Page 70 of Scarred By Sin

The hallway was silent on the other side. He opened the door, stepped into the corridor, and pulled it shut behind him with a soft click.

The hallway was lit by the warm glow of the wall sconces. Jacob continued straight ahead, past the elevators. He didn’t hurry. He never hurried. Fortunately, by slowing his gait, his limp wasn’t as noticeable.

He stopped completely in front of Brooklyn’s door.

He inhaled through his nose, slowly, drawing the air across his palate the way a sommelier might sample a wine. Her fragrance was there. Faint, clinging to the door and the frame and the carpet at the threshold, the residue of a woman who had just passed through this space minutes ago.

It was subtle, clean, and distinctly hers.

It had taken their conversation in Alaska for him to understand what he’d been circling for his entire life. The quiet exchange between siblings who had grown up in the same house and become entirely different species. She had studied him with an expression that carried neither fear nor hatred but something worse.

Understanding.

She understood him. Not the way the FBI profilers believed they did, with their frameworks and their acronyms and their behavioral science degrees. Brooklyn understood him because she was made from the same genetic material. The same parents, the same house, the same gene pool that had produced whatever he was. She had simply taken the raw components and built something different with them, and the fact that she had succeeded where he had chosen not to was the one thing about his sister that Jacob could not forgive.

Today was the day she understood the error of her ways.

He placed his hand on the door handle. It turned without resistance. Once again, he gave a slight pause to mull over such a change in behavior. She hadn’t engaged the deadbolt, which meant she either expected to leave soon or she didn’t think she needed it.

Jacob thought about gradually releasing his hold on the handle, stepping back, and then returning to Vogel’s unit. But then he breathed that sweet fragrance once more, and he couldn’t help himself. He opened the door and stepped inside. It was rare that his heart rate accelerated, but it did so now at the sight of her.

Brooklyn was standing at the dining room wall, the murder board half dismantled. Photographs and clippings were stacked on the dining room table behind her, lengths of red and blue string coiled in loose piles. Her right hand was reaching for a newspaper clipping pinned to the upper right corner of the board as he closed the door behind him.

The lock engaged with a click, and in the silence of the empty condo, the sound traveled.

Her hand stilled on the clipping.

She turned her head toward him. Not her body. Just her head, the way a person does when they hear something they’ve been expecting, and the expression on her face was not surprise, not fear, not the wide-eyed recognition of prey registering a predator.

It was the same expression she’d given him in Alaska.

Understanding.

~ The End ~