Page 41 of Two for Joy

Romeo fixed her with the most menacing stare he could muster. “Make a note of this. Stay the fuck away from Chad.”

“Okay—”

“I’m not answering any of your questions until you write that down.”

Holly huffed, then wrote down Romeo’s words at the top of her page. “Done.”

“Good.”

“I was doing it for you. You can forgive me, right?”

“I’m nothing towards you. I feel nothing.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You’ll believe what you want to.” Romeo sighed, then jutted his chin towards the papers on her desk. “Let’s get on with it…”

“I’ve got a publication date now.”

“Maybe this time you’ll stick to it, not push it back.”

Holly looked down, nodding. “There’s a few bits…”

“There always is, and always will be.”

She went on like he hadn’t spoken. “I wanted to ask why random people?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your victims are random, no pattern to them, no group. Other killers I’ve read about choose similar victims. Whether age, sex, sexuality, profession…”

Romeo shrugged. “It wasn’t about them, it was about my own need.”

Holly wrote something down, then covered it with her arm. “I always thought you might have been looked at differently if you’d gone after bad people.”

“Bad people?”

“Yeah, if you’d have targeted other killers, you’d be like an antihero.”

“Why would I kill other people like me? We’re family.”

“A family?”

“Yeah, we’re a separate species from the rest of you.”

“All murderers?”

Romeo rolled his eyes. “Anyone can kill. Jealousy, anger, money, accidentally, but those people aren’t my family. The killers who have theneedin their heads, the desire to end life, I’m a member of that. We’re the bad, the rest of you are the good.”

“We’ve gone through this. You weren’t born bad.”

Romeo sighed. “I was thinking more about Trisha Nobel, the woman I didn’t kill.”

“And?”

“Trisha had a kid—”

“Yes,” Holly interrupted “And it bothered you that her son would grow up without his mother.”

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