“To be with her. In every sense, not just the biblical. Although that was—”

“Stop there...” Ian warned, tilting the bottle up again, but I hardly heard him.

“She’s like this living fire, jumping and sparking, and lighting me up even while she casts fierce shadow all around us, and when I’m with her I can totally see how fire could be the source of all life, because that’s what she is. She is life. She burns with it. And I want to kill everyone who’s ever laid a cruel hand on her.”

I hadn’t realized I was clenching my empty glass until Ian shrugged and pushed the bottle my way. “So do it.”

Glass clinked as I poured. “Do what?”

“Kill him. We both know who you’re talking about. Find him and kill him.”

“I can’t.” Well, I could, but... “She wants to see him die. And I don’t fucking blame her.”

Ian frowned, as if I’d started speaking gibberish. “I didn’t mean now. I’m just saying that if you want to prove you can protect her, give her what she came here for.”

“That’s the plan, but I can’t do much until I know who the bastard is.”

“Just give it a little more time. Before she went to bed, Van was making a list of possible suspects based on Sera’s description and details from the crime scene. She’s planning to show mug shots to Sera tomorrow. If they can identify him, Cam and Liv will be able to find him.” He shrugged. “Then you can do what you do best, which will be giving her what she wants most in the world.”

“You think killing is what I do best? Did you learn nothing from whatever you heard through the thin walls?”

“Ah. Humor as a defense mechanism. I know that tactic well.”

I didn’t bother denying it. Nor did I own up to what was really bothering me. I was supposed to stop Sera’s bad guy before he killed her family. Killing him as an afterthought wouldn’t give her back what she’d lost.

“No use stressing over it now.” Ian pushed his chair back from the table. “There’s nothing anyone can do until Sera’s had a chance to look at the mug shots.” He stood and pushed his chair in. “I don’t think you have anything to prove to her, though. She likes you. We can all see that. So just don’t kidnap her anymore and keep doing...whatever you did upstairs, and you should be golden.”

After Ian went to bed, I poured another inch of whiskey and pulled Vanessa’s laptop into position in front of me. Ian might not have understood computers, but I understood them well enough to find Van’s search history and the files she’d worked on most recently. After three minutes of clicking links and opening documents, I found what I was looking for, though probably only because she’d made no effort to hide it. A series of six mug shots taken from a police database she shouldn’t have had access to, compiled and labeled with both a number and a letter designation. Three files later, I found the code key, which provided each paroled—and one escaped—criminal with an arrest record, labeled with those same letter/number combinations.

I stared at the pictures, wondering which—if any—of these men had smiled at Sera as he drove his knife into her. Which of them had shot her parents, then stabbed and violated her little sister? Which man would I have to kill to see that rage in her eyes replaced with a sad peace that would grow a little less sad and a little more peaceful every day?

But their pictures told me nothing, except that all of them had light eyes, pale skin, and dark curls of various lengths.

Their arrest records didn’t say much more. All had been arrested for violent crimes within one hundred miles of her parents’ home, including multiple counts of rape, aggravated assault, murder and one other home invasion. Three had been convicted and served time—several years each—before being paroled. One escaped from a local jail, where he was being kept during his appeal. One was acquitted. One never went to trial, thanks to police error. Such was the state of the justice system—I knew men who’d done more time for drug charges and nonviolent robbery than any of the sick fucks the police had questioned in Sera’s case.

But none of that told me who to kill. Vanessa’s technical sleuthing was no more help than Noelle’s incomplete predictions had been. But maybe together...

I stood so fast my chair screeched across the kitchen floor, and for a second, I was afraid I’d woken Gran. But when no sound came from her room, I practically ran into the living room and hauled my duffel bag out from under the coffee table, where I’d been storing all the stuff I’d taken out of my room when Sera moved in.

Elle’s notebook was at the bottom. I pulled it out carefully, aware, as always, that the cardboard cover and flimsy paper pages wouldn’t last forever.

In the kitchen, I rooted through the junk drawer until I found a pen and a half-used pad of sticky notes, then I sat in front of Van’s laptop again, ready—no, desperate—to make sense of passages whose meaning had been eluding me for years.

There was no guarantee I’d have any more success this time, but I couldn’t help thinking that I was more prepared than ever to unravel Elle’s knot of prophesies, considering that this time I already knew not only what and where the crime was, but who the victims were.

All I needed was the perpetrator’s identity.

While everyone else slept, I spent the next two and a half hours reading that notebook all over again, from start to finish, flagging all of the promising passages with a sticky note. There weren’t many. Then I reread the suspects’ criminal records, wishing that, like Cam, I had a degree in criminal justice. Even an unused one.