Deadly Fear (Deadly #1)(94)

Was he talking about Martin and his visits with Romeo? “But that won’t happen,” she said, her voice soft when his was hard.

“Hell, no. Some instincts are in the blood. Nothin’ will change ’em. Nothin’.”

“You’ve got those instincts, right? Was it those instincts that made you kill your ex-girlfriend? Those instincts made you murder Saundra?”

His eyes slit. “That bitch deserved to die! She was gonna leave me. Me!”

“She wasn’t your first, though, was she?” From the corner of her eye, she thought she saw Lee stir. What had Kyle given him? She’d caught sight of loose ropes binding his hands. Ropes were so much easier to work free than handcuffs. And it looked like Kyle had kept those binds nice and light, probably because he didn’t want to leave rope burns on the soon-to-be dead guy’s hands.

Rope burns didn’t go so well with a suicide.

Maybe he’d learned the rope lesson with Jeremy Jones.

Vance—Kyle—shook his head. “My first? Not even close.” He put the gun down and picked up his bloody knife. “I think it’s time we got down to business.” He turned to shoot a quick glance at Lee—

“You killed your mother!” The belt buckle bit into her hand. “She was your first kill in that fire on Valentine’s Day.”

He whirled back toward her. The gloating pride vanished from his face. All emotion wiped away in an instant. “She deserved it.”

Right, because everyone he’d killed had deserved to die.

His fingers tightened around the knife. “That bitch—she tried to kill me.”

The last piece of the puzzle fell into place. Kyle went after women. They were his primary victims, and he liked to terrify them so that he could have control.

He wanted the women to be weak, powerless. Because once, a woman had made him feel the same way. His was not instinct, more like a sick compulsion.

“She beat you.” Absolute certainty had Monica’s voice thickening. “It started when you were young. She’d hurt you—”

“That crazy whore kept saying the devil was in me!” Spittle flew from his mouth, and he didn’t see Lee sliding free of the ropes. “She’d take her belt to me every night and tell me that she was beating him out of me!”

May had been treated for schizophrenia. Maybe her sister had suffered from similar problems. But no one had ever been there to shield her baby boy.

“She said I was evil, and that night, that night, she was gonna kill me!” He brought the knife over Luke’s chest. Hesitated. With that hesitation, Monica knew he was seeing the past. Not the victims right in front of him, but the most important one he’d killed so long ago. “I got her instead. I hit her on the head, knocked her down, and then I poured gasoline all over her.”

Accelerant had been found at the scene.

“She woke up right before I lit the first match.” His eyes widened, and she knew he saw that moment with perfect clarity. “She was so scared. She begged me to help her. To get her out, but I just lit that match and watched her burn.”

And he’d gotten his taste of power. Learned how heady fear could be.

He’d become a monster.

“Everybody was working on Romeo. The deputies never looked twice at me.”

Because the sheriff had been there, covering hisnephew’s tracks? Family. You protected them. Maybe Sheriff Peterson had known what Margaret was doing to her son. Maybe he’d just been good at turning a blind eye to the things he didn’t want to see.

“You got away with murder.” It would have satisfied him for a while. But not forever. “Did you kill May, too? Did you torch her house and trap her inside?”

He laughed at that. A low, dark laugh. “Didn’t have to.”

What? She’d been certain he was behind that fire.

“All I had to do was call her. When she heard my voice, she thought I was a ghost.” Another laugh. “I told her to burn the house. I knew you wanted all those papers, that shit, she kept for years. I told her to burn it and to stay inside, to make sure the flames were bright enough.”

Oh, Christ. “And she did.”

His mouth hitched up. “Like I said, May was never good at taking her meds. And when she was off ’em, she’d do just about anything. Believe anything.”

She swallowed. “How many bodies are out in that swamp?” Close to the cabins. Close to the tree that had become Saundra’s grave. There could have been more. So many more.

His head cocked, and his lips stretched in a taunting grin. “You think you know me, huh? Well, he told me all about you.”

“He?” But she knew.

“Romeo.”

That knife was too close to Luke’s chest. Luke’s eyes hadn’t left Kyle’s face. The promise of deadly retribution glowed in those emerald depths. If she could just get him free…

“What the f*ck do you know about Romeo?” Luke yelled.

But Monica stared into Kyle’s eyes and finally understood the game. “Everything.” The night one killer had been captured, another had been born two counties over. And coincidences, they just didn’t happen.

“You had to go see him, didn’t you? You read about him in the papers. His story was everywhere while your kill didn’t even get a notice.” It had been about pride. Some killers were desperate for their time in the light. Even boys…