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And so what if he was? Maybe he was out in the Common having lunch, enjoying the weather like she was. No crime in that. If he was staring at her, maybe he thought she looked familiar, too. Maybe he would have come over and said hi to her, if she hadn’t charged after him like some paranoid psycho, accusing him of spying on her.

Oh, and wouldn’t that be lovely, if he went back to the station and told them all how she’d chased him several blocks into Chinatown?

If Lucan were to hear about that, she would absolutely die of humiliation.

Gabrielle resumed cleansing her scraped palms, trying to put the whole day out of her head. Her anxiety was still at a peak, her heart still drumming hard. She dabbed at her surface wounds, watching the thin trickle of blood run down her wrist.

The sight of it soothed her in some strange way. Always had.

When she was younger, when feelings and pressures built up inside of her until there was nowhere for them to go, often all it took to ease her was a tiny cut.

The first one had been an accident. Gabrielle had been paring an apple at one of her foster homes when the knife slipped and cut into the fleshy pad at the base of her thumb. It hurt a little, but as her blood pumped out, a rivulet of glossy bright crimson, Gabrielle hadn’t felt panic or fear.

She’d felt fascination.

She’d felt an incredible sort of…peace.

A few months after that surprising discovery, Gabrielle cut herself again. She did it deliberately, secretly, never with the intent to harm herself. Over time, she did it frequently, whenever she needed to feel that same profound sense of calm.

She needed it now, when she was anxious and jumpy as a cat, her ears picking up every slight noise in the apartment and outside. Her head was pounding. Her breath was shallow, coming rapidly through her teeth.

Her thoughts were careening from the flash-bright memories of the night outside the club to the creepy asylum she’d taken pictures of the other morning, to the confusing, irrational, bone-deep fear she’d experienced this afternoon.

She needed a little peace from all of it.

Even just a spare few minutes of calm.

Gabrielle’s gaze slid to the wooden block of knives sitting on the counter nearby. She reached over, took one in her hand. It had been years since she’d done this. She’d worked so hard to master the strange, shameful compulsion.

Had it truly ever gone away?

Her state-appointed psychologists and social workers eventually had been convinced that it had. The Maxwells, too.

Now, Gabrielle wondered as she brought the knife over to her bare arm and felt a surge of dark anticipation wash over her. She pressed the tip of the blade into the fleshy part of her forearm, though not yet firm enough to break the skin.

This was her private demon—something she had never openly shared with anyone, not even Jamie, her dearest friend.

No one would understand.

She hardly understood it herself.

Gabrielle tipped her head back and took a deep breath. As she brought her chin back down on the slow exhale, she caught her reflection in the window over the sink. The face staring back at her was drawn and sorrowful, the eyes haunted and weary.

“Who are you?” she whispered to that ghostly image in the glass. She had to choke back a sob. “What’s wrong with you?”

Miserable with herself, she threw the knife into the sink and backed away as it clattered against the stainless basin.

The steady percussion of helicopter rotors chopped through the quiet of the night sky above the old asylum. From out of the low cloud cover, a black Colibri EC120 descended, coming to a soft touchdown on a flat expanse of rooftop.

“Cut the engine,” the leader of the Rogues instructed his Minion pilot after the craft had settled on its makeshift helipad. “Wait here for me until I return.”

He climbed out of the cockpit, greeted at once by his lieutenant, a rather nasty individual he’d recruited out of the West Coast.

“Everything is in order, sire.” The Rogue’s thick brow bunched over his feral