.
Seriously abused. Sexual y. With wands, among other things.”
“Oh, gods.” Horrified woman washed the doctor away, and she wedged herself even closer to his back.
“I came home and . . . found Laura like that.” His bel y heaved as the memories he’d have given anything to burn from his mind assaulted him in vivid, gruesome succession. The wand had stil been inside her, a knife from a set her parents had given them for a wedding present protruding from her chest, her eyes blank, and her face waxen. He’d slipped in the ocean of blood around her, fal en in it before he’d reached her side. His mind had known she was gone, but he’d stil radioed for an ambulance, praying someone could undo what had been done, that somehow the awful metal ic stench of blood would be gone and she’d be there, smiling at him and tel ing him she’d burned dinner so it was Chinese takeout again. “We’d only been married five months, and it was over. I lost her.”
“And you blamed yourself.” The soft sob was almost his undoing, and he jerked away, every muscle in his body shaking. She came around him anyway, took his face in her hands. Like him, she wouldn’t let him run away. She blinked back tears and searched his face. “You stil do. Blame yourself. Your clairvoyance. For not seeing what was coming, for not saving her.”
He choked on a breath, but met her eyes and told the truth. “Yes.”
“It wasn’t your fault.” Her fingers stroked over his jaw, and he wanted to lean closer, wanted to rip himself away from the tenderness that was so absent from his life.
Words, the ugly, vicious truth, wrenched from his gut. “She died because of my case, because she was my wife, because I couldn’t see to save her. ”
“You can’t save everyone, Merek.” A wealth of sympathy, of understanding, fil ed her eyes. The knowledge of a woman who could have saved her mother if she’d possessed the skil s she did now. “When it’s time for someone to go, it’s time.”
“No. No, that’s not always true.” He couldn’t al ow himself so easy an excuse. Hadn’t he wanted to? Hadn’t he tried? But he’d been through this in his mind so many times, and then had forced himself to bury it deep inside and move on before he drove himself mad. “There are a lot of possibilities for when people’s lives are over. That’s what I see most of the time when I look into the future. The past is solid; the present is always in flux while people are making decisions, but the future is al possibilities. Roads people can take, choices people can make. If I had known what was coming, if I had made different choices, maybe it would have been a later possibility for their deaths.”
Her inky brows lifted. “Their deaths?”
A harsh chortle crackled from his chest. “Al those people I couldn’t see? My parents, my best friend, my wife? They’re dead. A murder, a car accident, a mugging gone wrong. All of them died. Horribly, unnecessarily.”
And he’d never let anyone that close ever again. Until now, until he’d had no choice. Until the alternative had been worse than letting someone in.
“You’re never going to know that for sure. You can’t torture yourself for being human. You’re not a god, no matter how powerful your abilities are.” She slid her arms around him and pressed her nose to his chest, squeezed him tight. “You’re not Superman, remember?”
He laughed, hot moisture stinging the backs of his eyes. He rubbed his hand over them until he knew he wouldn’t embarrass the hel out of himself. “Yeah. I know.”
Sliding out of his arms, she took his hand and tugged him into the bedroom. He fol owed without protest, too drained to deal with anything else. Some of the weight on his chest had shifted, the ice cracking, just from tel ing her the truth. He pul ed in a deep breath, stood placid while she undressed them both and urged him into bed.
She settled against him, hooked her leg over his thigh, and sighed. “You know, you had that same look on your face the night I met you.”
He grunted, pul ed her closer. “What look?”
“That stony-faced, the-world-fucking-sucks-ass look.” She kissed his chest. “The one you got when you watched Alex and me tonight. Same expression.”
The night he’d met her came back with perfect clarity. When he thought about it, he usual y focused on how it ended, not how it began. He blinked the grit from his eyes. “That about sums up that day, yeah.”
“Why?” She leaned up a little, propped her chin on his chest to meet his gaze.
Trailing his fingers over her silky hip, he let himself be distracted for just a moment, let himself savor the feel of her. Then he dragged in a breath, smel ed her sweetness. “You know how I said Selina’s fate fuzzes in and out for me? Sometimes I see it and sometimes I don’t?”
More understanding and empathy than he could ever deserve shone in her eyes, though she looked as tired as he felt. “What did you see about her? How bad was it?”
“I saw her death.” His shoulder jerked in a shrug. Seeing death was just a part of his reality, as a clairvoyant and as a cop. It was tougher with people he knew, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
“It’s going to be bloody and ugly and just as gruesome as—”
Laura’s. He didn’t say it out loud, but Chloe knew what he meant. It was a relief that someone knew; just the tel ing, the sharing had helped ease some of the oppressive weight of failure and guilt inside him.
He cleared his throat. “It’l happen soon, within the next year.” He’d seen it that day, and had gone to a bar to rinse the bitterness of it away. Instead, Chloe had walked in before he’d finished his first beer.