Capelli stared at the ceiling in Shae’s bedroom, his body perfectly still even though his brain was less than a step away from self-destructing. They’d gone through the motions of getting ready for bed, with her trading her bathrobe for a tank top and a pair of sweatpants and him throwing on a pair of nylon basketball shorts he’d left at her place earlier this week. Teeth brushed, lights out, blankets up—all the methodical steps followed, just like always. Yet all the step-by-step processes in the universe wouldn’t change the fact that Vaughn had nearly killed four people tonight, one of whom was Shae.

And they definitely wouldn’t change the fact that no matter how hard Capelli had worked to fight it, he didn’t just know Vaughn from their shared past. He knew him because his brain worked in the exact same calculating, always-moving way, and it would never, ever change.

The world is different for people like us, James. We’re cold and ruthless, like shadows and wraiths…

Shae turned to her side, close enough to touch him even though she didn’t. “Do you want to talk about this yet?”

Capelli’s heart slapped against his sternum before lodging firmly in his throat. The answer, he knew, should not just be no, but hell no. He needed his composure now more than ever. Needed to steel himself against his past, against the emotions that would ruin him if he let them see the light of day.

But all Shae had to do was look at him with those wide green eyes, and his brain stopped functioning altogether. He’d spent the last eight years not letting anyone see who he truly was. He dodged and strategized. Worked to stay busy. Hid while he tried to atone. Then Shae came along, wearing every last one of her feelings like a fucking billboard, loud and bold and proud as hell, and damn it, even though it defied every ounce of logic he’d ever known, Capelli wanted to show her everything right back.

Consequences be damned.

“Haven’t you ever wondered how I know so much about Vaughn?” he asked, and her body stilled at the same time her brows tucked in the scant moonlight filtering in past her bedroom blinds.

“He was the prime suspect for all the counter-surveillance in the DuPree case,” she said slowly. “Plus, he’s clearly not an altar boy. Intelligence must’ve suspected him in other cases, too. I’m sure his list of alleged crimes is three inches thick.”

A beat of silence opened up between them, but somehow, the shadows made it easier to admit the truth, like some sort of conduit for all things dark and ugly.

“It is,” Capelli agreed. “But that’s not how I know.”

“Okay.” Shae drew the word out into a question, and for once, he didn’t calculate the bare minimum of information required for a sufficient answer.

“I know what Vaughn’s like from firsthand experience. I’ve known him for more than a decade.”

The unease in Capelli’s chest twisted sharply between his ribs, reminding him he’d just scratched the surface of the truth, that the layers beneath were darker and more treacherous, unforgivable at best. But Shae was right there next to him, her breath steady and her body warm and her stare bold on his in the near darkness, and his words flew out despite the danger of what they’d expose.

“Vaughn and I used to work together.”

“Oh my God,” she gasped. “Vaughn was a cop?”

Capelli took a breath. Sealed his fate. And said,

“No, Shae. I’m a criminal.”

* * *

Something was wrong with Shae’s brain. Or maybe it was her ears, or possibly both, because there was no universe in which the words Capelli had just said could be right.

I’m a criminal.

“I don’t understand,” she finally managed, although it was the most gargantuan understatement she had ever uttered. Nothing about this made any sense. “How…what are you talking about?”

Capelli exhaled, the sound soft compared to the sudden soundtrack of her racing heart. “I’m talking about who I am. Do you remember how I told you I had a rough upbringing?”

“Yes,” Shae said, trying to make her brain fall in line enough to follow the facts. “You said you didn’t have much growing up. I remember.”

“We weren’t just poor. My mother wasn’t exactly what you’d call…stable.”

The words sounded strange, as if they were somehow rusty, and it occurred to her in that moment that this was the first time he’d spoken them in a long time. Maybe ever.

So she fought the deep-seated urge to start impulsively asking questions and she listened.

“I never knew my father,” Capelli said, his shoulders rustling against the pillow behind them as he capped the statement with a shrug. “To be honest, I’m not sure my mother did, either. It was always just me and her, although most of the time, I was the adult. She had a substance abuse problem,” he added, sending Shae’s heart into a full twist. “Meth mostly, but she wasn’t picky. If you could snort it, swallow it, or shoot it, she was usually game.”

Shae released a sharp exhale, unable to cage her emotions entirely. “Shit. Capelli, I’m so sorry.”

He laughed, a soft, joyless sound. “I remember thinking I was lucky, if you can believe that. Don’t get me wrong—she was hardly Mother of the Year material. But she never hit me or lost her temper, or…worse.”

His voice tripped over the last word, just enough to let Shae know how much worse he’d seen growing up, and oh God, how had he kept this inside for so long?

“Still, I took it on the chin in other ways, more times than I can count,” Capelli continued. “Sleeping in cars. Cleaning up after her all-night benders. Begging for food and eating whatever I could salvage from trash cans or restaurant dumpsters. It was all just part of my normal.”

“Oh my God,” Shae whispered, realization becoming reality in one swift, heart-rattling stroke. “Is that why you’re so careful about what you eat now?”

One corner of his mouth lifted slightly, like an attempt at a smile that didn’t quite stick. “It’s part of it,” he said. “When I was younger, I didn’t realize that wasn’t how things were supposed to be, though. I mean, we lived in the deepest part of North Point. The people around us had difficult lives too, and while my mother was a pretty bad parent, she wasn’t really a bad person. Not in the beginning, anyway.”

Anger sizzled in Shae’s veins, sudden and hell-hot. “You were her kid, and she let you sleep in cars and eat from garbage cans,” she snapped, but Capelli simply shook his head.

“I’m not denying that she was a terrible parent. But I couldn’t rely on her to always be unreliable. Every once in a while, she’d throw me for a loop and straighten up. We’d move into a less shitty apartment or she’d get a steady job, and for a while, things would be okay.”

He paused, seeming to get lost in thought. “On those nights when she was sober and didn’t have to work, my mother would break out the microwave popcorn and DVDs she’d borrowed from God only knew where. We’d camp out on a blanket and watch movies and laugh, and she’d promise me she’d stay clean, that things would only get better.”

In less than a breath, Shae’s anger melted into gut-punching heartache. “But they didn’t, did they?”

“No.” He shook his head. “A couple of weeks would go by, maybe a month, and I’d find my mother passed out on the bathroom floor or shacked up with some new guy who had a fresh stash and a bad look in his eyes,” he said quietly. “The craziest part was that even then, I knew how to read people. How to tell if they were hiding something or lying. And every time she said she’d get clean, she really meant it, so every single time, I believed her.”

“And then the cycle just started again,” Shae said softly.

“For a while, anyway.” Something hardened in Capelli’s voice, and it sent a spray of goose bumps over her bare arms. “I’ve always known my mind works differently than most people’s. But it wasn’t until my mother caught on that it really hit me how different I am.”

“I’m sorry.” Shae blinked, trying and failing to read him in the moonlight. “I don’t follow.”

He lay perfectly still beside her even though the sudden tension in his body radiated out to fill the room. “When my mother figured out that I could calculate odds and read people and memorize things after only seeing them once, she used the skills to her advantage. At first, it was low-level stuff here and there, like counting cards at local poker games or running small cons when we were desperate for extra cash. But then she caught me with that secondhand computer and she realized what I could do with it.”

Shae’s anger whipped back through her like a boomerang, stretching her voice thin and tight. “How old were you at the time?”

“I did my first black hat hack six days after my fourteenth birthday,” Capelli said, and oh yeah, it was official. She wanted to throttle this woman for no less than a dozen super legitimate reasons.

“Online security was a lot different back then,” he continued, quietly enough to capture her full attention. “It pretty much barely existed in places other than the FBI and NSA. Hacking into retail sites to access credit card information or local businesses’ payroll accounts to siphon some change off a handful of 401Ks was far too easy. I knew it was wrong,” he said in a rush of breath, and of all the truths he was letting her see, this one felt like the biggest. “But my mother kept telling me how much we needed the money, and that the companies had insurance and loss protection plans, so it didn’t actually hurt anyone. And just like all those times she told me she was clean and sober, like a fool, I went with my emotions instead of my head, and I believed her.”

Shae’s throat threatened to close. “Of course you believed her.” Tears pricked at her eyes, born of equal parts anger and emotion, but she held fast to her determination in spite of them. “You were barely in high school, you had no one else to turn to, and you needed a place to sleep at night. Your mother manipulated the hell out of you. None of that was your fault.”

“Of course it was my fault,” he said, adamant. “I knew stealing money from those people was wrong, Shae—I certainly knew it was illegal. And I did it anyway. Not once or twice, but hundreds of times, over the course of years, until I was so good at lying, stealing, and hacking that it wasn’t just all I did. It was all I knew.”

Realization flashed in her mind, pinning her into place on the bedsheets as she came full circle with the start of their conversation. “Is that how you know Vaughn?”

Shoulders locked around his neck, Capelli nodded. “Vaughn came up on the streets, just like I did. His mother was in and out of jail—prostitution, possession, all the usual songs on the playlist. His old man’s doing back-to-back life sentences for a double homicide he pulled when Vaughn was seventeen. We ran in the same circles, and we had the same set of skills. It didn’t take long for us to connect.”

“So you worked together on cons and scams.”

“For a while.” At Shae’s silently raised brows, he added, “Enough times to know he’s as smart as he claims and that he’s got no soul.”

She did her best not to wince. It worked for the most part. “Okay, but then how did you get out of that life and start working for the RPD?”

Here, he paused, and her gut tapped out a warning she didn’t understand. Turning his life around should be the best part of this story, not something that should put a look of sheer dread on his face.

“After a while, my mother got greedy, and that made her brash. She pushed me to do bigger jobs,” Capelli said quietly. “She’d find potential places to scam or rob, and I’d do the counter-surveillance to show her the weak spots and the best way not to get caught. If she needed muscle for on-site robberies, she’d convince the boyfriend-of-the-month to help out for a cut. But then, eight years ago, she fell in with some guy who worked as a night-shift security guard for Holden Federal Savings.”

Whoa. “Hardly a small company.” They were the second biggest bank in Remington, with branches all over Charlotte, besides.

“Nope,” Capelli agreed. “And their security systems are top of the line. The only way to kill the live feed on the surveillance video was to patch it on-site during the actual job. I told my mother the whole thing was too risky—the odds of something happening that we couldn’t predict were a lot higher than usual. But she and her boyfriend went full court press because the payday was bigger, and I was the only one who could put the patch in place to make the whole thing work.”

“Oh my God.” Shae’s heart pounded and broke all at once. “What happened?”

Capelli said exactly what she knew he would. “The whole thing went completely south. I got the patch in place, but my mother’s boyfriend tripped the motion sensors, and we both got arrested. Of course he lied to cover his ass. Said the entire job had been my idea and that I’d coerced him into it. The cops had me on the surveillance footage doing all the recon in the days leading up to the job, so the story stuck. And the next thing I knew, I was taking the weight for the whole robbery.”

Shae gasped. “Okay, but your mother must have—”

“She didn’t.”

“—said something,” Shae finished softly, and oh God. Oh God. “She let you take the fall?”

Capelli nodded. “She knew that if her boyfriend couldn’t hang what had happened at the bank on me, he’d try to hang it on her instead. Me, my mother—that guy would’ve implicated fucking Santa Claus if it would have lessened the charges against him.”

Shae’s lips pressed into a tight line, trapping her deeply rooted temptation to curse, but only by a thread. She sensed a tiny shift in Capelli’s voice, some measure of sadness that hadn’t been there a second ago, and as she kept listening, her temptation to curse became something else entirely.

“My mother knew it wouldn’t take much digging for the RPD to figure out she had been partying beyond her means for years. If I didn’t go down for the one crime, neat and tidy, she knew she might go down for everything. So she did what she was best at.”

“She lied,” Shae whispered.

“She lied,” Capelli said, his resignation on full display even in the dusky shadows of her bedroom. “I didn’t have any recourse. Telling the detectives that my mother was the guiltiest party of all would’ve only gotten me in deeper in the hole for all the other jobs I’d helped her pull, and more importantly, they weren’t wrong. I’d committed the damned crime.”

Shae’s breath slapped to a stop in her lungs. Okay, so technically, that was true, but still… “You shouldn’t have been the only one to pay for it. God, Capelli, you shouldn’t have even been the first person to pay for it.”

“Funny you should say that,” he answered, all irony. “Turns out, someone else felt the same way.”

Shae’s confusion must have been slathered all over her face, because he went on with, “One of the detectives who arrested me came into the interview room just as I was about to be booked. He told me he thought my mother’s boyfriend was lying, and that he knew I’d gotten caught up in something I hadn’t wanted to be a part of. He also said he knew there was a third party involved.”

Understanding lit like a tissue paper touching open flames. “The boyfriend ratted your mother out as a safeguard, didn’t he?”

“Yeah.” Capelli’s chin dipped in the smallest of nods. “Although at the time, I didn’t know that. The detective said the plan was too detailed to have been a first crime, and he made me an offer, right then and there. A full statement and testimony against my mother for the bank job along with all of the other crimes she and I had committed in exchange for no jail time.”

“It sounds like that detective knew who should take the brunt of the blame,” Shae said, slowing her breath to accommodate the rush of relief filling her lungs.

But Capelli surprised her with a firm shake of his head. “It was a massive risk on his part. I was just as guilty of those crimes as my mother. But he said he didn’t quite see it that way, and in the end, once the DA heard everything the detective had to say, he agreed, too.” Capelli paused to laugh, a joyless sound that cracked Shae’s heart. “Even though I knew it would keep me out of jail, I didn’t want to take the deal. But I also knew that if I didn’t, I’d end up back at that precinct—or worse—eventually anyway. So I agreed. I told the detective everything, and he had my record cleared in exchange for my testimony.”

Shae looked at him, at the wistful sadness dominating his features in the silvery, barely there light slanting in past her window shades, and in that moment, everything clicked. “The detective was Sinclair, wasn’t it?”

The realization earned her the tiniest of smiles. “Yeah. It was pretty obvious from the investigation that I had a skill set the police department would find useful, so he offered me a job, helped me find a place to live, and I’ve been with him at the Thirty-Third ever since.”

“What happened to your mother?” she asked.

“She and her boyfriend were both convicted, him for the robbery at the bank, her for a lot more than that. She was…” Capelli stopped to clear his throat. “She was two years into her thirty-six year sentence when she was stabbed to death in prison. Some drug smuggling thing gone bad, I guess.”

Ice coated Shae’s gut, her chin whipping up with the force of her sadness and shock. “Oh, Capelli.”

“The thing is, what I did to her isn’t even the worst part.”

“What you did to her?” Shae repeated, but he kept talking as if what he’d said was some universal truth, some unarguable constant like the color of the sky.

“I’m always trying to figure things out,” he said, his voice rising in frustration. “Strategies and systems and schemes—Christ, all of it! My brain doesn’t rest, Shae. Ever.”

He pushed up to a seated position, turning swiftly to pin her with the full force of his stare. “I was twenty when Sinclair arrested me. An adult. I could’ve walked away from those crimes I committed a thousand times, but I didn’t. Because I’m not like normal people, like decent people,” he bit out, gesturing roughly to his temple. “Figuring out those cons and crimes is my default! It’s how I’m wired. It’s what my brain does, and it’s never going to stop.”

The words stunned her into place so completely that for a second, Shae couldn’t even breathe. “You think you’re a bad person because of how your mind works?”

“I think I’m the worst sort of person because of how my mind works,” he shot back. “Jesus, Shae, don’t you get it? I might work for the RPD now, but I’m not different. If my brain didn’t do this, my mother wouldn’t have been able to talk me into all these crimes in the first place. But it does. It always will. I’m ruthless and cold, just like Vaughn.”

The mere suggestion sliced through her, foregoing muscle and hitting bone. With nothing but impulse in her veins, she swung toward the bedside table, fumbling with the lamp—come on, come on—until her fingers clumsily found the switch. The sudden brightness burned her eyes and tempted her to squint. But she couldn’t hold back on this, not even a little bit.

She needed to make Capelli see that she meant every goddamn syllable of what she was about to say.

“No, you’re not.” Jamming her knees into the mattress, Shae stabbed a finger through the air, making contact with his bare shoulder to be sure she had the full measure of his attention. Her affirmation shook under the weight of the pure emotion sailing through her veins, but she didn’t care. “You are nothing like him, do you hear me? Your mother exploited you! You did what she told you to because you needed a place to sleep at night, then you kept doing it because it was all you knew.”

He opened his mouth—presumably to argue—but oh no. Not fucking happening.

“Yes, you did bad things, and yes, they were wrong,” Shae said, and the words seemed to shock him into silence. “But you did the right thing when you needed to. What happened to your mother in prison isn’t your fault.” Her vocal cords wanted to falter at the sudden flash of grief in his eyes, but she dug deep for what she knew. “You’re not a bad person, and you’re nothing like Vaughn. You work your ass off to catch guys just like him, and you care about everyone in that intelligence unit like they’re your family.”

“I’m not…” His voice caught, all gravel and rough edges. “I’m still not a good man, Shae.”

“Yes, you are,” she whispered, flattening her hand over his chest, her own heart tripping as his pounded against her palm. “Your brain might never rest, Capelli, but your heart doesn’t either. You’re just too smart to see it. That’s okay, though. I see it. I see you, and I know you’re a good man.”

Shifting her hands to cup his face, she leaned forward until she was close enough to feel his shaky exhale on her cheek. Yet she’d never been more steady or sure of anything in her life.

“Look at me, James Capelli. Know what I’m telling you. You’re a good man.”

And as he pressed his forehead to hers and let her fold her arms around him to hold him close, Shae knew he believed her.

Just like she knew she was in love with him.