Chapter 3
VISCERAL
GRAYSON
London Noble has quirks. Likes and dislikes. Fears. All the little intricate details that make up her personality. I love dissecting her.
She wears glasses instead of contacts. She braids her long dark hair, twirling it into a bun, instead of cutting it short. She doesn’t paint her nails. She always leaves one infuriating button undone on her blouse. She crosses her ankles instead of her legs.
That is, until we talk about my dark deeds, then I love watching her cross those long legs slowly, thighs squeezing tight.
She doesn’t like noise. She enjoys complication.
Her smiles are rare. Her approval even harder to earn.
She suffers back pain due to some injury, but pretends it doesn’t affect her.
She’s petite. Practically a doll compared to my six-foot-two.
Yet she allows no one to look down to her.
She’s afraid of aging, becoming obsolete.
But the single most interesting thing about my psychologist is this: I make her curious.
Not in a professional sense—though I’m sure that’s how it started; a small flame sparked into existence—but the deep-seated, scary curious. The kind of curious that makes good girls bad.
I’d love to tangle her up in my web and feast.
“What do you see?” Her soft, slender fingers peek from around the edge of a card.
On the front, a black and red ink blot splashes against white. You, I think, but I tell her, “I see a butterfly.”
London lowers the card, her expression unreadable. At least, she strives for neutral, yet I glimpse the irritation beneath her mask. She’s desperate to crack me. Wiggle inside my head and crawl around.
A week together, and she still doesn’t get it. There’s nothing to be found. I’m not here for myself, to resolve my psychotic tendencies. To be rehabilitated with the hopes of mounting a defense.
I’m here for her.
“You like games?” she asks as she sets the stack of ink blots aside.
A smile curls my lips. I like playing games with her. “It depends on the game,” I say.
“Do you see our time together as a game?”
Questions. Always tedious questions with her. She turns every answer into one, trying to keep me out of her head. I adjust my feet, the rattle of my shackles loud in the still room. “This isn’t really our time, though, is it?”
Her delicate brows knit together. “You feel that I’m not committed to your treatment.”
“No,” I say, sitting forward, as much as my chains will allow. “I feel you’re very committed, just to the wrong thing. Do you believe rehabilitation is possible?”
Her dark eyes blink behind her glasses. “I won’t lie to you, Grayson. I have my uncertainties. But we won’t know if it’s a possibility for you unless you take our time together seriously.”
Interesting. “I like when you answer my questions.”
She attempts to hide a smile. Crosses her legs. I inhale a deep breath, trying to taste her excitement. “My answers won’t help you.”
“How do you know?”
Her hands settle in her lap. She keeps her gaze steady on me, but I see the anxious need to wrap her string around her finger.
She hides it well—almost as well as she hides the ink on her hand—but I’ve caught her once.
A black thread she keeps tucked inside her pocket.
The skin of her index finger wears the groove marks from where she wraps it, tightening the thread over and over.
I wonder why she does it, where she picked up the compulsion.
“You said you have uncertainties,” I say, keeping the tables turned. “But what if it’s not uncertainty at all. What if you simply don’t want rehabilitation to work.”
Her pretty mouth parts, before she can blurt a practiced response, she checks herself. “Why would I not want it to work?”
I shrug as I ease back into the leather chair. “Because seeking the answer on how to fix the sick and deviant is boring. You’re really seeking to understand why you’re so drawn to it yourself.” My mouth twitches to hold back a smile. “Which is far more interesting.”
She allows a faint smile to slip free. “I suppose that’s a logical leap. Of course I’m drawn to it, and fascinated with my study. Understanding your compulsion to punish and kill people—”
“I’ve never killed anyone.”
Her lips thin. “Why traps, Grayson?”
Her question tenses my shoulders. This isn’t what I want to talk about.
“Why not traps? Aren’t we all victims of some sort of trap?
A wife trapped in an unhappy marriage. A child trapped in a loveless family.
A woman trapped in a profitless, unfulfilling career.
” My gaze drops to her mouth. Those satin pink lips press together with a tell.
“Those are theoretical,” she says, her tone softening, “and they’re not life threatening.”
“They can be.”
“But your traps are designed to take lives, Grayson. Your victims forced to participate against their will.”
I release a lengthy breath. “It’s never against their will. Their choices led them there. They’re responsible and should be held accountable for their actions. I only provide a resolution. I offer them a final choice, a way to redeem themselves, which is more than any god would grant them.”
Her hand inches toward her pocket before she firmly rests it on the armrest. “Do you see yourself as a god? Granting your victims redemption?”
She can do better than this. She is better than this tired psychobabble. “No, I see myself as a hunter. They’re not victims, they’re predators stalking the woods in search of prey. If they fall into the hunter’s trap, then they were in a place they never should’ve been.”
She wets her lips, her tongue peeking out to tease me. One of her sins: seduction.
“This room is designed like a trap,” I continue.
“You lure the mentally ill in with promises of recovery and freedom. Maybe not physical freedom, but freedom from their demons. Once they’re shackled—” I tug at my restraint “—you feast on their horror stories in the name of psychology. You feed off them, sating your own twisted curiosities. And then you publish your papers on the poor damned souls that never had a chance. You reap glory off the murderers and from the victims themselves.”
Her sigh is heavy, breathy. Torturous. It slides over my skin with a tantalizing stroke, making the distance between us unbearable. “Have you always been this judgmental?” she asks.
This line of questioning is tiring, getting us nowhere. “No,” I say, cocking my head. “But I’ve always liked puzzles.”
“Puzzles,” she repeats, deep brown eyes narrowing. “And why is that?”
Unbidden, a memory from my childhood flickers across my vision, and I tamp it back down into the dark recesses. “I like the mechanics of puzzles, the way each piece has a place, a purpose. The way it simply belongs.”
London uncrosses her legs and straightens her back, sitting taller in the chair. If she wanted to, she could curl up in it. “Where do you feel you belong, Grayson?”
Oh, if she only knew how loaded that question was. But this isn’t about me or my story; this about her—where she fits into the puzzle. It’s time to start peeling back her layers.
I hold her gaze as I say, “With you, Dr. Noble. I belong right here with you.”
A tense battle of wills arcs between us, neither one of us willing to be the first to look away.
Yet if I come on too strong, if she becomes too aware, she could request my transfer. Better not to chance it by provoking her. I curb a smile and avert my eyes to the chain resting against my leg.
“I refused your interview a year ago,” I say, baiting her with an answer she’s wanted since our first session, “because I didn’t trust you.” I look up in time to catch her eyes widen a fraction.
She subtly arches one eyebrow. “And you trust me now?”
Dr. London Noble has a reputation of getting convicted murderers a reduced sentence or even off completely. She humanizes monsters. She tames the untamable. She’s the answer to every killer on death row—their angel of mercy.
But beneath that saintly facade, a devil lurks.
It’s taken me months to accept that she was put in my path for a reason. At first, I refused any connection to her. We couldn’t be farther apart on the continuum—and yet, her name kept coming to me, a chant my own damned soul recognized as kindred.
I lean forward, getting as close to her as my restraints will allow. “I trust in the inevitable,” I tell her honestly.
My response unnerves her. Despite her ability to maintain an unaffected appearance, the delicate column of her throat jumps. “At some point, all your victims’ fates were inevitable to you,” she says. “Do you view me as a victim, then? Have I committed some sin that I’m unaware of?”
Her twisty words bring a real smile to my face. Is she unaware—or is this merely a ruse, a part of her seduction? I don’t have the answer. Not yet. I need all the pieces of her puzzle first.
All I know for sure is that we have a story. Ours is not a love story—we’re too volatile, too explosive for happily ever after. No, our story comes with a warning:
Beware.
“You’re twisting things, doctor,” I say with a smirk.
“But even so, you’re not wrong. Every sinner was once a victim.
Anyone who sets out to harm, has suffered some harm themselves.
” I run my palms over my thighs, my gaze flicking to the gleaming metal of my cuffs.
“It’s the yin and yang, dark and light feeding and devouring each other.
An ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail in a vicious cycle. ”
London doesn’t use a notepad or tablet to log our sessions. She records them with a camera so she can watch them played back to her. Like me, she’s a watcher. A voyeur. She’s here in the moment with me as silence thickens between us, taking her time to analyze my words.
Finally, she says, “You feel you’re powerless against the cycle.”
My gaze clashes with hers, my hands itching to snatch those glasses from her face so I can stare into her eyes unhindered. “None of us are powerless,” I say, a guttural edge bleeding into my tone. “Choice is the most powerful thing in this world. Everyone has a choice.”
She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, that small action igniting a flame beneath my skin. My hands curl into fists as I wait for her next question.
“That’s a powerful statement in itself,” she says, surprising me. “But if you render your victims helpless and force them to choose from only the options you dictate, then it isn’t truly freedom of choice, is it?”
I unclench my hands. My fingers splay across the tops of my thighs. I’ve wriggled an inch beneath her skin. I can see it in the way she rubs her finger, anxious for her little string. “Much like our sessions,” I say.
Her head tilts. “How do you mean?”
I lift my arms and rattle the chains. “If we were on equal ground, able to voice our thoughts truthfully, then my answers might be different.” I eye her closely. “And your questions, I bet, would be much different.”
She’s so still, if I blink, I might miss the slight tremor in her hands. Gradually, I let my gaze roam over her face, taking in those beautiful, captivating features I can’t get out of my head no matter how many times I sketch her.
We’re an inevitability—a certainty that no amount of chains and bars and guards will prevent.
This time, she’s the one to break the connection as she glances at the wall clock. “I think that’s enough for today.”
Disappointment coils the muscles at the base of my spine, and I clench my jaw.
Where is the combative psychologist. Where is her determination to make me see the world her way.
Doctor Noble is a narcissist, and I’ve spent the past year studying her and devising my strategy for a woman I have yet to meet.
I release the rising frustration with a slow exhale.
Tomorrow.
We have an infinity of tomorrows.