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The camera panned to Shelby.

She sat in her chair, arms crossed tight over her chest, a scowl the size of Montana on her face. “Yes.”

Four years ago, Shelby hadn’t known what direction that she wanted to go with her life.

Then Leo Darling had happened, and she’d found her path.

She wasn’t a psychiatrist yet, but she would be in about two and a half years if she kept on the same full-throttle path that she’d been on since Leo had entered her life.

“Nineteen and two halves.”

“Nineteen and two halves?” The reporter paused. “I’m sorry, but wouldn’t that make it twenty?”

“No,” Shelby said. “Because he nearly killed two—his sister and a woman named Blanche Brand—but they’d ended up surviving.”

“That’s right, poppet.”

My hand clenched.

Just as they had when they panned the camera toward me as I sat across the room from him and listened as he shared his story. They caught my every reaction. Especially my concern over Shelby.

If I’d thought Leo had an unhealthy obsession with me, he really had one when it came to Shelby.

With the discovery of Blanche Brand had come the FBI, and the FBI had taken custody of Leo before I could kill him in his cell like I’d wanted to.

The same went for Brayden Michaels and Camden Crane, the two eighteen-year-old boys that’d kidnapped me and buried me in a box for Leo.

But where Leo was protected because he was in a secure medical treatment facility for the men who were counted as “mentally ill,” the other two boys had gone to regular prison.

And died there.

Black hadn’t said, but I knew he was responsible for the acts.

Which only made me love him all the more.

“Let’s talk about Blanche Brand,” the reporter said. “Why did you take her?”

I knew why.

Though he’d never shared.

But Blanche looked like me.

She was my replacement when he couldn’t get to me.

Blanche and I had met only once in the four years since she’d been found, but in it we saw the truth. I was the reason she was taken.

I’d apologized, even though it wasn’t my place to apologize, and she’d forgiven me.

But we’d decided that we’d never see each other again. We were reminders of what Leo had done, and I couldn’t fault her, as she couldn’t fault me, for not wanting anything to do with each other.

That was until the producer—Rush Everheart—of this documentary had asked us to come together to produce it.

Rush, Shelby’s mentor, was a mastermind in his field. He’d worked for the FBI for ten years as a profiler before he’d quit after a particularly bad case. Now he taught at one of the most prestigious colleges in the country.

His solution to our healing? Get him to talk. Take away his power. Then leave him behind.

Black had asked me why I’d agreed to this, and my answer was: It’s time to heal. It’s time to get Leo out of my head once and for all.