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Jessie Hunt tried to hide her concern.

It had been just over two weeks since her husband and investigative partner, Detective Ryan Hernandez, was poisoned by a disturbed killer. She’d managed to catch the man and get Ryan help in time to save him, but he still hadn’t returned to full strength.

He had hoped to return to work tomorrow—Monday—but it was clear that he’d need at least a little longer. As she sat beside him on their living room couch, she stroked the back of his neck. He was drifting in and out of sleep, which was fine. It was a lazy Sunday morning, and he could use all the rest he could get.

In the sixteen days since he’d nearly died, his psychological state seemed stable despite everything he’d been through, both physically and emotionally. It was possible that under his “raring to go” mentality, there might be a flicker of depression at how long the journey back was. But if it was there, she had yet to see it.

And he still had the warm brown eyes and sweet smile, highlighted by impressive dimples. Having said that, he’d lost over ten pounds and lots of strength and stamina. He would need a little time to get back to his normal, well-muscled, two-hundred-pound, six-foot-tall body.

Jessie had taken personal time of her own to care for him. She would be starting back at work tomorrow, where she was an LAPD profiler. When Ryan eventually got the all-clear to return, he’d be on desk duty for a while, no matter how much he hated the idea.

In the kitchen, Jessie’s younger sister, Hannah Dorsey, was making them all breakfast. Hannah was in her freshman year at UC Irvine, about an hour away from them, but she’d come back to the house on each of the last two weekends to help care for Ryan until he felt strong enough to be on his own. It helped that she was a great cook.

Jessie glanced over her shoulder to see how everything was going. Hannah was diligently focused on the task at hand, moving among different pans and slicing and dicing a variety of items on the butcher block. Jessie knew that a frittata was on the menu, though she wasn’t sure of the ingredients. It didn’t matter. If Hannah was making it, the dish would be good.

It was fun to watch her sister in her element. The nineteen-year-old was the picture of organized freneticism, with her ponytailed blonde hair bobbing furiously as she moved about. Her green eyes, the same shade as Jessie’s, flashed with excitement as she darted from one station to another.

Jessie felt a little guilty that she couldn’t help, but she worried that getting up might wake Ryan, and that wasn’t a risk she was willing to take. So she sat next to him, quietly running her fingers along his neck, and allowed her mind to drift.

There had been a lot of time for that lately. Everything had been on hold for the last two weeks, so she’d been trapped with her own thoughts more than she would have liked. Despite their downtime together, she and Ryan had pointedly avoided discussing the potential of adopting a child, an idea they’d been circling for a few months now.

Jessie preferred that route to parenthood, as opposed to putting her already battered body through a pregnancy. In fact, during her confrontation with the killer who’d poisoned Ryan, she suffered several new injuries, including to her lower back, her ribs, her neck and trachea and her face, which had met the backside of a shovel. She was feeling better now, but for a week there, she’d really been dragging.

In the past, Ryan had expressed a desire to have children of their own, though he’d told her he was willing to go the adoption route instead. Regardless of where they each stood, it was just too fraught a topic to address under the current circumstances.

Jessie allowed herself a silent, bitter little chuckle at her own use of the euphemism “circumstances.” That was a polite term for the other major issue she was dealing with. In addition to both her and Ryan’s physical recoveries and their potential future as parents, there was the little matter of her mental health.

In recent months, she’d been dealing with a return to a psychological place she thought she’d moved beyond. She was 31 years old now, but back when she was younger, as a teen and in college, she’d often felt an intense desire to mete out punishment to those she considered worthy of it. The problem was that she didn’t just want to make them pay by arresting them or getting them convicted. She wanted to make them suffer physically too. Sometimes the desire was so strong that she could picture herself committing the violent act that would put the perpetrator in their place, preferably forever.

It had taken years of therapy with the then-and-still-now psychiatrist, Dr. Janice Lemmon, to understand the roots of this bloodlust. Part of the explanation was straightforward. Her birth father, whom she’d only known until she was six years old, was named Xander Thurman. But he was better known by his nickname, the Ozarks Executioner. That was because her father had been a prolific serial killer.

It was clear to Jessie that some part of his sickness had infected her, though she’d never felt the urge to kill anyone for the thrill of it, at least not yet. With Dr. Lemmon’s help, she’d learned to channel those feelings into a pursuit of justice. She managed to satisfy her jones for making bad guys pay by understanding them, catching them, and putting them behind bars.

It was why she’d studied Forensic Psychology and eventually became a criminal profiler. She wasn’t a cop. She was a consultant who helped the cops catch killers. For a decade now, she managed to keep a lid on the darker side of those urges, even after Hannah came into her life.

Jessie had only discovered that she had a half-sister two years ago, when they both learned that the man who had killed Hannah’s adoptive parents was the serial killer father they shared. Jessie took in the sister she’d never known existed, becoming her guardian. It was only then that she found out that Hannah shared her bloodthirsty need to deliver retribution to those she considered wrongdoers.

In Hannah’s case, that desire had gone a step further, when she’d actually killed a man. Yes, he was a serial killer as well, one who’d been threatening Jessie, Hannah, and Ryan. But when she shot him, he was in handcuffs, no longer a threat.

That act hadn’t chastened Hannah. In fact it had exacerbated the compulsion to be an avenging angel. Ultimately, Hannah had asked for help from Jessie and Dr. Lemmon. She got it in the form of self-admission to a psychiatric rehabilitation center, where she spent months learning how to control and redirect her urges.

It seemed to have worked, as Hannah was doing incredibly well now. She was getting great grades in college and had even become a bit of an amateur sleuth herself, helping out other students at school with problems they didn’t want to take to the campus police.

So if Hannah had bounced back from the dark place she was in, why was Jessie having so much trouble? It was an issue that she and Dr. Lemmon had addressed in their last session together.

“Why can’t I get past this?” she’d asked as their session drew to a close. “It can’t just be genetics that’s causing this.”

“Have you ever considered,” Dr. Lemmon suggested that day in her office, “that as bad as what Hannah has been through, it’s nothing compared to the trauma you’ve experienced?”

“What do you mean?” Jessie asked.

The tiny but accomplished woman with thick glasses and tight, little gray ringlets of hair, now 70, studied her impassively for a moment before replying.

“Hannah’s birth mother was killed when she was a baby,” she said. “She doesn’t even remember her. And after her adoptive parents were murdered by Thurman, you took her in and gave her not just a safe place to live, but a new connection to family. And even then, she struggled.”

“I know all this,” Jessie had told her impatiently. “I was there, remember?”

“Yes, you were there for her , but who was there for you?” Lemmon asked. “When you were six, you watched your father murder your mother in an isolated cabin in the Ozark Mountains. Then he left you there—tied up next to her dead body—to freeze to death. If not for some hunters who happened upon you, you wouldn’t be here. Admittedly, you were adopted by a wonderful couple. But years later, Thurman found and killed them too, to spite you. You lived with that undeserved guilt ever since. Hell, Jessie, your own sociopathic ex-husband tried to murder you. And when he got out of prison on a technicality, he murdered your profiling mentor and my friend, Garland Moses, to get back at you, and then he nearly killed your new husband after that.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point,” Dr. Lemmon said, undeterred, “is that you’ve been through a lot in the last few years. I haven’t even gotten to the obsessed woman who kidnapped you and tried to make you her love slave in an Arizona cave. Or to Mark Haddonfield, the college student currently on trial because he resented that you didn’t make him your profiling protégé and killed multiple people you’d saved before coming after you too.”

“I’m familiar with his body of work,” Jessie retorted snarkily.

“And then there was the emergency brain surgery,” Lemmon added, undeterred. “That was just last fall. Between the loss of so many loved ones and the constant stress you’ve faced in the last couple of years, it’s no wonder that your brain is starting to short-circuit a little.”

“So what do we do about that?” Jessie asked. “Because two weeks ago, I came within a half-second of slamming the pointy end of a rolling pin through an incapacitated guy’s mouth into his spine. Only Ryan begging me to stop brought me to my senses. I’m worried that even that won’t do the trick next time.”

“You could always take your sister’s route to recovery,” Lemmon said, “and check yourself into a facility to work through your issues.”

“Hannah could do that because she was in high school at the time,” Jessie objected. “She was still able to take classes while she did all that intense therapy. And thanks to you, she was largely anonymous at the place. That’s not an option for me.”

“Why not?”

“First of all, I can’t take the time off. I don’t have two months to spare to go out to Malibu to work through my psychic pain in group therapy or even one-on-one. Plus there’s the fact that, because of all the high profile cases I’ve handled lately, I’m a minor celebrity. There’s a very real chance that someone might recognize me, and then that would get blasted all over the media. That definitely wouldn’t help my mental health. Lastly, I worry that I could lose my job. If the LAPD discovers that I’m taking time off to try to address an unquenchable bloodlust that has nearly resulted in the deaths of multiple suspects, they might have some concerns.”

“Listen,” Lemmon said calmly, “those are all fair points. But ultimately, they’re not convincing to me. First of all, you don’t have to give the department a specific reason to take some leave. Generalized trauma based on the list of terribles we’ve been discussing is more than enough. No one in the department would dispute that you’ve earned the time. And you can always go to a facility out of the area. It doesn’t have to be in California or even the U.S. You’re not that famous, Jessie Hunt.”

“That’s hurtful,” Jessie replied, managing to find a scrap of her sense of humor despite the situation.

“But the larger issue,” Lemmon said, pressing ahead, “is that there are lots of reasons this anger has built up. Frankly, I’m surprised it hasn’t reared its head earlier. But no amount of justification for these urges will help you if you kill someone who isn’t a direct threat to you. If you stab a cuffed suspect or jam a rolling pin through the spine of a near-unconscious killer, that’s murder, and you’ll be the one put on trial. Once that happens, you better believe that all these close calls will be brought up again in a courtroom. You’ve already got a history here. Any decent prosecutor will convict you without breaking a sweat.”

“So what do you propose then?” Jessie asked.

Lemmon sighed.

“Short of checking yourself in somewhere like Hannah did,” she said with a scowl, “we’re going to have to find foolproof tools to help you effectively cope with these feelings, before it’s too late.”

“That sounds good,” Jessie said, “so why are you frowning?”

“Because, my dearest Jessie, nothing’s foolproof.”

Those words were still rattling around in Jessie’s head as she sat on the couch beside her napping husband when her cell phone rang. She looked over and saw that the call was from Gaylene Parker, the captain at downtown L.A.’s Central Station, where Jessie’s unit was headquartered. Parker rarely called on an off day, especially when Jessie was still on leave. It had to be important.

“What’s up, Captain?” she asked quietly so as not to wake Ryan.

“Morning, Hunt,” Parker said in her standard, no-frills tone, “I know you don’t officially start back up at work until tomorrow, but I was hoping you might be able to come in a day early.”

“There’s no one else from HSS that can help you out?” Jessie asked.

HSS was Homicide Special Section, a unit that specialized in cases with high profiles or intense media scrutiny—typically involving multiple victims or serial killers. While Parker was nominally in charge of HSS, it was really Ryan’s baby. He led the unit, which was comprised of five detectives, including himself, a two-person research team, and Jessie, who was the unit’s dedicated profiler.

“We’re a little shorthanded,” Parker conceded. “Detectives Bray and Goodwin are working a different case, and I just sent Nettles home after he finally finished the paperwork on his. He’s been up for almost 48 straight hours, and I don’t think he’d be much good to anyone right now. That leaves Valentine, but even though she’s willing, I don’t want her to have to work this one alone.”

“Why not?” Jessie asked.

“I always prefer my people to pair up,” Parker said, “and this case in particular could use an extra set of eyes, preferably from a profiler.”

“What makes it so special?” Jessie asked.

“I don’t know much yet. You can get the details from the officer in charge at the scene. But the short version is that a couple was found dead in their bed. They were posed in some kind of unusual position, and they were wearing masquerade ball masks.”

“Jeez,” Jessie muttered under her breath.

“Are you in?”

Jessie glanced over at Ryan, who was snoring softly, then at Hannah, who had walked over. Her sister gave her a knowing nod that silently said, “go ahead, I’ll watch him.” Jessie mouthed the words “thank you” to her.

“I guess so,” she told the captain.

“Good,” Parker said, “I’m relieved to hear it.”

“Relieved?” Jessie said.

“That’s right,” Parker said. “I didn’t want to be presumptuous, but I already sent Valentine to pick you up. She’ll be at your house in ten minutes.”