Page 26 of Kiss Me Honey Honey (To Love a Psycho #2)

Six months later…

Here he was again.

The visitor centre was heavier this time, though. As if the weight of all the despair, guilt, and twisted hope contained within its walls had grown since his last visit. Or maybe that was him? The air reeked faintly of bleach, sweat, and something metallic. Aaron’s stomach churned at the surrounding voices carrying fragments of lives torn apart. Apologies. Accusations. Pleas.

Too fucking late for that now.

He flicked his gaze to the scuffed linoleum floor, and the bolted steel tables, where other visitors shuffled in as close as the guards allowed to the inmates they came to see. Parents clutched children. Lovers exchanged tight smiles. Faces lined with the weight of trying to love someone capable of atrocities. Were they here for answers, too? Or had they already made peace with their loved ones’ darkness?

He didn’t know what was worse. To accept or to hate .

Having promised Kenny he wouldn’t come back, he was here anyway while Kenny was busy with department faculty stuff wrapping up an end to the academic year. Because he was a slave to the answers only she held. Kenny had told him he wouldn’t get any truth from her. That she would only say what he wanted to hear. To find the truth, he had to ask his questions in therapy. Or to him. But Kenny didn’t know . He theorised. Hypothesised.

So he was here . No matter how many times he told himself to move on, no matter how much Kenny tried to help him, there was always another loose end. Another question clawing at his mind. Another truth he couldn’t understand. But after this, he might be free.

The clanging of metal doors snapped him from the thoughts of how he planned to spend the summer confined to Kenny’s bed. Apart from the conference in Barcelona Kenny had to attend, he’d said he’d be all his. But if there was anyone who could change his mood so rapidly, it was his mother .

Roisin Howell entered with the other inmates, flanked by guards like some twisted queen escorted to her court. Her posture was straight, head held high, and her lips curled in a smile that had nothing to do with warmth. Unlike the others, she didn’t rush into the arms of a waiting loved one. Not that Aaron had stood and held his out for her arrival. But whatever, Roisin Howell didn’t belong to anyone but herself.

Aaron gripped the edge of the table, his knuckles whitening. He didn’t smile. He just watched as her eyes swept the room before landing on him, her practiced smile widening, perfected over decades of deceit. She was stunning. Electric. A magnetic force. All the things people had said about him. Kenny said about him.

Suddenly, they weren’t compliments anymore.

“Darling!” Roisin greeted him, voice bright as she slid into the seat opposite and raked her gaze over his appearance, amusement glinting as she took in his ripped jeans, flimsy T-shirt, and platinum blond hair swept up and over.

Aaron held her gaze, refusing to flinch under her scrutiny. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing how much it cost him to sit here across from her.

“It’s been a whole year.” She tilted her head, tone light as if commenting on the weather. “Whatever has kept you too busy to visit your mother?”

“University.”

“Ah, you’re still doing that.”

It wasn’t a question, so Aaron didn’t answer it. But he found his mouth opening to offer something, but she cut him off with a wave of her hand.

“I’m pleased you got rid of that awful pink hair.” She wrinkled her nose. “The blond suits you so much better.”

Kenny thought so too. But he hadn’t done it for him. Or for her. He’d done it to get back to being something natural.

“It was my decision,” he said, to counter any thoughts that she had anything to do with it.

“Of course it was.” She leaned back, gesturing to him with a sweep of her cuffed hands. “You’re your own man. Look at you! So handsome. You could rule the world with that face.”

“Is that what you wanted for me?”

“Are we back here again?” She sighed. “You thinking I had some grand plan for you? My only plan was for you to be you. And you are.”

“Most parents want their children to be happy.”

Roisin shrugged. “What’s happy these days? No one is happy. Everyone’s got some trauma, some mental health problem. Even the rich cry about how hard life is.” She cocked her head. “ Are you happy?”

“I’m…”

Kenny’s face flashed in his mind. The way Kenny looked at him on the mornings when he woke up in his bed. And the way he gazed at him across a lecture hall when he thought no one else was watching. And how he sometimes caught him staring at him when Aaron was studying on his living room floor while Kenny was supposedly marking papers or doing whatever else it was he did. Like he was someone worth saving. Worth loving . And he thought of how Kenny’s warmth had replaced the cupboard where his mother once hid him, offering something real, somewhere safe .

“Getting there,” he said.

Roisin’s gaze swept the room, lips curling with disdain. “Look at this lot. All of them blaming their mental health for the terrible things they’ve done. It’s pathetic.”

“What got you in here?”

She snapped back to him, smile twisting. “The very thing that ends us all, darling. That eventually kills us all.”

“Which is?”

“Love, darling. Love got me in here. Falling for the wrong man.”

“Frank?”

“What a rotter.” She gave a dramatic wave as if recalling a man who didn’t put the rubbish out rather than a man who abducted, maimed and killed young girls. “I should have seen the red flags. It’s not my fault. I was merely a woman in love, deceived like everyone else.”

“Will you ever admit it?”

“Admit what?” Her voice was sugary sweet.

“That you tortured and killed people.”

Roisin gasped, hand flying to her chest in mock shock. “Is this the poison your professor has been feeding you?”

“They’re not lies. Can’t you admit it? Even to me?”

She leaned forward. “I’ve never lied to you. Not once.”

“What about my sister?”

Roisin’s mask slipped, just for a second—a flicker in her gaze, a crack in her polished facade. Aaron saw it, the truth Kenny had been teaching him to read.

“Your sister is a very disturbed individual.”

“Because you made her that way.”

“Did I make you how you are?”

Aaron’s breath hitched, Kenny’s voice echoing in his mind. “I care about the man you’ve become on your own.”

So Aaron shifted, asked what had haunted him since childhood. “Why did you lock me in the cupboard? Drug me?”

“To protect you, darling.”

“From you? From what you were doing?”

Roisin laughed—a sharp, grating sound making heads turn. She tossed her hair back, revelling in the attention. “No, sweetheart. From them .”

“Them?”

“Your father. Your sister.” Her smile tightened, eyes gleaming with a wicked light. “You were my precious. My angel. I wasn’t going to let anyone hurt you . They had the devil in them. What was I supposed to do?”

“If they had the devil in them, why didn’t you leave him?”

“I couldn’t. I was bound to that house.” She hiccupped, breath catching, as if recalling a terrible ordeal. The agoraphobia she had once claimed. “I was a prisoner. Just like you were. But now you’re free. I saved you.” She touched her eyes as if there were tears falling. There weren’t. Crocodile ones, maybe. “That’s what gets me through the long, lonely nights in here. Knowing that I saved you , at least.”

“Where is she?”

“Who, dear?”

“My sister.”

“I don’t know. She was taken from me. Just like you were.”

“And she’s never come to see you?”

Roisin’s lips curved into a slow, deliberate smile, her eyes gleaming with something dark and impenetrable. “Why would she come to see me? She knows what she is. What she’s capable of. She doesn’t need me to remind her. She’s not seeking answers to questions she already knows the answers to.”

“What does that mean?”

Roisin dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Why do you come here, darling? What are you hoping to find out from me?”

“Why you spared me.”

Roisin laughed softly, a sound that made his blood run cold. “I didn’t spare you. I saved you.”

“Why me? Why not her?”

“Because I had to choose one of you. That was the deal.”

“The deal? What fucking deal?”

“With your father. One of you was mine. One was his.” She waved a hand. “Our little game. Our experiment. And I must say, it’s working out rather well, I think. It’s almost a shame he won’t get to see the outcome.”

Aaron flinched. “Your children were experiments to you?”

“All children are experiments, darling. No one knows what sort of parent they’ll be until they have them. Nor what child they’ll have.” She shrugged, looking away absentmindedly. “Unless you pick them, that is. But, whatever, it’s all an experimental risk.”

“Do you love me?”

Roisin stared at him, eyes vacant, as if there was nothing human behind them. The stillness of her gaze was unnerving. Nothing like how Kenny looked at him—filled with something he still wasn’t sure was love, but was definitely heading towards it. Care. Affection. Longing. And an abundance of lust in Kenny’s eyes, too. Desire. And when Kenny was inside him, those eyes were a testament to how utterly infatuated he was by him.

He supposed his mother shouldn’t look at him like that.

But there should be at least something there .

“Of course I love you,” she said, her voice soft but wrong, like a blade wrapped in velvet. Like she was reading from a script. “You’re mine.”

“You don’t even know what love is.”

“Do you?” Roisin titled her head.

“Yes.”

He was certain of that now. But he’d keep it to himself until he knew the admission wouldn’t ruin everything.

The laughter bursting from Roisin was sharp and jagged, echoing through the room like the crack of thunder, cold and cruel, making Aaron question everything he ever knew about anything.

“What you know, darling, is how to need. Not love .” She narrowed her eyes. “You know how to crave. How to demand for someone to fill that hollow void inside you. You want them to make you feel whole. To tell you how special you are. Adore you. Worship you. You want to be the sun in someone’s sky. The centre of their universe. You want to consume their every thought, drive them mad with their desire to be enough for you. But here’s the truth, my sweet boy—” She leaned forward, her voice deceptively tender, yet her words dripping poison. “—They won’t love you. Can’t. Not the way you want.”

Aaron refused to look away despite not wanting to hear or see anymore.

“I told you every single day how precious you were. How you were everything to me. How I adored you. Worshipped you. I made you believe you were the axis the world turned on. And now that’s all you know. That’s all you’ll ever want. What you seek . You want people to bleed for you. Some might. Many won’t. But eventually, whoever you choose will bleed out for you completely and it still won’t be enough.” Her lips curled into a smile, sending shivers down Aaron’s spine. “You’re no different from me. ”

“I’m nothing like you.” He hoped. He prayed, and he wished he’d never come here.

Roisin’s eyes glinted with feral predatory. “On the contrary, my dear boy. You are everything like me. Isn’t that what you’re doing now? With Dr Lyons? Making him destroy everything just to keep you close? To be wanted by you? Isn’t he giving you everything? Yet one day he’ll have nothing left to sacrifice and therefore nothing to give.”

Aaron’s stomach twisted, a wave of nausea washing over him. “How do you know about Kenny?”

Roisin laughed, leaning back in her chair with a satisfied sigh. “I know everything about you. Always have. I know you’re suffocating him with your need to be loved, to be worshipped? But he won’t love you how you want, darling. Because he can’t. What you want isn’t love. It’s control. Obsession . And do you know how I know this?”

“Enlighten me.”

“Because I made you this way. Like I made your sister the way she is. Complete opposites yet causing the same destruction. I crafted you. I shaped you. You are me . And I made you so perfect, so exquisite, that no one could ever truly love you. And we made her so grotesque and abhorrent no one would ever want her.”

Aaron’s breath hitched, hands shaking against the table.

“We are the same, you and I. We both make people bleed for our love.”

“I don’t kill .”

“Everyone is capable of murder for the right motivation. I wonder who said that?” She tapped her chin, tone mockingly thoughtful, before grinning with a salacious wink. “Ah, yes. Your precious Dr Lyons . So tell me, my sweet boy, what will it take for you to kill? The need to be loved, perhaps? Or the fear of losing that love? Or if that love can’t give you what you need anymore? ”

Aaron’s chest tightened, her words suffocating, oppressive as Roisin’s smile widened like a predator savouring the moment before the kill.

“When the time comes—and trust me, it will—you’ll have a choice to make.” Her voice dripped with certainty, with cruel amusement, as if the outcome was already written in blood. “I’ll be watching, front row, popcorn in hand. Because seeing Dr Lyons bleed out for you?” She let out a soft, delighted sigh. “Now that will be a show worth waiting for.”

Aaron shot to his feet, the screech of his chair tearing through the air as he stumbled back, her words twisting through his mind like a storm, tearing at the fragile truths he clung to.

“You’re wrong.”

“Am I, darling?”

“I’d never, ever let Kenny bleed for me. Ever.”

Roisin smiled. Eerily. Then began to sing Que Sera Sera, chilling Aaron to the core . So he walked away, but the usual doubt crept in, dark and insidious .

What if she’s right?