Her words gave him pause.“Maybe you’ll tell me about your nightmares one day soon.”
She stared at him.
Right.Today was not the day to hear her nightmares.He turned away.“Scream if you need me.I truly will come running.”His hand reached for the door.
“Thank you, Atlas.”
His hand hung in the air.
“If I’d gone back to my home by myself and found that destruction…” Her words trailed away.
What if you’d gone there without me and found that prick waiting for you?“He knows who you are, Lily.”Growled.“He knows where you live.”
“It’s more than that.He knows about my research.He has my files.”
Now Atlas glanced back at her.“Files on me.”
“On you, on at least a dozen adult children of serial killers and…” An exhale.“The locations of those individuals are listed in files.The crimes of their parents and, um….”She bit her lower lip.
He waited even as exhaustion pulled at him.His body ached in a million places.Pain he hadn’t noticed when he was touching her.Kissing her.
“For some of them, I suspected that they might be tied to current…incidents.I just didn’t have enough evidence to completely prove those suspicions yet.”
Yeah, he’d rather thought that might be the case.Lily believed some of her would-be subjects had followed in the footsteps of their parents and become killers.“Like me, huh?Like when you suspected I might be the one killing in Dallas?”
A nod.
“We’ll deal with it,” he said, because they would.“After we’ve slept, we’ve eaten, and I don’t feel like a human punching bag any longer.”
Another nod.“Thank you.”Soft.
Ah, she should not thank him.Being with him would probably turn out to be a disaster for her.He looked away and reached for the doorknob.
“In my nightmares…” Lily’s voice drifted to him.“I’m dying.I can feel the darkness reaching out to swallow me whole.”
He exhaled.“In my nightmares…” His spine straightened.“I am the darkness.”And death was all around him.
But that wasn’t just the case in his nightmares.It was like that in his real life, too.
I am the darkness.He’d been carrying the weight of evil on his shoulders his entire life.
ChapterTwelve
Lily crepttoward Atlas’s bedroom.She’d slept for an hour.It had been a fitful sleep.Unease kept pulling at her.She’d told Dr.Owen that she would keep an eye on Atlas.She had to check on him.
His door was unlocked.She turned the knob and slipped inside.
Darkness.
His curtains were drawn over the windows.Had to be those heavy, blackout curtains because no light at all drifted into the bedroom.The guest room had been the same way, and that darkness had enveloped her.
But worry had stopped her from sleeping too deeply.
She tiptoed toward the bed.Her eyes had adjusted to the dark, and she could see his heavy form in the middle of the bed, and she?—
“Decided not to wait the full forty-eight hours, huh?”
Lily froze.“I was…checking on you.”
