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He walks away from me and then stops, because there is only glass behind him and a mountain beyond that and nowhere else to put any of this. He is still holding the mask. He looks like a man who has been gutted and is refusing to sit down.

“Do you understand what you are?” he says, and he is not talking to his trainer anymore. This is the lawyer talking, and he is shaking under it.

“You murdered Noah Brennan. You murdered Lauren Brooks. You murdered Kit Mori. You murdered Ivy Chen. You murdered Shane Cole. That is five people. That is not a crush, and it is not a love story, and it is not something you get to name for me as if I signed it.

“You used a mask so no one could say if you were a man or a woman, and a different mouth on them and the same mouth on me so I would hunt my own building. You made Noah think he was about to get laid. You made Lo and Shane think they were talking to me. You stood in my lodge and watched my sister drive away so you could walk up to my glass. You are a murderer, Cruz. A criminal. That makes you dangerous. Motive does not wash blood. Love does not wash blood. I am a lawyer. I know what this is. If I pick up that phone, Pell owns you before sunrise.”

I look at the phone in his other hand. He has not used it the entire time I have been in this room.

“I know what I am,” I say. “I knew it when Noah’s hands were on his own stomach. I knew it when Lo said your name with her fingers inside herself. I knew I should have stopped then, and I didn’t. I knew it when Shane said your name like a prayer. I still did it. I would do it again if they stood between me and you. That is the truth you asked for. It is ugly. It is what you wanted to hear.”

He does not come closer and he still does not pick up the phone. The mask is still in his hand. My face is not. He stands there long enough that the house starts to make its own noise again. The fridge hums. The glass ticks when the wind hits it. A clock ticks too, and I do not notice it until the room is this quiet.

He looks at me, then at the mask, then at the phone, as if one of those three things might change. He sets the mask on the table like it might burn him, but he keeps the phone. His hand is shaking as he walks to the glass. He puts his forehead on it and stays there with his eyes shut, and I watch his shoulders climb and drop and climb again.

“Noah left his door open,” he says. “I told myself he had gone to get laid.”

He swallows. The next name takes longer.

“Lo was still in that office. Kit told me not to work myself into an early grave.” His voice frays. “Ivy came back. Shane came back after I told him to stay home.”

He turns from the glass. His face is wrecked. I have never seen him look like this in the gym.

“They are dead because they stood near me. That is what you are telling me. That is what you did in my building and in my parking lot, and then you stood in my house and let me pull that thing off your face like that was the honest part.”

“Yes.”

He laughs and it is a bad sound, short and ugly, and then it is gone.

“Sit down,” he says.

I don’t sit, and he does not make me. He drops onto the edge of the couch instead, phone on his knee, and stares at the floor as if the names might be written there.

“I need dates,” he says. “When did this start? Not the wanting. The first time you decided someone was in the way.”

“Tuesday night. Noah. That was the first time I put the mask on for a kill. The wanting started the first month I trained you. I can give you that month if you want the calendar.”

“What did you not do?”

I wait, because that is the first question that sounds like him.

“I did not touch your sister. I waited in the trees until the car took her down the mountain. I did not put a blade in you in the car park when you grabbed the hood, and I did not come to the glass until she was gone. I used the side door, and I let you take the mask off. I am standing here with nothing in my hands.”

“That is not love. That is control.”

“It is both.”

He rubs his mouth with the back of his wrist. Rafe did that over Noah, and I can tell the picture is in the room with us.

“Why me?” he asks, softly.

“You walk into a room and it changes. I have had my hands on you three times a week and I still had to pretend it was all work. The voice I used on you was mine and the voice I used on them was whoever would get them to a dark floor. If I was going to wreck my life I was going to wreck it for one person, and it was you.”

“Why the gym?”

“The gym was the only place you let me in without thinking I was up to something. You booked the hour and you let me stand behind you. You let me count. You never looked at me the way they looked at you, and I wanted that more than I wanted to stay a man with a simple job.”

“What would you have done if I had called Pell from the lobby after Shane?”