I was still asleep. I had to be.

I had no doubt Ricky was capable of violence. He’d put a man in the hospital two weeks ago. Like Gabriel, he’d grown up in a world where that was a reasonable way to solve your problems and, indeed, sometimes it was the only way.

My mother taught me that there was never any excuse for violence. I remember her horror when my private school principal called after I slugged a fellow third-grader because he tripped me on purpose. And I remember my father taking the phone and saying he sure as hell hoped the boy’s parents had gotten the first call, and that if someone lashed out at me, I had the right to hit back. Guess whose words I took to heart?

But now Ricky stood there saying he thought he’d killed James, and I was one hundred percent certain I was still asleep in the police station. Whatever Ricky was capable of, it didn’t include murdering James. It just didn’t.

I squeezed my eyes shut and waited to drift out of this nightmare.

“Liv?” Ricky’s voice at my ear. “Can I explain? I know there’s no excuse, but just hear me out. Then you can go. I won’t stop you.”

I was still holding his hands, which were trembling now. When I looked, he was right there, his hazel eyes bright with panic, and I knew this wasn’t a dream.

I ran my fingertips over his knuckles and felt the scabs there. Scabs from the scrapes I’d seen Wednesday morning. After James died. They were still there, his knuckles rough.

James had been beaten. I hadn’t more than briefly noted that, because what mattered were those bruises around his neck and the symbols carved into . . .

My head jerked up. “He’d been strangled—like the other victims. And he had the marks. The ones my parents—”

“No,” he said emphatically. “Absolutely not. I didn’t do any of that.”

“But the beating,” I said. “That was you?”

He nodded and shifted his weight. “After the blowout with my dad, I went to Gabriel’s place to see you, and James was there. I just . . . I’d had enough. He was still stalking you, and I decided I was going to show him why that was a very bad idea.”

“So you called him out?”

A short, humorless laugh. “You don’t call out guys like James Morgan. They’ll walk away and phone the cops. He drove off. I followed. I decided I’d wait until he got someplace quiet, cut him off, and confront him. Except I didn’t need to. He drove to an empty building and went inside. The place was up for demolition and reconstruction. Something to do with tech, so I figured it was his project.”

“You followed him inside.”