I take a sip of bourbon and stare at the person restrained to the bed, consumed with both fear and fascination that someone so evil can be contained inside someone so beautiful. Such a thing shouldn’t be possible. Yet it’s happening. I’m witnessing it with my very own eyes. It makes me keep the bourbon glass pressed to my lips.

This time, I take a gulp.

“I remember when you used to get tipsy after a single glass of wine,” Len says as he watches me drink. “That’s clearly changed. I suppose I had a little something to do with that.”

I swallow. “More than a little.”

“Am I allowed to say I’m worried about you?” Len says. “Because I am. This isn’t like you, Cee. You’re very different from the person I fell in love with.”

“The feeling is mutual.”

“And because of that you’ve decided to drink yourself to death?”

“You, of all people, have no right to judge me,” I say. “I don’t want your fucking concern. Because this”—I raise the glass of bourbon still clutched in my hand—“is your fault. All of it. Now, we can talk all about why I drink, but only after you tell me more about those girls you killed.”

“You want to know how I did it?”

Len smiles. A sick, ghoulish grin that looks profane on Katherine’s kind and lovely face. It takes every ounce of restraint I have not to slap it away.

“No,” I say. “I want to know why you did it. There was more to it than simple enjoyment. Something compelled you to act that way.”

A noise rises from outside.

A gust of wind, shrieking like a banshee across the lake.

It slams into the lake house, and the entire place shudders, sending up a communal rattle of windowpanes. The bedside lamp again starts to flicker.

This time, it doesn’t stop.

“You don’t really want to know, Cee,” Len says. “You only think you do. Because to truly understand my actions, you’ll need to confront all the things about me that you overlooked or ignored because you were too busy nursing wounds from your own shitty childhood. But you weren’t abandoned by your whore mother. You didn’t have a father who beat you. You didn’t grow up getting passed around foster homes like an unwanted mutt.”

Len wants me to feel sorry for him, and I do. No child should experience what he went through. Yet I also know that many do—and that they easily manage to go through life without hurting others.

“Those girls you killed had nothing to do with that,” I say.

“I didn’t care. I still wanted to hurt someone. I needed it.”

And I’d needed him to be the man I thought he was. The kind, decent, charming man I wrongly assumed I’d married. That he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do that fills me with a sticky combination of anger and sadness and grief.

“If you felt this way, why did you insist on dragging me into it?” There’s a quiver in my voice. I’m not sure which emotion is causing it—rage or despair. “You should have left me alone. Instead, you let me fall in love with you. You let me marry you and build a life with you. A life that you knew all along you were going to destroy.”

Len shakes his head. “I didn’t think it would get so bad. I thought I could control it.”

“Our marriage should have been enough to stop you,” I say, the quiver growing to a quake. “I should have been enough!”

“I tried not to act on it,” Len says. “The urge refused to go away, no matter how much I wanted it to. Some nights, while you were asleep, I’d lie awake and think about what it would feel like to watch the life go out of a person’s eyes and know I was the cause of it. The more I thought about it, the more I resisted. And the more I resisted, the stronger the urge became.”

“Until you came here and did it.”

“Not at first,” Len says, and my gut tightens at the thought of him killing others elsewhere. “In LA. Sometimes, when I was out there alone for work, I’d scour the streets, find a hooker, take her back to my room.”

I don’t flinch at the news. After knowing your husband murdered at least three women, finding out he also cheated doesn’t have the sting it would under normal circumstances.

“And then one night, I didn’t feel like bothering with the room. We just got in my car, parked somewhere quiet, made the necessary financial arrangements. And as it was happening, me with the front seat reclined, her kneeling in the wheel well, giving a blow job that wasn’t worth the money, I thought, It would be so easy to kill her right now.”

I shiver, repulsed. Once again, I can’t believe that this man was my husband, that most of my nights were spent sleeping by his side, that I loved him with every fiber of my being. Even worse, I can’t get over how completely he had fooled me. During our time together, I never suspected—not once—he was a fraction this cruel and depraved.

“Did you?” I say, not wanting an answer but needing one all the same.

“No,” Len says. “It was too risky. But I knew it was going to happen someday.”

“Why here?”

“Why not here? It’s quiet, secluded. Plus, I could rent a car, drive here for a weekend, come back, and pretend I was in LA. You never suspected a thing.”

“I found out eventually,” I say.

“Not until it was too late for Megan, Toni, and Sue Ellen.”

I feel a pain in my gut, as sharp and twisting as if I’d taken the knife on the bed next to me and shoved it into my side.

“Tell me where you left their bodies.”

“To atone for my sins?”

I shake my head and take another sip of bourbon. “To atone for mine.”

“I see,” Len says. “Then what? And don’t pretend you haven’t thought it through. I know exactly what you plan on doing. Once you learn where those bodies are, you’re going to kill me all over again.”

When he was alive, I found it uncanny how well Len could read my thoughts. Sometimes it felt like he knew my every mood, whim, and need, which I absolutely loved. What a pleasure it was to have my spouse know me so well. In hindsight, it was more curse than blessing. I suspect it’s how Len was able to hide his true nature from me for so long. I’m certain it’s how he knows exactly what I have planned now.

“Yes,” I say, seeing no point in lying. He wouldn’t believe me if I did. “That’s what I intend to do.”

“And what if I refuse?”

I set the glass on the nightstand, next to the lamp that continues to flicker. It’s like a strobe light, plunging the room into microbursts of darkness and light as my hand once again moves toward the knife. “Then I’ll kill you anyway.”

“I don’t think you want that much blood on your hands, Cee,” Len says, pronouncing the nickname with an exaggerated hiss. “I know from experience you won’t hesitate to kill me. But it’s your other victim that should give you pause.”

“What other victim?”

“Katherine, of course.”

He doesn’t need to say anything else. I now understand exactly what he means.

If I killed him, I’d also be killing Katherine Royce.

Riding on the coattails of that revelation is another bit of clarity. One that’s more hopeful, if no less complicated.

“She’s still there,” I say.

Len doesn’t get a chance to respond. He’s blocked by another screaming wind outside.

Coming closer.

Swooping in.

It rams against the house and everything shakes, me included. I reach for the nightstand to steady myself. In the hallway, something falls to the floor and shatters.

The nightstand lamp stops flickering long enough for me to see the rattling bourbon glass, Len straining against the ropes, the smug grin on his face.

Then the lamp, the room, and the entire lake house go completely dark.