Bonds of Justice (July 2010) - Nalini Singh is a New Zealand author of numerous paranormal romance novels.
From the book
Circumstance doesn‟t make a man. If it did, I‟d have committed my first burglary at twelve, my first robbery at fifteen, and my first murder at seventeen.
—From the private case notes of Detective Max Shannon
It was as she was sitting staring into the face of a sociopath that Sophia Russo realized three irrefutable truths.
One: In all likelihood, she had less than a year left before she was sentenced to comprehensive rehabilitation. Unlike normal rehabilitation, the process wouldn‟t only wipe out her personality, leave her a drooling vegetable. Comprehensives had ninety-nine percent of their psychic senses fried as well. All for their own good of course.
Two: Not a single individual on this earth would remember her name after she disappeared from active duty.
Three: If she wasn‟t careful, she would soon end up as empty and as inhuman as the man on the other side of the table . . . because the otherness in her wanted to squeeze his mind until he whimpered, until he bled, until he begged for mercy.
Evil is hard to define, but it’s sitting in that room.
The echo of Detective Max Shannon‟s words pulled her back from the whispering temptation of the abyss. For some reason, the idea of being labeled evil by him was . . . not acceptable. He had looked at her in a different way from other human males, his eyes noting her scars, but only as part of the package that was her body. The response had been extraordinary enough to make her pause, meet his gaze, attempt to divine what he was thinking.
That had proved impossible. But she knew what Max Shannon wanted.
Bonner alone knows where he buried the bodies—we need that information.
Shutting the door on the darkness inside of her, she opened her psychic eye and, reaching out with her telepathic senses, began to walk the twisted pathways of Gerard Bonner‟s mind. She had touched many, many depraved minds over the course of her career, but this one was utterly and absolutely unique. Many who committed crimes of this caliber had a mental illness of some kind. She understood how to work with their sometimes disjointed and fragmented memories.
Bonner‟s mind, in contrast, was neat, organized, each memory in its proper place. Except those places and the memories they contained made no sense, having been filtered through the cold lens of his sociopathic desires. He saw things as he wished to see them, the reality distorted until it was impossible to pinpoint the truth among the spiderweb of lies.
Ending the telepathic sweep, she took three discreet seconds to center herself before opening her physical eyes to stare into the rich blue irises of the man the media found so compelling. According to them, he was handsome, intelligent, magnetic. What she knew for a fact was that he held an MBA from a highly regarded institution and came from one of the premier human families in Boston—there was a prevailing sense of disbelief that he was also the Butcher of Park Avenue, the moniker coined after the discovery of Carissa White‟s body along one of the avenue‟s famous wide “green” medians.
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