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Dinah

I don’t know how to fix this. The look in his eyes .

.. it isn’t a part of my husband I’ve ever seen.

This isn’t Joe. This is a man without a soul, one fueled by rage and hurt.

I did that to him. I pushed him to this place, one where he screams at me as if I am a misbehaving child.

My cheek is still stinging from his slap.

For a decade, he’s never so much as grabbed me too tightly, much less put his hands on me like that.

I may have misjudged my husband, and discovering that while you are handcuffed to a chair is far from ideal.

Throughout all my years searching for and researching missing and dead women, there have been countless times where I have scoffed at their stupidity.

For staying with an abusive partner, for choosing a high-risk path when there were safer options, for not seeing a murderer until they had their knife in her gut.

All that time on the intellectual high road, and yet here I am, a prisoner stupid enough to think I can sweet-talk my way out of this. Maybe I can. But maybe I can’t. I need a plan B, just in case.

“I know you’re mad at me,” I say quietly, hoping to lower the volume of his emotion. “But we can fight about this after we figure out how to get me back to the station before Natalie raises the alarm.”

“Fuck Natalie,” he says, and a bit of his spittle lands on my cheek.

“If we fuck Natalie, we fuck everything we’ve built,” I say evenly.

He might be crazy right now, but he is not stupid.

Implementation plans and cover stories are his specialty, building narratives and red herrings his favorite hobby, followed closely by the anticipation and advance solving of problems. “This isn’t a coworker; this is the chief of the LAPD, Joe.

” I will him to think, to understand what I’m saying.

I don’t know where my soulmate is, but he has to come up for breath at some point.

“Why didn’t you tell me when we met?” he asks, and there’s a fracture in his voice, a crack in the anger, one that reveals the deep pool of hurt underneath.

Because I would have looked like damaged goods.

It’s the truth that I can’t admit. My pride is too great for that.

Not just my pride—my fear. My fear that saying it will cause it to become true.

Maybe he already sees me as that, but if not now, putting that thought into his head will cause it to stick.

I’d rather him be mad at me over uninterested.

I’ve always been a prize in his eyes. To fall from that height might kill me.

“Answer me,” he grits out, and when he pushes off my wrists, it feels like the small bones in the left one crack. I yelp, but he doesn’t react, crossing his arms in front of him and waiting for a response.

Why didn’t you tell me when we met? I try to think of a response, something he will believe and accept. I glance toward the bathroom, not wanting Jessica to come in during this, the embarrassment already unbearable.

“I was so young when it happened,” I say softly. “I was only sixteen. By the time I met you a decade later, I just ... It didn’t even seem real to me. It was something I had buried so deep that it was like it didn’t happen.”

I have and had tried so hard to forget it. I’ve tried but failed. It is impossible when the reminders are everywhere, a memory I can’t run away from.

Jessica was ten when I met Joe. Had she been in my life, he never would have dated me. Never would have chased me. Never would have fallen for me, or proposed, or become the second part of my soul.

She would have taken that away from me.

Would she do it to me now?

“Don’t let this destroy us,” I whisper. It’s a fight not to say it without crying. “I was trying to kill her to protect us. You don’t have to wonder where my priorities are. She won’t affect us. Nothing has to change.”

He stares at me, his face stony, but I can see the wheels turning in his mind.