“I don’t wish that.”

“No? Then why do you keep getting into fights with men who abuse their partners? It’s because when the chips were down, you didn’t stand up for our mother. You did nothing, and it eats you alive.”

I felt myself breathing hard. I wanted to scream a denial, but he wasn’t wrong. Yes, I’d dreamed about doing what this other Dylan had done. This mirror of myself, this serial killer, knew me better than I knew myself. A little smirk of triumph crossed his face as I looked away.

“See?” he announced, easing back in the chair and sucking on his cigarette. “I’m the ultimate Dylan Moran. I do what all of you wish you could do, and I get away with everything. Killing my father? They let me off. I was just a traumatized kid. In high school, I kept beating kids up, but they didn’t do a thing to me. Oh, that poor boy, he had such a tough upbringing. They’d send me to detention, or send me to a counselor, and then I’d do it again. Sound familiar?”

I frowned. Yes, it did.

“So I just kept raising the stakes. I wanted to see how far I could go. But I already knew where I was headed. I knew the line I wanted to cross. It’s how I’m wired. Somewhere inside you, you’ve got the same code, whether you like it or not.” He shot me a look that said he was familiar with all my secrets. “Who was the first girl you slept with? Diana Geary, right?”

There was no point in lying. “Yes.”

“How’d you meet her?”

“We met on a train,” I said, because it was obvious the same thing had happened to him. “I was seventeen. She was older, twenty-two. We started talking and went back to her place, and then she got me drunk on tequila, and we ended up in bed. She was feeling bad because her boyfriend had dumped her, and I was the consolation prize.”

“I met Diana Geary on a train, too,” the other Dylan replied. “Same as you. We had sex.”

He stopped. He waited for me to ask, and I couldn’t stop myself.

“Then what?”

“Then after we were done, I suffocated her with a pillow and cut off her head.”

“Oh, shit.” I struggled against the ropes that held me again, but I couldn’t move.

“And do you know what happened after I killed her? Not a damn thing. No one found out. No one knew it was me. Once I figured that out, once I knew I could do anything, I tried different methods, different victims. The violence itself wasn’t really the high. The thrill was knowing I could get away with it. By the time I turned twenty-six, I’d killed fourteen people. The police had no idea.”

“You’re a sick son of a bitch.”

He shrugged off my loathing, as if moral and immoral were just mirror images of each other.

“I could have kept going like that for a long time, but everything changed on my twenty-sixth birthday. Do you remember what you did that day?”

Actually, I did. It was a memorable thing to do on my birthday. “I saw a shrink.”

“That’s right. Court-ordered therapy for anger management. After a bar fight.”

“Yes.”

“Who did you see?”

“Her name was Vanessa Kirby.”

Dylan nodded. “Yeah, I was supposed to see Dr. Kirby, too, but she was sick that day and didn’t show up. So I saw someone else. There was a shrink with an office on the same floor, and I figured, what the hell? All I needed to do was check off a box on my court papers. Guess who I saw?”

My brow furrowed. “Who?”

“Eve Brier.”

I swore under my breath.

“Yeah, isn’t it funny how things work out? Eve was smart. She really got me. She told me that I felt guilty about killing my father and getting away with it. She said I felt an intense need to be punished, so I kept putting myself in situations that proved I was a bad person. Of course, I hadn’t told her about any of the other people I’d killed, but I guess that would have just proved her point.”

Dylan got up from the chair again. He grabbed a skinny-fit dress shirt in deep purple, with a checkered design. He held it up on the hanger. “What do you think of this shirt? Can I pull it off?”

I stared at him. “What?”

“Is it stylish? Maybe with a button vest? There’s not a lot to choose from here.”

“You want fashion tips? Are you kidding me?”

He shrugged and took off the leather jacket and unbuttoned his olive shirt. When he slipped it off, I noticed a pattern of scars all across his bare chest, like cuts made with a razor blade. It was obvious they’d been self-inflicted. I understood why Eve thought that this Dylan felt a desire for punishment. He’d been taking out his self-hatred on his body for years.

“Anyway, that was when she told me about the Many Worlds thing,” he went on. “Did you think it was bullshit?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah. Me too. But Eve wanted to try it on someone, and I thought, what the hell? She said experiencing other worlds would help me deal with the bad choices I’d made. So I let her inject me with her little cocktail. That was a ride, huh? There I was in the Art Institute, surrounded by all of these other versions of myself. Except I was the only one who knew what it meant. The others were oblivious. Knowing what was going on made it even worse. The more of them I saw, the more I felt like I was cracking up. Is that what it was like for you?”

I didn’t want to answer, but I did. “Yes, that’s exactly how it was.”

He nodded, as if it made him happy to hear that. Then, without saying anything more, he turned around and went into the bathroom. With his back to me, he found a razor and shaving cream in the medicine cabinet, and he began shaving his face with slow, measured strokes. He was doing that with Tai’s body still in the tub, where he’d drowned her. We could see each other in the mirror, and he smiled a little as I kept struggling to free my hands and feet. But I couldn’t.

Eventually, he finished, washed his face, and came back, drying his now-smooth skin with a towel. He sat down and continued his story. “I didn’t try to go anywhere that first time. I just got the lay of the land, you know? Then I said the word—you know the word—and boom, there I was back with Eve. She asked if the treatment helped me, and I told her it did. That was true, but not in the way she was thinking. I was already starting to wonder if I could really go into one of these worlds. So I said I wanted more sessions. The next time, I followed one of the other Dylans out the door. I had no idea what to expect, but holy shit. I was totally lost. When I woke up, it was days later. I was on the can in a men’s room in Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg. It made no sense, right? Except when I got out into the mall, I spotted my double, and I followed him. I never let him see me, but I got to know his whole life. I stayed there for a week or so, and finally I said the safe word to get the hell out of there. Same thing, there I was, back in Eve’s office, and like half an hour had passed on her end. I told her I wanted to keep doing it. I wanted to go back. Only this time I knew what to do.”

“Kill,” I murmured.

“Oh, yeah. I followed another Dylan into his life, and I watched him. Studied him. Figured out his routines. Then I did an experiment. I went into his job at the hotel while he was at a meeting somewhere else. Nobody knew. Nobody suspected a thing. I mean, why would they? So then I slept with his wife. She thought it was the best sex they’d ever had. I loved that. And then on a night when I knew he was home alone, I picked up a girl at a bar and went to her place.”

I closed my eyes. I knew what was coming.

“And then I cut out her heart.”

I swore, over and over and over.

“The next day, I watched from the park as the police arrested this other Dylan Moran. They had him on camera at the bar. He’d given his name to the bartender. They had his fingerprints in her apartment. They took him away, screaming that he was innocent. I’d never had a high like that. The thrill of killing wasn’t even close to the thrill of watching Dylan Moran suffer for my crimes. Of all things, it turned out that Eve was right about me. I really did want the punishment. I wanted everybody to know that Dylan Moran was an evil, terrible person who should be put away forever. But the best thing was, I could do it over and over and never stop. There was always another world, another Dylan to destroy.”

“The perfect crime,” I said.

“The perfect crime,” he agreed. “You’re right.”