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hold together, but the utter conviction in his voice drew a shudder from her. And a question, too. “What was it he wrote? What did he say about my sister?”
    Durant braked hard as a coyote dashed across the road a few feet from their bumper. Her grip on the dog tightened as the tires squealed. There was a moment the car lost its grip, the rear end sliding sideways. But the ex-agent kept them on the road, and the coyote vanished into the tall grasses.
    “You okay?” he asked her.
    “Sure. Fine. Never better,” she said, though her heart was pounding with the near miss. Clearly upset with the jostling, the dog whimpered and struggled in her arms until Lauren helped her climb down to the floor of the backseat. “There you go, sweetie. Curl up down there. Good girl.”
    Turning around, Lauren strapped herself back in and focused on the agent. “Now tell me, what was this troll saying on the forum?”
    His gaze locked on the road, Durant said, “You don’t need to hear it. Trust me, you don’t want it in your head.”
    “I want to know. I have to. I owe that much to Rachel.”
    The car grew so quiet that Lauren could make out the chatter of each pebble that passed beneath the tires, every breath the driver took.
    When he spoke again, his words were scarcely louder. “That’s what I thought once. But I was wrong, Lauren. I never should have—”
    “But it’s your job,” she argued.
    “No, it wasn’t ,” he ground out, “as the special agent in charge—all my colleagues and the damned psychologist they made me see—were all too quick to remind me. But because I had to know what he said, this investigation—this hunt for the twisted animal who killed her—is fucking all that I have left.”
    By the dim light of the glowing dashboard, she studied the tension in his handsome features. The tautness of his square jaw, the way he gripped the wheel so hard, it looked as if he might rip it from the column. Though she wasn’t particularly bothered by the language, she took the harshness in his voice as another warning. A warning that this man was skating dangerously close to the edge.
    “All? I don’t understand.” Hardly daring to breathe, she asked, “You’re not talking about Rachel, are you?”
    He shook his head before confirming, “Hell, no, I’m not talking about Rachel. This all goes back to the very first victim that I know of. Her name was Carrie—Carrie Wilkinson…”
    There was a weighted quality to his pause, like a heavy stone dropped onto the frozen surface of a pond. With the cracks in the ice spreading toward her, Lauren knew instinctively that he had something more to say, something that would change everything she thought or guessed about him.
    “Carrie Wilkinson Durant,” he said, his words as cold and empty as the emerging starlight outside. “We’d been married for ten years when she took one of my razorblades out of the package. Took it with her to the bathtub. I found her floating hours later. Just the way he’d planned.”

EPISODE TWO
    I’ve already told you: the only way to a woman’s heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.
    —Marquis de Sade

CHAPTER FOUR
    The mention of his wife’s name reopened old scar tissue, and Brent was there again, seeing the streamers of pale golden hair floating on the surface, hearing the splash of blood-tinged waves as he’d dragged Carrie from her bath.
    But the water had long since grown cool, just as she had, her flesh pale and wrinkled from the water, her hazel eyes wide and fully dilated. Worst of all had been the absence in them, the yawning emptiness that told him his frantic efforts at resuscitation had come far too late.
    Yet he couldn’t make himself stop, not even when the paramedics—responding to a call he would never remember making—had tried to pull him away. Maybe it was because he knew, knew it to his marrow, that this cold kiss would be their last, this damp embrace final.
    “Your wife,”