"The warehouse and rehabilitation center were just conditioning phases," Shaw continues with obvious academic pride. "Designed to separate you and Delilah, to force you both to confront your authentic selves individually. But the real question that will revolutionize criminal psychology is this: what happens when two killers who love each other are reunited under extreme pressure?"
"You're insane," I say, but Shaw's laugh suggests she finds my assessment irrelevant.
"I'm methodical. You have exactly eighteen minutes to reach 1247 Oakmont Drive before the failsafes I've installed in Ms. Morgan's restraints activate. Delilah is already en route—she solved her puzzle faster than anticipated. Quite impressive, really."
The line goes dead, leaving Janine and me alone in the abandoned therapy room.
Cold understanding floods through me as Shaw's real plan becomes clear. This was never about forcing Lila to choose between Janine and Aliyah. This was about separating us, getting me away from Lila so Shaw could orchestrate whatever final confrontation she's been planning for nine years.
Shaw wanted me here, at this location, playing her psychological games while Lila walked into the real trap at the warehouse.
I pull out my phone with shaking hands, Janine leaning against me for support as we move toward the exit.
The call goes straight to voicemail.
"Fuck," I breathe, then try again. Still voicemail.
Janine sees my expression, and her face goes pale. "She's in trouble."
"She's walking into whatever Shaw's real experiment is," I confirm, already calculating drive times and tactical possibilities. "We need to get to the warehouse now."
We make it to my truck without encountering Shaw again, though I can feel her watching from somewhere in the abandoned building through cameras that are likely rigged to be all over the fucking place. She'll regroup, adapt her plans, find another way to get her research data. But right now, stopping whatever she has planned for Lila takes priority over eliminating Shaw permanently.
Janine buckles herself into the passenger seat with movements that speak to pain and exhaustion, but her voice carries steady determination when she speaks. The revelation about Lila's past—the letters, the gratitude for murder, the years of correspondence with a killer—should have broken something fundamental in their relationship. Instead, she seems to have processed the information and reached some kind of acceptance I wasn't expecting.
"She told me things," Janine says as I start the engine and pull away from the rehabilitation center. "About Lila, about what she did when her father died. About the letters you two exchanged, the connection you formed, the way she helped you that night."
I wait for condemnation, for horror, for the normal human reaction to learning that someone you love has been hiding a relationship with a serial killer. Instead, Janine continues with surprising calm.
"Shaw wanted me to be disgusted," she says, watching the abandoned buildings blur past as we accelerate toward the warehouse district. "She kept emphasizing the details she thought would horrify me most—that Lila thanked you for killing Harry, that she helped position the body, that she wrote to you for years afterward. Shaw thought those revelations would destroy my love for Lila, would make me see her as irredeemably damaged."
"And?"
"And she fundamentally misunderstood the nature of love," Janine replies, her voice growing stronger. "Shaw sees pathology where there's actually survival. She sees moral corruption where there's someone finding the only way to heal from trauma that would have destroyed most people."
The acceptance in her voice surprises me, though I realize it shouldn't. Janine spent her career working with people society had written off—addicts, abuse survivors, individuals whose responses to trauma didn't fit neat psychological categories. She understands better than most that healing sometimes looks different than expected.
"I need you to know that it doesn't change anything," she continues, meeting my eyes across the center console. "What she became, what you helped her become, what you two found together—it doesn't change the fact that she's my family and I love her."
"Shaw was wrong about something fundamental," Janine adds after a moment of silence. "She thinks violence defines people, that capacity for killing is the most important thing about someone's character. But she's never seen Lila comfort a victim, never watched her fight for justice through legal channels, never witnessed the compassion she brings to her work every single day."
"She's more than what Shaw thinks she is," I agree, pushing the truck harder as we race toward whatever trap is waiting at the warehouse. The speedometer climbs past reasonable limits, but reasonable stopped mattering the moment Shaw decided to make this personal.
"So are you," Janine says quietly, and there's something in her voice that makes me glance over at her. "And when we get there, when we find them, I need you to be exactly what Shaw thinks you are. Not for her research, but to save my girls."
I understand what she's asking—permission to stop pretending to be reformed, authorization to become the Carver again if that's what it takes to keep Lila alive. It's a gift I never expected from someone who should be horrified by what I represent.
"Shaw made one critical error in her research," I tell Janine as the warehouse district comes into view. "She studied us individually, documented our separate psychological profiles, built theories about how we respond to isolation and pressure. But she has no data on what we become when we work together."
"What do you become?"
"Something she's not prepared for," I say, and pull into the shadow of the Mackenzie Warehouse complex, where somewhere in that maze of converted industrial space, the woman I love is facing whatever Shaw's real experiment turns out to be.
And Dr. Evelyn Shaw is about to discover what happens when someone threatens the only person I've ever loved enough to kill for.
Chapter 31 - Lila
The Mackenzie Warehouse squats against the twilight sky like a monument to abandoned dreams, five stories of red brick and steel that speak to an era when this city made things with its hands instead of shuffling paper and manipulating data. I park my BMW in the shadow of a loading dock, the engine ticking as it cools, and study the building that once housed Aliyah's artistic ambitions.
