She could not tear her eyes away from the stain.

Bile burned the tender spot at the back of her throat, but she would not allow herself to be sick. She had made a pact. This was her duty.

She swallowed again.

She knew what was coming.

In a couple of minutes, Hudson would direct her assistant to slice through the scalp and open up the skull. But Wildeve did not want to hear the whine of blade against bone, the rising of the dust and the scorched smell of hell.

She did not want to watch Hudson bend over in observation as soon as the skull was chiseled open, seeking out signs of hemorrhaging.

She did not want to see the brain—the part of the body that makes us all human, that lets us sing and laugh and savor and love—pulled free with forceps for analysis, reduced to a lump of meat.

Her hand gripped the edge of the table. The walls rippled, the start of an earthquake. She breathed. In. Out. In. Out. After a sort of fierce gulping, she was able to compose herself.

She had wanted to be here. This was her choice.

But it was too much.

Too soon.

In a flash, Sheridan was at her shoulder again, and she leaned into him, the solid mass of his body a comfort as her legs began to shake.

“I’m fine,” she said. Repeated it. A lifelong mantra to keep the darkness at bay.

“Let’s get you some water,” he said, steering her toward the door.

She wanted to protest, to insist that she could handle it. She was one of the lead detectives on a murder case that was making national headlines, for Christ’s sake. She didn’t need to lean on anyone.

Three or four black spots in the periphery of her vision began to flash. Lightning bolts of nerve pain struck her jawline, spreading out toward her ear, the back of her head. The beginnings of an attack of trigeminal neuralgia. Extreme stress could do that. It could bring her to her knees.

Wildeve embraced the hot spikes of physical pain. They distracted from the deadness inside. She wanted to stay here until the organs were returned to the body, until the incisions were sewn closed, the body cleansed and the hair washed. To bear witness.

And she had promised. They had promised. Not the vows they had made amongst the rain of confetti, although she had meant every word of those, too, but in the dark cloak of their honeymoon suite, a confessional for their bleakest fears.

But the room was growing smaller, the black dots running into blotches that would soon obscure her vision. And the pain was drilling its way deeper, and she needed her fix of carbamazepine and some water, and her bed. She staggered as another blast of fire exploded in her head. She didn’t want to, but it was time for her to leave.

Wildeve half turned to get a last glimpse of the eyeless body on the mortuary slab. The fifth victim of The Doll Maker.