he breathed in the cloying metallic scent of blood.
His stomach cramped, and he doubled over, crippled with pain. But the pain was not his. It was never his. He always felt others’ pain, others’ emotions. Never his own.
Until today. Until he’d met Alaina Paulsen.
“What the hell!” a vaguely familiar male voice exclaimed in surprise.
“How—Why are you here?” asked a woman. The woman—Alaina Paulsen.
Like earlier today when he’d been with her, Trent felt none of her emotions. He felt no emotions but his own. Attraction, fascination and an overwhelming sense of destiny …
“You can’t be here,” the man said.
Trent assumed he was the other agent, the one he’d refused to see because he’d only been able to see her. This time he took a moment to compose himself, schooling his features back into his usual cocky mask, before he straightened up and turned to her.
“How did you get here before us?” Alaina asked.
“He must have a helicopter,” her partner answered for Trent. The man stood close to her, protectively. Were they more than professional partners?
Trent didn’t care what they’d been. The guy was no threat to him. No other man had the claim on her that he did. As he met her gaze, one emotion gripped him—possessiveness. Mine.
Her eyes widened, as if she’d read his mind, and she dragged in a shaky breath. “That explains how you got to Detroit before we did,” she said, “but how did you get here?” She gestured at the apartment. “Into our crime scene.”
The “our” to which she referred was not her and her partner; Trent couldn’t accept that. It was him and her. She knew just as well as he did that he was part of this. If only he knew, for certain, which part.
“I told you,” he reminded her. “I have a few fans in law enforcement.”
“In the Bureau?” the male agent asked, his dark eyes narrowed with doubt. His suspicion was as palpable in the air as the scent of the victim’s blood.
“Check out my story,” Trent suggested, more to get rid of the guy than to reassure him.
The agent turned to Alaina, who offered a brief nod. With a warning glare at Trent, the man ducked under the crime-scene tape and slipped out into the hall.
“So you’re the senior agent,” Trent observed.
“What?”
“He checked with you before leaving.” Or maybe her partner had just wanted to make sure she would be all right alone with Trent.
Alaina didn’t satisfy his curiosity as she ignored his observation. “That’s why I went to your estate,” she said, “to check out your story. To find out what your involvement was in those old murders.”
Her brow knitted as she glanced around the room, taking in the crime scene. Again, the color faded from her porcelain skin, leaving her ghostly pale.
But she wasn’t a ghost. She was real. And for the first time in the memory of his own life, Trent felt real. His emotions were finally his own instead of what he’d empathetically picked up from someone or somewhere else.
“Those murders happened before I was born,” he reminded her.
“You do have a friend in the Bureau,” she said, accepting his claim without the confirmation her partner required. “A source.”
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t call him a source,” he clarified. “More like a fan.” Someone who had contacted him a couple times throughout the years and whom Trent had felt comfortable calling to find out all he could about Agent Paulsen—like where she’d rushed off to in such a hurry.
Before he’d had a chance to kiss her and test the strength of the passion she’d drawn from his soul.
“A fan?” She shook her head, as if she doubted his claim or doubted that anyone would actually enjoy the novels he’d written.
Sometimes he wondered about that himself. He didn’t enjoy writing them; they exhausted him as much as experiencing the emotions of others.
“This murder didn’t happen before you were born,” she pointed out, her teeth nibbling at her full bottom lip. “Did you get sick of just writing about murder and decide to reenact one that you wrote about?”
“No.” He wasn’t a killer … in this life. But if he had the soul of a killer …
“No?” she repeated as if disappointed by his short response. “That’s it? You’re not going to eloquently profess your innocence?”
While he shrugged, he was anything but unconcerned. “It doesn’t matter how eloquent I am. You’ve already made up your mind about me, Alaina.”
“You’re involved,” she insisted. “Somehow, someway, you’re involved.”
He wished like hell that he wasn’t. But he couldn’t deny her allegations.
As if she dismissed him, she began to inspect the crime scene, ignoring his presence. He couldn’t ignore her; he could do nothing but stare at her.
Then she uttered a sudden gasp.
He followed her gaze to discover what had elicited the reaction from her. The blood, the gore? He would have expected that she was used to those things in crime scenes. Then he saw it, too: his book, lying atop the day-bed where the victim had been raped and mutilated. The book lay facedown, the hand lifted over Trent’s face in the publicity shot spattered with blood.
As if he hadn’t already been blaming himself for this woman’s death.
Her blood was on his hand. It had only been a book, Alaina kept reminding herself. But still she couldn’t get the image out of her head. She couldn’t get Trent out, either. She worried that he was in deeper than her mind, that he owned a part of her reincarnated soul.
“Why are you so hung up on Baines?”
She jerked away from her intense scrutiny of the bright lights of the cityscape outside her office window. Vonner’s startling question brought forth a rage of denial and resentment. “Why the hell would you say something so—”
He held up a palm to interrupt her tirade and clarified, “As the killer. Why are you so hung up on him being the killer? Yeah, I get that the helicopter access makes him a suspect in this case, but he wasn’t even alive when the other murders occurred.”
She turned back to the window, leaving Vonner sitting in front of her desk piled high with cold-case files. She only needed to glance at one of the folders to know exactly what was inside; she’d read them all so many times. But how did Trent know so many of the details it had taken her years to learn? “He knows too much.”
“So you think he knows who the killer is?” Vonner asked with a heavy sigh. “That he interviewed him when he started writing those horror books of his?”
He
