“We met on a train,” I said, because it was obvious the same thing had happened to him. “I was seventeen. She was older, twenty-two. We started talking and went back to her place, and then she got me drunk on tequila, and we ended up in bed. She was feeling bad because her boyfriend had dumped her, and I was the consolation prize.”

“I met Diana Geary on a train, too,” the other Dylan replied. “Same as you. We had sex.”

He stopped. He waited for me to ask, and I couldn’t stop myself.

“Then what?”

“Then after we were done, I suffocated her with a pillow and cut off her head.”

“Oh, shit.” I struggled against the ropes that held me again, but I couldn’t move.

“And do you know what happened after I killed her? Not a damn thing. No one found out. No one knew it was me. Once I figured that out, once I knew I could do anything, I tried different methods, different victims. The violence itself wasn’t really the high. The thrill was knowing I could get away with it. By the time I turned twenty-six, I’d killed fourteen people. The police had no idea.”

“You’re a sick son of a bitch.”

He shrugged off my loathing, as if moral and immoral were just mirror images of each other.

“I could have kept going like that for a long time, but everything changed on my twenty-sixth birthday. Do you remember what you did that day?”

Actually, I did. It was a memorable thing to do on my birthday. “I saw a shrink.”

“That’s right. Court-ordered therapy for anger management. After a bar fight.”

“Yes.”

“Who did you see?”

“Her name was Vanessa Kirby.”

Dylan nodded. “Yeah, I was supposed to see Dr. Kirby, too, but she was sick that day and didn’t show up. So I saw someone else. There was a shrink with an office on the same floor, and I figured, what the hell? All I needed to do was check off a box on my court papers. Guess who I saw?”

My brow furrowed. “Who?”

“Eve Brier.”

I swore under my breath.

“Yeah, isn’t it funny how things work out? Eve was smart. She really got me. She told me that I felt guilty about killing my father and getting away with it. She said I felt an intense need to be punished, so I kept putting myself in situations that proved I was a bad person. Of course, I hadn’t told her about any of the other people I’d killed, but I guess that would have just proved her point.”

Dylan got up from the chair again. He grabbed a skinny-fit dress shirt in deep purple, with a checkered design. He held it up on the hanger. “What do you think of this shirt? Can I pull it off?”

I stared at him. “What?”