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Kilkenny huffed out a breath. “I’m too rusty.”
“I can wait.”
“It might be a while,” Kilkenny said. “Maybe not tonight.”
“I can wait,” Raisa repeated.
They sat in silence for a while before Kilkenny shifted toward her, his eyes clear and sharp now. She braced herself.
“You’re keeping something from me.”
He was probably right, but Raisa couldn’t for the life of her remember what it was. “What?”
“I don’t know how I know with you,” Kilkenny admitted. “We haven’t worked together enough for me to tell. But you’re keeping something from me.”
She squinted at him for a minute before it hit her, and she almost laughed. “Oh, Jesus. Right. I brought Delaney in on all this.”
“Delaney,” Kilkenny said, his voice completely neutral, not judgmental at all. He felt fonder toward Delaney than Raisa did, though. Or was at least more understanding.
“If we have a second killer, which we both agree, yes we do?” Raisa asked, checking in. He nodded. “Then it’s weird that they only killed three times. Delaney’s looking for patterns.”
“Patterns and logic,” Kilkenny murmured, like it was an inside joke. “You trust her?”
“Enough.”
“You weren’t doing well with it,” Kilkenny pointed out. “Everything.”
That was a gentle understatement. Raisa thought back to what she’d been forced to tell Isabel.
Do you have nightmares about me?
Most nights.
She thought of the list Kilkenny had sent her of therapists who could help her work through the trauma of her entire life being upended. She hadn’t wanted to talk to any of them, but this wasn’t Kilkenny the psychologist asking.
This was Kilkenny the friend.
And turnabout was fair play. She’d just spent a half hour pressing on his bruises; she couldn’t balk when he did the same back.
Raisa said, “Yeah, well, when your sister turns out to be a psychopath serial killer, and your other sister turns out to be someone who aids and abets said serial killer ... well, you have to start to wonder about yourself.”
“Do you come down on the nature side of psychology?” Kilkenny asked. “Your life didn’t shape you at all, or not enough to win out against blood?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know,” Raisa said. She didn’t want to think she was someone who believed there were those who were born to be serial killers. Or born to be evil. But ... maybe she was. “It’s terrifying, though. Looking at the sliding-door image of yourself, of what you could have become under different circumstances. To know that’s within you, only a traumatic life event from being unlocked. And itwasn’t just my sisters—from what it sounds like, my brother wasn’t exactly proving the theory wrong, either.”
Her brother hadn’t been the one to kill their parents, like everyone had thought for twenty-five years, but in his short sixteen years, he’d left other kinds of victims behind.
“But none of them are sliding-door images of you,” Kilkenny pointed out. “They’re their own people.”
Raisa nodded not because she believed it but because she wanted him to think she did. “When do you think it happens? That point of no return? What age was it that Isabel and Delaney and Alex became what they were going to become? What moment?”
Kilkenny shook his head. “If we knew that ...”
“Right. We might not be here today, talking about Nathaniel Conrad,” Raisa said. “Do you think he would have turned out any differently if his father hadn’t poisoned his whole family?”
“No,” Kilkenny said. “I think he’s wired to be evil and nothing could have stopped him.”
That was not the Kilkenny she knew. He was an optimist. He believed in the good in people, even when he saw the monstrous in them day in and day out. “Nothing?”