Fragile Sanctuary (Sparrow Falls Book 1)

It took everything in me to keep my hold on Rho gentle. Today had been countless torturous lifetimes of her slipping through my fingers, from others’ vicious actions and my own stupidity. But having her in my arms again, feeling the beat of her heart against my chest, melted the worst of that away.

“You shouldn’t be running,” I rasped. “Or jumping.”

“Shut up,” Rho mumbled, shoving her face into my neck and breathing me in.

Keeping Rho in my arms, I climbed the two steps up to the deck and crossed to the back door. Opening it, I stepped inside. I kicked the door shut with my boot and flipped the lock. Darkness swirled around us as I strode down the hall and into the living room. Lowering to the couch, I cradled her against me, not bothering to turn on the light. She burrowed into me, and I trailed my fingers up and down her back, relishing the feel of each vertebra in her spine, the rhythm of it, the vibration.

“Thanks for coming back,” Rho whispered.

My fingers stilled. “Told you. Can’t stay away. You clawed yourself inside. Walking away would be like tearing out a part of myself—even if it would be the smart move.”

She shifted then, moving so she could straddle me. It wasn’t sexual; it was pure dominance as her eyes narrowed on me. “Why?”

I knew I’d have to tell her. Knew that coming back here meant only one thing. Telling Rho everything.

That oppressive weight resettled on my chest, the icy dread seeping in. But then Rho slid her fingers through mine, grounding me in the here and now. Her touch was better than any damn breathing exercise or anti-anxiety med. “You can tell me anything. I promise.”

My eyes burned as I stared at Rho through the dark. Even in the shadows, her beauty stopped me dead. The wildness of it, the freedom. I didn’t want to lose the way she looked at me. And I knew telling her the truth might do just that. But there was no other choice, no place left to go.

“After college, I went straight into an accelerated doctoral program in psychology.”

“So, you’re a shrink?”

“Technically. But I never went into practice.” This was the easy part, the clinical piece, but even it seemed to stick in the back of my throat. “One of my professors had ties to the bureau and suggested I apply to their Behavioral Analysis Unit.”

Rho studied me, not letting go of my hands. “And what does that unit do, exactly? Trace said profiler, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard the term outside movies and TV.”

My thumbs traced designs on the backs of her hands, and I used the feel of her skin to keep me steady. “We’re the law enforcement nerds, honestly.”

She gave me a droll look. “You’re hardly a nerd.”

“Don’t be so sure. I’ve got an IQ of one-forty-four.”

Rho’s brow lifted. “Interesting. So, I’m shacked up with a genius.”

“I prefer nerd.”

“Okay, I can go with nerd. Do you have any black-framed glasses to complete the effect? I think I could be into that.”

I shot up, kissing her. My tongue swept in, stroking and teasing but not taking it any further. Not until she knew the truth. I pulled back to find those hazel eyes slightly unfocused. “I’ll bring my reading glasses next time.”

Rho stared down at me, waiting.

I sighed. “Profilers are sort of like analysts. We take all the facts from a series of crimes and build the image of a suspect. Age, sex, race, personality traits.”

“How do you get your cases?”

“We have to be invited by local law enforcement, or another arm of the FBI could ask for our help when crimes cross state lines.”

“That’s a lot of moving around with no real roots,” Rho mused.

“We were on the go a lot. Living out of hotels.”

She looked down at me, adding shades of color to the image she had of me in her mind. “How long did you work there?”

“Almost five years.”

Rho gripped my hands tighter. “You probably saw a lot of awful things.”

My mouth went dry, but I forced the words out anyway. “I did. But I didn’t see enough.”

She frowned, curiosity brimming in those soulful eyes.

“I didn’t let it in. I should’ve. But I turned off that part of myself. I saw crimes as data and not the human beings behind it.”

“That makes complete sense. How could you? If you let yourself truly see that day in and day out, you’d drown in grief. It was a self-protection mechanism.”

That was Rho. Always seeing the best in everyone, in me. But she gave me too much leeway, too much grace. “I’m sure that was part of it. But there’s an ugly piece, too.”

Rho kept a grip on my hands and didn’t look away.

It took everything to hold her gaze as I continued. “I thought I was hot shit. It was like my mind was made for profiling. I saw connections no one else did. Things that led to more case closures than people with a decade or more on the job.”

I gripped her hands harder, needing to feel the contact with the here and now. “I got cocky. Wrote a few books. Got some press attention. Kept working cases.”

“Anson,” Rho said quietly. “There’s nothing wrong with being good at your job.”

“Maybe not. But I was a dick. Thought I knew everything.”

“And something happened,” she whispered.

I moved my head up and down in the barest nod. “We started working a case of serial murders that crossed state lines. Everywhere from the Southwest up the coast to the Pacific Northwest. All women. Restrained. Ligature marks on their ankles, wrists, and necks. But the cause of death was always the severing of their carotid.”

There was the tiniest jerk of Rho’s hands. A jolt of shock. “He slit their throats.”

“Yes. But every time he did, he mailed a letter to local law enforcement. A clue. A game.”

Rho’s expression was everything I should’ve felt about the case but didn’t. “That’s awful.”

“He gets a thrill out of it. It’s almost sexual for him, that cat-and-mouse back-and-forth. Each note had a word game. Clues that gave a letter, and the letters gave a location. They started calling him The Hangman.”

“And that location was where the body would be,” Rho finished for me.

“Yes.” I traced more circles on the backs of her hands, a swirl of my callused fingertips against the smooth silk of her skin. “I was good at his game. Too good. We gave one press conference, and something I said during it tipped him off that I was the one solving his riddles.”

Rho gripped my hands so hard I’d likely have bruises tomorrow. “He fixated on you.”

My throat worked as I swallowed. “The clues started being sent to the BAU and addressed to me. I should’ve known he’d dig. He sent letters to the victims’ families afterward, notes that told us he’d watched them. Interviews, social media posts. He tracked them because he got off on their pain. The emotional torture of the loved ones was as much of a high as the physical.”

She shuddered against me. “Anson…”

“I was stupid thinking I wouldn’t end up as a target, that I was out of his reach. I’d used my middle name as my last when I published my book and never went public with my last name at press conferences. I thought that would be enough.”

Fear swirled in Rho’s eyes, dulling the gold to a deep amber. “What did he do?”

“Found my family. My sister. Grabbed her outside the hospital she worked at in Portland. Kept her for twenty-four hours. Then he sliced her throat and sent me the clue to find her. We didn’t even know she was missing. She always worked crazy shifts as an ER nurse. I didn’t know that he was terrorizing her for a full day, slicing her throat, because I was too caught up in my own bullshit.”

“Anson,” she rasped. “Tell me they got him. That they put him away for the rest of his life.”

I shook my head, the agony digging deeper at yet another failure. “No idea where he is. Cases are still open, but he went quiet when I quit the bureau.” I swallowed hard, trying to choke back the pain. “I’d already gotten my sister killed, and when my father had a heart attack three months later, I knew I killed him, too. My mom thinks so. Said as much at Dad’s funeral.”

Rho only held my hands tighter, not wavering. But tears brimmed in her eyes. “You didn’t do this, Anson.”

“I might not’ve held the blade or stopped the heart, but I may as well have,” I bit out.

She shook my hands this time, nails digging into my skin. “You were trying to stop him.”

I had tried. Before Greta died and I realized it was all pointless, I’d given it everything. Nights of barely any sleep so I could keep digging when the bureau moved us on to other cases. Endless phone calls and flying back to crime scenes on my own dime. But was it obsession more than anything? I didn’t know. Maybe it was that ego-driven need to defeat him more than dedication to the greater good.

Rho released one of my hands and brushed the hair away from my face, her fingers lingering there. “None of us is just one thing. We’re not all good or all bad. We’re a blend of shadow and light. And those sparks only shine because of the darkness.”

My throat constricted, air barely getting through.

“I hate that this happened to you. That you lost people you loved. That a monster ripped away so much from you. But you are a beautiful person, Anson. A good person. And you are that way because of what you’ve been through.”

Rho’s eyes bored into me. “You are the kind of person who takes time with a terrified dog to show him that all men aren’t bad. The kind of person who sleeps on a lumpy couch because you knew I was too proud to say I was scared. And you’re the kind of person who made it safe for me to say some of the things I was most scared to give voice to.”

Her fingers trailed down my neck to my shoulder. They dug in there, squeezing as if to ask if I was really paying attention. “You made me feel seen, Anson. Understood when I always felt like a bit of a freak. Do you get what a gift that is?”

“Rho.” Her name was more plea than anything else.

“So, you had a big head. Maybe you were a cocky prick. So what? You think that means you deserved to have your life shredded? To have your sister killed?”

My jaw clamped shut, teeth grinding.

“Guess what? It wasn’t about you. It was about some sick asshole and his obsession. You didn’t do it. He did.”

Something about what Rho said, the ferocity with which she said it, penetrated. For possibly the first time. It wasn’t about you.

She was right. If I hadn’t been at the bureau then, the unsub would’ve fixated on someone else. It could’ve been anyone, for any reason. It just happened to be me.

“Sometimes, it feels like the guilt is going to swallow me whole,” I admitted.

A few tears spilled over Rho’s lids, dropping to my chest. Her hand slid down, covering the spot where they’d fallen. “I know. I’d give anything to take it away for you. Anything. But I can’t. All I can say is that I know.”

And she did. Rho knew, unlike anyone else ever could. The circumstances were completely different, but the weight was somehow the same. The price we paid for still breathing amidst the loss.

“The only thing we can do is let them teach us how to live,” Rho whispered.

I stared up at her, those wild brown locks swirling around me, blocking out the rest of the world.

“We know there are no guarantees. So, we live life to the fullest. We don’t miss a second. And we appreciate all the things they loved so much.”

A lump formed in my throat, a boulder I had to clear before I could speak. “Greta loved flowers.”

Rho’s fingers clamped down on mine.

My mouth curved the slightest bit. “But she was awful at taking care of them. We talked every week, and she would moan about killing another one. She would’ve loved your back deck.”

Even in the dark, I could see all the color out the back doors—more pots than I could count. Red, yellow, pink, purple. So much life.

I looked back at Rho, the same swirl of color, of life, in her eyes. “I wanted to climb into the grave with her.”

“I know,” Rho whispered. “But she wouldn’t want that.”

“No,” I croaked. “She wouldn’t.”

Rho bent, lowering herself slowly until her lips were just a breath away from mine. “So, live.”

And for the first time in two years, she made me want to.