Chapter 20
Jude
One doesn't.
Casey Robin is fourth in the line. Ward A. Movement privileges. Full corridor access during approved hours. Average height, soft features, a face that makes nurses smile and guards relax.
I've caught him twice during my own transfers.
Brief glimpses through the corridor glass, a few seconds each while the guards walked me past. Both times Casey sat in a common area along Hope's route, angled toward the door she'd come through.
Two glimpses shouldn't be enough to build a pattern, but I know what positioning looks like, and Casey positions.
Hope mentioned him a few weeks back. Said there was a patient in Ward A whose engagement was improving, meds working, that he was a nice kid. Then she caught herself, laughed, said sorry, she shouldn't be talking about another patient's case with me.
Nice kid. The words stuck.
She has no idea what she's looking at. She sees medication compliance and positive indicators. I see a man who's learned her schedule and planted himself along her route, and the only reason the staff don't see it is because they're too busy watching me.
When the line passes the window, Casey's head turns. Our eyes meet.
The mask doesn't slip—not exactly. I see through it. One predator seeing another. He's learned to wear harmlessness so well that most people stop looking past it, but I'm not most people and I've been reading men who hide what they are since I was old enough to watch my father do it.
His eyes find me and hold, and in that fraction of a second I see everything. The obsession. The fixation. The absolute certainty that whatever story he's telling himself is the only story that matters.
He thinks we're the same.
The recognition is there. I see you, and you see me, and we both know what we are. He wants the acknowledgment. Wants me to nod, or smile, or give him some sign that predators share a language the prey don't speak.
I give him nothing.
I look past him. He's nothing. A mark on the window I've already forgotten.
The line moves on. He turns away. The moment passes.
I've seen enough.
I'm still at the table when Kent arrives twelve minutes later, briefcase in hand, suit immaculate despite the early hour. He settles into the chair across from me and sets a folder on the table between us. Thick, organized, months of legal work in one place.
"The motion's filed," he says without preamble. "Formal request for a security classification review. Hope's documentation gives us everything we need to argue your current restriction level can't be justified."
"When?"
"Hearing's next month." He flips open the folder.
"Forty-seven pages of protocol violations, eighteen instances of backdated authorization, a sedation pattern that would make any medical board uncomfortable.
Civil commitment means the facility has to prove their restrictions are necessary.
Her reports make that argument collapse. "
"What happens if it goes through?"
"Classification downgrade. Reduced sedation. Expanded privileges. It's not release, Jude, but it's the first real crack, and once it's open I can build through it." Kent's eyes meet mine. "Everything we've been working toward is in that hearing room."
Next month. Four weeks and a hearing room. I've been building toward this for three years, and it's closer than it's ever been.
But all I can think about is Casey's eyes through the window.
"There's a patient," I say. "Ward A. Casey Robin."
Kent's pen stops moving. "I know the name. The guy with erotomania, if I remember the file. Transferred in eight months ago."
Erotomania. The clinical word for a man whose brain rewrites a woman's warmth into proof she wants him.
A held door becomes desire. A smile becomes a confession.
Rejection becomes a test he has to pass.
The delusion is total, and nothing she does or doesn't do will change the story he's already written.
"He's fixated on Hope."
I don't let Kent hear what's underneath. The want. The rage that's been building since I first noticed how Casey's body oriented toward her in the corridor.
"Fixated how?"
"The way I was fixated on Frederick's victims. The way every man I ever killed was fixated on the women they thought belonged to them.
" I lean forward. "He thinks she wants him.
Thinks her warmth is invitation. And his medication is slipping.
I can see it in the way he tracks her now. Less controlled. More certain."
Kent sets down his pen. His expression shifts—the lawyer replacing the friend.
"Have you reported this to anyone?"
"Who would I report it to? Kennedy? Hudson? Don't be stupid, Kent." My voice stays level but the edges sharpen. "The system that's supposed to protect her is the system that's trying to destroy her."
"Then we work within the system." Kent's voice is steady. "I can file a privileges restriction request. Flag Casey as a potential threat, get his movement limited, create documentation that shows the facility was warned."
"How long?"
"I can have it on Hudson's desk by Monday."
Monday is four days from now.
Casey has movement privileges. Full corridor access during approved hours. He can be anywhere in this building that his schedule allows, and Hope walks these halls a few times a week with nothing but a clipboard and a smile that makes dangerous men think she's safe.
Every minute of those four days with him out there, building his story, waiting for his moment.
"Don't." Kent reads my face before I've said anything. "I know what you're thinking. I know what you want to do. But if you act, if you give them any reason to increase your security level, the hearing disappears. Everything we've built disappears."
"And if he gets to her before Monday?"
"He won't. Gage is watching. The protocols exist. She's not unprotected."
Gage's name lands differently than it would have a week ago. Before, I would have dismissed it—what can a guard do that I can't do better? But I watched her eyes find his while I was inside her, and I let her keep that moment instead of crushing it.
Gage is watching.
It's not enough. It's not nearly enough. But it's something, and that's more than I have from inside this cage.
"Monday," I say. "You're certain."
"I'll have it drafted tonight and on Hudson's desk Monday morning." Kent closes the folder, meets my eyes. "Trust the process, Jude. We're too close to lose this now."
He leaves, and the guards walk me back. The cell is twelve feet by ten. I've measured it a thousand times—paced it, memorized every crack in the concrete and every imperfection in the paint. It's been my world for three years, and I've learned to make it small enough to survive.
Today it's too small.
I lie on the narrow bed and stare at the ceiling and my mind does what it's always done. Builds plans. Constructs scenarios. Maps routes to objectives I've turned from impossible to inevitable.
My mind goes to Gage first. Remove the guard, remove the obstacle.
I know his schedule, his habits, the routes he takes between checkpoints.
I know which corridors have camera blind spots and which guards take long breaks.
I know three ways to hurt him badly enough that he'd be out of commission for weeks, and two ways to make it look like someone else did it.
The plan builds itself in perfect detail. Every step, every contingency, every variable accounted for.
I let it run.
Then I tear it down.
My mind wants to keep it. Save it for later, just in case. I force myself to stop. Kill each step. Erase the routes, the timing, the exit.
Underneath all of it is one thing. She's mine and he's in the way.
But she looked at him while I was inside her.
My jaw locks. My fists close around nothing. Every part of me wants to pull that moment back, undo it, pretend I never let it happen. I don't. I lie still until my breathing evens out and the urge passes. It comes back. I do it again.
I start the Gage plan again. Different approach this time.
Not violence but isolation. Turn Hope against him, plant doubts, make her see weakness where she currently sees strength.
I know how to do this. I've done it before, with guards and doctors and everyone who stood between me and what I wanted.
The plan is elegant. Efficient. It would work.
I tear it down again. Slower this time because my hands don't want to let go. My fingers dig into the mattress and my teeth ache from clenching and I hold still until the plan falls apart and there's nothing left to act on.
My hands shake when I'm done. Actually shake, which hasn't happened since Frederick's dining room. The effort of dismantling something my mind built takes more out of me than building it ever did.
But I do it.
Because she looked at him, and I let her keep that moment. I don't get to take that back.
The afternoon crawls. I run the Casey scenarios instead. Safer ground, if anything involving him can be called safe. I map his patterns from what I've observed through corridor windows, reconstruct his schedule from the glimpses I've caught of the transfer lines.
He has privileges I don't have. Movement, access, the freedom to be in spaces where Hope might be alone. His medication is supposed to dull the compulsion, flatten the obsession into manageable noise. But I've watched him for weeks now, and I can see the edges fraying.
He's compensating. Cheating the system somehow.
Palming pills, timing doses, finding ways to be more himself when it matters.
The pleasant mask stays in place for the guards and doctors.
But his attention sharpens when Hope walks past, and his body angles toward her, tracks her, doesn't look away until she's gone.
He has a story in his head where she belongs to him.
I know this because I recognize the posture. The patience. The absolute certainty that the ending is already written and he just has to wait for the world to catch up.
Every man I ever killed had that look. Powerful men, cold men, men who carried themselves like they owned everything they touched. They all had stories about the women in their lives, stories where resistance was invitation, where fear was love, where the violence they planned was something earned.
Casey's story is the same. Different surface, same rot underneath.
And I'm locked in a cage while he walks free.
The scenarios run dry by evening. I've run every version of what Casey might do and when, and none of it changes the only fact that matters. I can't get to him from here.
What's left when the planning stops is worse.
What if the door stays locked?
What if Monday comes too late?
What if the protocols fail and he finds her alone?
I know this fear. I felt it when I learned my mother died while I was deployed, half a world away and useless, and I understood that being strong enough to kill men meant nothing if I couldn't reach them.
I hunted them across cities, through security systems, past bodyguards and locked doors and every protection their money could buy.
I found them in their homes, their offices, their dining rooms. I sat across from them and watched them realize what was coming, and then I made them pay for what they'd done.
But Casey is twenty feet away, and a locked door makes twenty feet uncrossable.
Night comes and the corridor goes quiet. I don't sleep. Instead I lie on the narrow bed and count. Monday's privileges restriction. The hearing next month. The future Kent promises. I try to see the future where all of this works, where the plan succeeds.
The future is blurry, uncertain, too far away to touch.
What I can see is Casey's face through the window. The recognition. The mask that didn't slip because he's learned to hold it so well.
He thinks we're the same.
He's wrong.
I killed men who hurt women because I couldn't save the two women who mattered to me. Elizabeth. My mother. Every powerful man I took apart was practice for Frederick, and Frederick was the end of a grief I couldn't put anywhere else.
Casey doesn't kill out of grief. He kills out of entitlement. The absolute conviction that his feelings create obligations, that his obsession earns him ownership.
We're not the same, not even close.
But it doesn't matter what I think.
If Casey gets to her before Monday, I'm getting out of this cell. I don't care what it costs.
The thought stays with me, not a plan, not yet.
I close my eyes and count the hours until Monday. Ninety-six of them, and every one too many.
She's the one I can't reach.