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Logan wouldn’t knock.
Warily, I go to the peephole, and I spot a very distinguishable redhead with her back turned.
I open the door, wondering what she’s come to say this time. But when she turns, there are tears in her eyes.
She walks by me, shouldering her way in.
The burden of my secret is apparently weighing on her too much. Fuck.
I’m so close now.
Silently, I shut the door, and she takes a seat on the bed, while I lean against the door.
“Sixty-nine pictures and seventy nails,” she says, confusing me for a brief second. “Something tells me you’re not one to miscount.”
Realizing her meaning, I take a seat in the corner.
“This is about Ferguson?”
“I finally had the courage to look at the file today. I got up early to go in and look at it, then some things happened afterwards that we need to talk about. The point is, there were seventy nails and sixty-nine pictures. What’d you do with the other picture, Lana?”
My lips tense. She knows it was her picture I took. I don’t know how she’s going to react now.
“I burned it.”
“Why?” she asks without a flicker of emotion.
“Because the mind is a fragile thing. Your friends would have seen it; you’d have seen it too. It would have been the thing that broke you. Hearing it existed isn’t as critical as seeing yourself as that child who was exposed and vulnerable, then knowing proof existed all along. Hearing it is processed differently than seeing it. The mind is more delicate to sight than it is to sound. I didn’t want you broken. I didn’t want him winning from the grave. So I burned it.”
She wipes away the few tears that have managed to trickle down her face.
“I’m with you,” she says quietly. “Whatever you need, I’m with you.”
That…confuses me even more.
“Why?”
“Because a psychopath wouldn’t care about someone, who by my own admission, has made your plans so much more difficult. You show genuine compassion. It’s an obvious confliction with a psychopathic personality.”
“I have psychopathic tendencies, but I’m not a psychopath,” I say on a sigh. “I’ve told you this.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t believe it until I saw sixty-nine pictures and seventy nails. Now you have my trust that you’re really just someone who is avenging only the wrongs. And if anyone can relate to needing to kill the demons in the world that won’t die otherwise, I can.”
I blow out a weary breath, not realizing until this moment how much her indecision has been bearing down on me.
The string has been glued into place now, no longer threatening to be the unravelling of this entire thing.
“Then SSA Miller Johnson shows up today, as if more of a sign was needed.”
Just his name has my back stiffening, and she notices it.
“He covered this up, didn’t he?” she asks, ciphering my reaction too well.
“He did more than cover it up.”
“What else did you not tell me?”
“I told you everything that happened before. I didn’t tell you anything that happened after. You’ll need to learn it with the rest of your team.”
