Ritual Sins by Anne Stuart

… freshen up …”
    “You mean you have to use the bathroom?”
    “No,” she snapped, pulling herself together. “If I had to pee I’d tell you. I just wanted a few moments of peace and quiet, some time to myself.”
    “Peace and quiet we have in abundance here atthe center. If you want time to yourself I’ll take you someplace where you won’t be disturbed.”
    “Where?”
    “My private quarters.”
    From her expression you would have thought he’d said Alcatraz. “I don’t think so.”
    “Afraid?” he taunted softly.
    Her reaction was gratifyingly immediate. “Not of you.”
    “Why should you be?” he countered. “And yet you seem edgy whenever you’re around me. I wonder why?”
    “That’s not fear, that’s simple dislike,” she shot back.
    He grinned. Maybe it was a mistake, but he couldn’t help it. She amused him, with her fuck-you attitude and her nervous mouth. He’d never known anyone who’d fascinated him more.
    Which just went to prove he was overripe for a change. If he was going to become fixated on an angry young woman who was no more than passably pretty, then he better have a damned good reason for it. As far as he could tell, his only reason was boredom.
    “Ah, I forgot,” he murmured. “But then, you’re here to give me a chance to change your mind, aren’t you? You want to learn to trust me, don’t you?”
    He didn’t have to read minds to guess at herresponse.
Over my dead body
, her eyes said. But her mouth was still vulnerable beneath the angry edge.
    “I want to keep an open mind,” she temporized.
    Her mind was more tightly closed than her legs, and they were locked together tighter than the entrance to Fort Knox, but Luke didn’t mind. The challenge was half the charm.
    “Of course you do. I’ll arrange for them to bring supper in to us so we won’t be disturbed. And we’ll start on helping you learn to let go of your fears. Learn to reach out.”
    This time she didn’t try to avoid the truth. “I don’t want to reach out,” she said.
    “And you don’t want to let go of your fears either. Why not?”
    “Don’t you have any fears?”
    She was surprisingly disingenuous when she asked that question, and he almost gave her a truthful answer. That his fears were all inside him. That he’d killed, and he was terrified he’d learned the taste for it. That he’d find a reason to kill again. And again. And again. Till he couldn’t stop.
    Joliet Prison could warp a man’s brain, if it wasn’t twisted inside out already. He’d lived most of his life on the edge of society, accepting the unspeakable as everyday occurrences, but nothing had prepared him for the mind of Mallo Gilmer.
    Mallo came to him sometimes in the night,when he couldn’t sleep, empty holes where his eyes once were, his teeth bared in a skeletal grin. That’s all Mallo was now—a skeleton, buried in the yard at Joliet. No one wanted to claim his body. No one wanted to claim kinship with an aberration like Mallo. A man who’d taken pleasure in killing, a true sadist, an artist of painful, prolonged death.
    In the books about serial killers Mallo’s name always came up, listing the twelve men and women he’d killed, entirely at random, going into detail on some of the more grisly murders. But Mallo often used to moan that he’d never come close to the great ones in the annals of sin. Like Albert Fish, who killed and ate scores of children during the Depression. Or Ted Bundy, whose charm and intelligence drew people into his deadly web.
    Mallo had no charm, and not so much intelligence as a certain evil cunning. He also wasn’t particularly interested in killing children—he preferred to choose more easily disposable victims. Hitchhiking students, hookers, street people. It was only when he got greedy and gutted a yuppie’s wife that anyone started making a concerted effort to stop him.
    Once they began looking it was only a matter of time, and Mallo, knowing he was going to be