The Naturals

CHAPTER 26

Wanting to know more about my mother’s case and determining the best way to gain access to her file were two very different things. Twenty-four hours after Dean had confirmed my impression of our UNSUB, I was still empty-handed.

“Well, well, well …”

I heard Lia’s voice, but refused to turn around and watch her make an entrance. Instead, I focused on the grain of the kitchen table and the sandwich on my plate.

“Somebody got a package in the mail,” Lia singsonged. “I took the liberty of opening it for you, and voilà. A box within a box.” She sat down next to me and placed a rectangular gift box in front of her on the table. “A secret admirer, perhaps?” There was an envelope on top of the box, and Lia picked it up and dangled the card in front of me.

My name was written on the envelope, the letters evenly spaced with just a hint of curl to them, like the person who’d written them was torn between writing in cursive and writing in print.

“You really are incredibly popular, aren’t you?” Lia said. “It defies all logic. I assumed you were just the new shiny. In a program with so few students, it would be weirder if the new girl didn’t draw attention from the opposite sex. But neither Michael nor Dean would have a reason to mail you a package, so I can only infer that your, shall we say, appeal isn’t limited to people who live here.”

I tuned Lia out and looked at the box. It was matte black with a perfectly fitted lid. A black ribbon had been wrapped around the box twice, forming a cross shape on the front. In the center of the cross, the ribbon curled into a bow.

“Did I hear my name?” Michael sauntered over to join us. “Don’t you just hate it when you walk into the room and everyone’s talking about you?” His eyes landed on the gift, and the smile on his face turned plastic and sharp.

“Somebody’s not fond of competition,” Lia said.

“And somebody is a lot more vulnerable than she lets on,” Michael replied without missing a beat. “Your point?”

That shut Lia up—temporarily. I looked back down at the box and ran my finger along the edge of the ribbon.

Silk.

“You didn’t send this?” I asked Michael, my voice catching in my throat.

“No,” Michael replied with a roll of his eyes. “I really didn’t.”

There wasn’t a person in my family who would have sent me a package wrapped up in silk, and I couldn’t think of anyone else who would want to send me a care package.

Michael hadn’t sent it.

Dean wasn’t the gift-giving type.

I turned to Lia. “You sent this.”

“Not true.” She stared at me for a second, then made a grab for the card.

“Don’t—” I started to say. My words fell on deaf ears. She plucked a plain white note card from the envelope and cleared her throat.

“From me, to you.” Lia arched an eyebrow and tossed the card back on the table. “How romantic.”

A chill crawled up my spine. My breath felt hot in my lungs, but my hands were freezing cold. The package, the ribbon, the bow tied just so …

Something isn’t right.

“Cassie?” Michael must have seen it on my face. He leaned toward me. I glanced at Lia, but for once, she had nothing to say. Slowly, I brought my hand up to the ribbon. I pulled, and it fell away into a graceful black heap on the table.

Now that I’d started, I couldn’t stop. I hooked my fingers around the lid of the box. I pulled it off and set it gingerly to the side. White tissue paper, meticulously folded, lay inside.

“What is it?”

I ignored Lia’s question. I reached into the box. I unwrapped the tissue paper.

And then I screamed.

Nestled in the tissue paper was a lock of red hair.

CHAPTER 27

It took Agent Briggs an hour to get to our house. It took him five seconds to get from the front door to the kitchen—and the box.

“Still think I’m jumping to conclusions when I say this case is related to my mother’s?” I asked him, my voice shaky. He ignored me and barked out commands to the team of agents he’d brought with him.

“Bag the packaging, the box, the ribbon, the card, everything—if there’s a speck of evidence on any of it, I want to know. Starmans, track the box—how it was sent, where it was mailed from, who paid for it. Brooks, Vance, we need DNA on the hair, and we need it yesterday. I don’t care who you have to threaten in the lab to get it done, rush it. Locke …”

Agent Locke crossed her arms over her chest and gave Briggs a look. To his credit, he lowered his voice to a more reasonable volume and pitch.

“If this is our UNSUB, it changes everything. We have no evidence that he’s ever made contact with a target prior to killing. This may be our chance to get ahead of him.”

“We don’t even know that this is our UNSUB,” Agent Locke pointed out. “It’s red hair. For all we know, it could be a prank.”

Her gaze drifted over to Lia the second she said the word prank. I whipped my head around to look at the Natural liar, too.

Lia tossed her black hair over her shoulder. “This is a little beyond the pale, even for me, Agent Locke.”

Locke glanced at me. “Gotten into any arguments lately?” she asked.

I opened my mouth, then glanced at Lia again. Remind me never to ask you for a favor again. The venom in her tone when she’d said those words had been palpable.

“Lia.” Agent Briggs barely managed to get the word out around his clenched jaw. “Tell me again how you found the present.”

Lia’s eyes flashed. “I went out to get the mail. There was a package with Cassie’s name on it. I opened said package. Inside, there was a box. I decided I wanted to see the look on Cassie’s face when she opened said box. I brought it into the kitchen. Cassie opened it. The end.”

Briggs turned to Locke. “If the DNA comes back as a match for one of our victims, you’ll have to completely rework the profile. If it doesn’t …”

He glanced back at Lia.

“Why does everyone keep looking at me?” she snapped. “I found the package. I didn’t send it. If the DNA on the hair doesn’t come back as a match, maybe you should think about asking Cassie some questions.”

“Me?” I asked incredulously.

“You wanted in on this case,” Lia retorted. “And now the killer contacts you out of the blue? How lucky for you.”

I couldn’t tell if Lia believed what she was saying or not. It didn’t matter, because Briggs had already turned his diamond-hard gaze on me.

“Cassie didn’t do this.”

I hadn’t even realized that Dean was in the room until he spoke. Clearly, neither had the agents. Briggs actually jumped.

“Cassie’s not the type to play games.” Dean’s voice brooked no doubt. “The entire reason she wanted to work on this case is that she thinks it has something to do with her mother’s murder. Why would she risk diverting manpower and resources away from the real investigation when she knows the killer is escalating? If this is a prank, it’s a prank that’s going to get someone killed.”

The knot in my chest loosened. I looked at Dean, and suddenly, I could breathe.

“Dean’s right.” Locke’s voice sounded exactly like mine when I was working my way through a puzzle. “If Cassie wanted in on this case, she’d just find a way to keep working it on her own.”

I tried very hard not to look conspicuous—because that was exactly what I’d been trying to do.

“Cassie, did you or did you not drop this case when I told you to?” Briggs took a step forward, invading my personal space. “Have you done anything that might have drawn the killer’s attention?”

I shook my head—no to both questions. Briggs’s hand fell back to his side. He clenched his jaw again. For the second time, Dean intervened.

“All Cassie did was give a copy of the case file to me.”

Every pair of eyes in the room turned to Dean. Normally, he stood and walked like someone who wanted to disappear into the woodwork, but today, his shoulders were back, his jaw set.

“I read the file. I profiled it. And I think Cassie’s right.” Dean leveled his gaze at Agent Briggs. “These women are stand-ins, and I think there’s a very real chance that the person they’re standing in for is Cassie’s mother.”

“You’ve never even seen the Lorelai Hobbes case file,” Briggs shot back. My mother’s name hit me like a punch to the stomach.

“I’ve seen Cassie’s mother’s picture,” Dean argued. “I’ve seen the human hair that someone just sent to Cassie as a gift.”

Briggs listened to every word Dean had to say, an intense look of concentration on his face. “You’re not authorized to work this case,” he said finally.

Dean shrugged. “I know.”

“You are not going to be working this case.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to pretend that we never had this conversation.”

“Liar,” Lia coughed.

Briggs was not amused. “You may leave the room, Lia.”

Lia clasped her hands together. “Oh, Mother, may I?”

Dean made a choking sound. I wasn’t entirely certain, but he might have been swallowing a laugh.

“Now, Lia.”

After a long moment and a glare aimed at the room as a whole, Lia twirled on her toes and stalked out of the room. Once he was sure Lia was gone, Agent Briggs turned to Agent Locke. “Do you think this case is related to the Lorelai Hobbes case?”

I didn’t flinch when he said my mother’s name a second time. I concentrated on the fact that Lia was correct: Briggs had no intention of forgetting what Dean had told him.

I think Cassie’s right.

“I don’t know that it matters whether the two cases are related or not,” Locke answered finally. “Cassie’s hair is red. She’s a bit younger than the other victims, but otherwise, she fits the profile of this killer’s victims, and more importantly, our UNSUB is escalating. If you assume the last victim’s hair was dyed as a message, that means this guy is playing with us. And if he’s playing with us, there’s a sizable chance that he’s watching us.” Agent Locke rubbed the back of her hand wearily over her brow. “If he’s watching us, he could have followed us here, and if he followed us here, he could have seen Cassie.”

Briggs’s phone rang before he could reply. By the time he hung up, I already knew what the next words out of his mouth were going to be.

“We’ve got another body.”

YOU

You watch the FBI agents scurrying around the crime scene like ants. This particular corpse is not your best work. You killed her last night, and already, her screams have faded from your ears. Her face is still recognizable—more or less.

You used scissors this time instead of your knife.

But that’s not the point. Not this time. This time, the point is that the gift you sent sweet little Cassandra Hobbes was the real thing.

The pathetic little slut lying lifeless on the pavement is just a piece of the plan. You abandoned her body at dawn, knowing that it wouldn’t be discovered immediately. You’d hoped—prayed, even—that Cassie would be there when the agents got the call.

Did you scream when you opened the box, Cassie? Did you think about me? Am I the thought that keeps you up at night? There’s so much you want to ask her.

So much you want to tell her.

The rest of the world will never understand. The FBI will never know the inner workings of your brain.

They’ll never know how close you are.

But Cassie—she’s going to know everything. The two of you are connected. Cassie is her mother’s daughter—and that’s as close as you’re ever going to get.

CHAPTER 28

Two days later, the hair from the black box came back as a match for the UNSUB’s latest victim.

“I’ll accept gifts in lieu of an apology,” Lia told Agent Locke. “Any time now is fine.”

Locke didn’t reply. The three of us—along with Briggs, Michael, and Dean—were in Briggs’s study. Sloane was nowhere to be seen.

You sent me a piece of hair. I couldn’t keep from talking to the killer in my head, couldn’t keep from thinking about the present and what it meant that the UNSUB had sent it to me. Was she screaming when you cut it off? Did you use the scissors to cut her afterward? Was it ever even about her? Or was it about me? About my mother?

“Am I in danger?” I sounded remarkably calm, like my question was just a piece of the puzzle and not a matter of life and death—specifically, mine.

“What do you think?” Locke asked.

Briggs narrowed his eyes, like he couldn’t believe she was using this as a teaching opportunity, but I answered the question anyway.

“I think this UNSUB wants to kill me, but I don’t think he wants to kill me yet.”

“This is insane.” Michael had that look on his face—the one that told me he wanted to hit someone. “Cassie, are you even listening to yourself?” He turned to Briggs. “She’s in shock.”

“She is standing right here,” I said, but I didn’t contradict the rest of Michael’s statement. Given his ability to read people, I had to assume that he might be right. Maybe I was in shock. I couldn’t deny the fact that my emotions were on lockdown.

I wasn’t angry.

I wasn’t scared.

I wasn’t even thinking about my mother and the fact that this UNSUB might very well have killed her, too.

“You kill women,” I said out loud. “Women with red hair. Women who remind you of someone else. And then one day, you see me, and for whatever reason, I’m not like the others. You never needed to talk to them. You never needed them to go to sleep at night thinking about you. But I’m different. You send me a gift—maybe you want to scare me. Maybe you’re playing with me or using me to play with the feds. But the way you wrapped that box, the care you took with my name on the card—there’s a part of you that thinks you really have given me a gift. You’re talking to me. You made me special, and when you kill me, that will have to be special, too.” Every single person in the room was staring at me. I turned to Dean. “Am I wrong?”

Dean considered the question. “I’ve been killing for a long time,” he said, slipping into the killer’s mind as easily as I had. “And each time, it’s a little bit less than it was the time before. I don’t want to get caught, but I need the danger, the thrill, the challenge.” He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, it was like the two of us were the only two people in the room.

“You’re not wrong, Cassie.”

“This is sick,” Michael said, his voice rising. “There’s some psycho out there, fixating on Cassie, and you two are acting like this is some kind of game.”

“It is a game,” Dean said.

I knew Dean wasn’t enjoying this, that looking at me through a killer’s eyes wasn’t something he would have chosen to do, but Michael only heard the words. He lunged forward and caught Dean by the front of his shirt.

A second later, Michael had Dean pinned to the wall. “Listen to me, you sick son of a—”

“Michael!” Briggs pulled him off Dean. At the last second, Dean lunged forward and grabbed Michael, reversing their positions and wedging his elbow underneath Michael’s throat.

Dean lowered his voice to a whisper. “I never said this was a game to me, Townsend.”

It was a game to the UNSUB. I was the prize. And if we weren’t careful, Michael and Dean were going to kill each other.

“Enough.” Locke put a hand on Dean’s shoulder. He stiffened, and for a second, I thought he might hit her.

“Enough,” Dean echoed, expelling a breath. He let Michael go and took a step back. Then he just kept walking backward until his back hit the opposite wall. He was a person who didn’t lose control, who couldn’t afford to, and he’d come close enough with Michael just now that it scared him.

“So what do we do now?” I asked, pulling everyone’s attention from Dean and giving him a second to recover.

Briggs jabbed his index finger in my direction. “You’re still not working this case. Either of you.” He spared a glare for Dean before returning that laser focus to me. “I’ve assigned a team to watch the house. I’ll introduce you all to Agents Starmans, Vance, and Brooks. Until further notice, none of you will be leaving this residence, and Cassie is never alone.”

Closing ranks around me wasn’t going to bring us any closer to this UNSUB.

“You should take me with you,” I told Briggs. “If this guy wants me, we should use that. Set a trap.”

“No!” Michael, Dean, and Briggs responded at the exact same time. I turned beseeching eyes to Agent Locke.

She looked like she was on the verge of agreeing with me, but at the last second, she bit her lip and shook her head. “The UNSUB has only made contact once. He’ll try again, whether you’re here or elsewhere, and at least here, we have the home court advantage.”

I’d been taught that there was no such thing as the home court advantage, but my mother’s lessons had been geared toward reading people, not playing cat and mouse with killers.

“The UNSUB is breaking pattern.” Locke reached out and touched the side of my face softly. “As scary as it is, that’s a good thing. We know what he wants, and we can keep him from getting it. The more riled up he gets, the more likely he is to make a mistake.”

“I can’t just do nothing.” I locked my eyes onto my mentor’s, willing her to understand.

“You can do something,” she said finally. “You can make a list. Everyone you’ve spoken to, everyone you’ve met, every place you’ve been, every person who’s spent even a second looking at you since you got here.”

My mind went immediately to the man who’d interrupted my reading that afternoon by the Potomac—without telling me his name. Was that him? Was it nothing?

It was hard not to be paranoid, given what I knew now.

“The UNSUB mailed the package,” Lia pointed out, jarring me from my thoughts. “He doesn’t have to be local.”

Dean jammed his hands into his pockets. “He’d want to see her,” he said, his own gaze flicking toward my face, just for a second.

“We weren’t able to trace the package,” Locke said grimly. “Busy post office, busy day, less than observant mail clerk, and no security cameras. Our UNSUB paid cash, and the return address is obviously faked. This guy is good, and he’s playing with us. At this point, I wouldn’t rule anything out.”

CHAPTER 29

For the next three days, I could barely manage to go to the bathroom without someone else following me in. And every time I looked out the window, I knew that the FBI was out there, watching and waiting, hoping the killer would try again.

“There are approximately thirty thousand working morticians in the United States.”

Sloane—who was the only person in the house I couldn’t justify throwing out of my room, since it was her room, too—had pulled Cassie babysitting duty when I’d tried to sneak away for some time alone.

“Morticians?” I repeated. I eyed her suspiciously. “Did someone give you coffee?”

Sloane very pointedly did not answer the coffee question. “I thought you could use a distraction.”

I plopped down on my bed. “Don’t you have any more cheerful statistics?”

Sloane frowned in contemplation. “Are balloon animals cheerful?”

Oh dear lord.

“Balloonists are more likely than other circus performers to suffer from subconjunctival hemorrhages.”

“Sloane, subconjunctival hemorrhages are not cheerful.”

She shrugged. “If you had a balloon, I could make you a dachshund.”

Another few days of this and I might willingly serve myself up to the UNSUB. Who would have thought my fellow Naturals would take Briggs’s decree that I not be left alone so seriously? Dean and Michael could barely stand to be in the same room with each other, but the second I stepped out of my bedroom, one or both of them would be there waiting for me. The only thing that could have made this whole situation more awkward was if Lia hadn’t magnanimously decided to stay out of the fray.

“Knock, knock!”

So much for Lia’s magnanimousness.

“What do you want?” I asked her, not bothering to sugarcoat my words.

“My, but we’re cranky today.”

If looks could kill, Lia would have been dead on the floor, and I would have been on trial for murder.

“I suppose,” Lia said, with the air of someone making a most generous concession, “that the argument you had with Dean about his father wasn’t entirely your fault, and since this whole hair-in-a-box thing seems to have given him a renewed purpose in life, I’m not morally obligated to make you miserable anymore.”

I wasn’t sure how to reply to that. “Thank you?”

“I thought you could use a distraction.” Lia smiled. “If there’s one thing I excel at, it’s distractions.”

The last time I’d let Lia dictate our plans, I’d ended up kissing Dean and Michael in a span of less than twenty-four hours, but after three days of house arrest and way too many statistics about dachshunds, I was desperate.

“What kind of distraction did you have in mind?”

Lia tossed a bag on my bed. I opened it.

“Did you rob a cosmetics store?”

Lia shrugged. “I like makeup—and nothing says distraction like a makeover. Besides …” She reached in the bag and pulled out a lipstick. Smiling wickedly, she uncapped it and twisted the bottom. “This is definitely your color.”

I eyed the lipstick. The color was dark—halfway between red and brown. Way too sexy for me—and strangely familiar.

“What do you say?” Lia didn’t actually wait for an answer. She pushed me into a sitting position on the bed. She leaned into my personal space and tilted my chin back. And then she dragged the lipstick across my lips.

“Kleenex!” Lia barked.

Sloane supplied the Kleenex, a goofy grin on her face.

“Blot,” Lia ordered.

I blotted.

“I knew that would be a good color on you,” Lia told me, her voice smug and self-satisfied. Without another word, she turned her attention to my eyes. When she was finally finished, I pushed her off me and walked over to the mirror.

“Oh.” I couldn’t keep the sound from escaping my mouth. My blue eyes looked impossibly big. My lashes had been thoroughly mascara-ed, and the color on my lips was dark against my porcelain skin.

I looked like my mother. My features, the way they came together on my face—everything.

Blue dress. Blood. Lipstick.

A series of images flashed through my mind, and I realized with sudden clarity why the color of this lipstick had seemed so familiar. I turned back to the bed and scavenged through the bag of makeup until I found it. I turned the tube upside down, looking for the color’s name.

“Rose Red,” I read, swallowing after I said the words. I turned to Lia. “Where did you get this?”

“What does it matter?”

My knuckles went white around the tube. “Where did you get this, Lia?”

“Why do you want to know?” she countered, folding her arms over her chest and examining her nails.

“I just do, okay?” I couldn’t tell her more than that—and I shouldn’t have had to. “Please?”

Lia gathered the makeup off the bed and made her way to the door. She gave me one of those smiles that wasn’t a smile. “I bought it, Cassie. With money. As part of our fine system of capitalistic exchange. Happy?”

“The color—” I started to say.

“It’s a popular color,” Lia cut in. “If you bribe Sloane with some java, she could probably tell you exactly how many millions of tubes of it they sell every year. Seriously, Cassie. Don’t ask why. Just say thank you.”

“Thanks,” I said softly, but I couldn’t help feeling that the universe was mocking me, and I couldn’t keep from looking down at the tube in my hand and thinking, over and over again, that once upon a time, I’d known someone else who was partial to Rose Red lipstick.

My mother.

YOU

“Hold still.”

The girl whimpers, her eyes filling with tears, her hands pulling at the bindings. You backhand her, and she falls to the ground. There’s no pleasure to be had in this.

She’s not Lorelai.

She’s not Cassie.

She’s not even a proper imitation. But you had to do something. You had to show the people closing ranks around Cassie what happens when they try to stand between you and what is yours.

“Hold still,” you say again.

This time, the girl obeys. You don’t kill her. You don’t even hurt her.

Not yet.

CHAPTER 30

I woke midmorning to slanting rays of light breaking through my bedroom window. Sloane was nowhere to be seen. After doing a cursory check of the hallway, I slunk into the bathroom and locked the door behind me.

Solitude. For now.

I pulled the shower curtain, stretching it across the length of the tub. With a twist of my wrist, I turned on the spray, as hot as it would go. The sound of water drumming against the porcelain tub was soothing and hypnotic. I sank down to the floor, pulling my knees to my chest.

Six days ago, a serial killer had contacted me, and my only reaction had been to crawl into the UNSUB’s head, calm and cool. But last night, wearing the same shade of lipstick as my mother had undone me.

It was a coincidence, I told myself. A horrible, twisted, untimely coincidence that within days of being contacted by a killer who might have murdered my mother, Lia had made me up to look just like her.

“It’s a popular color. Just say thank you.”

Steam built up in the air around me, reminding me that I was wasting hot water, a cardinal sin in a house with five teenagers. I stood and swiped my arm across the mirror, leaving a streak on its steam-covered surface.

I stared at myself, banishing the image of Rose Red on my lips. This was me. I was fine.

Stripping off my pajamas, I stepped into the shower, letting the spray hit me straight in the face. The flashback came suddenly and without warning.

Fluorescent lights flicker overhead. On the ground, my shadow flickers, too.

The door to her dressing room is slightly ajar.

I concentrated on the sound of the water, the feel of it on my skin, pushing back against the memories.

The smell—

Abruptly, I turned off the shower. Wrapping a towel around my torso, I stepped out onto the bath mat, dripping wet. I combed my fingers through my hair and turned to the sink.

That was when I heard the scream.

“Cassie!” It took me a moment to pick out my name, and another after that to recognize that Sloane was the one yelling. Wearing only a towel, I rushed across to our room.

“What? Sloane, what is it?”

She was still clad in her pajamas. White-blond hair stuck to her forehead. “It had my name on it,” she said, her voice strained. “It’s not stealing if it has my name on it.”

“What had your name on it?”

With shaking hands, she held out a padded envelope.

“Who did you not steal this from?” I asked.

Sloane looked distinctly guilty. “One of the agents downstairs.”

They’d been screening all of our mail, not just mine.

Angling my head so that I could see what was inside the envelope, I realized why Sloane had screamed.

There, inside the envelope, was a small, black box.

Once the box had been removed from the envelope, there was no question that it matched the first one: the ribbon, the bow, the white card with my name written on it in careful, not quite cursive script. The only difference was the size—and the fact that this time, the UNSUB had used Sloane to get to me.

You know the FBI has me under guard. You want me anyway.

“You didn’t open the box.” Agent Briggs sounded surprised. About ten seconds after I’d realized what was inside the envelope, Agents Starmans and Brooks had burst into the bedroom. They’d called Locke and Briggs. I’d had just enough time to get dressed before the dynamic duo had arrived—with another, older man in tow.

“I didn’t want to compromise the physical evidence,” I said.

“You did the right thing.” The man who’d come with Briggs and Locke spoke for the first time. His voice was gruff, a perfect match for his face, which was weatherworn and suntanned. I put his age at somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty-five. He wasn’t tall, but he had a commanding presence, and he looked at me like I was a child.

“Cassie, this is Director Sterling.” Locke made the introduction, but the things she didn’t say numbered in the dozens.

For instance, she didn’t say that this man was their boss.

She didn’t say that he was the person who’d signed off on the Naturals program.

She didn’t say that he’d been the one to rake Briggs over coals for using Dean on active cases.

She didn’t have to.

“I want to be there when you open it.” I addressed the words to Agent Locke, but Director Sterling was the one who replied.

“I really don’t think that’s necessary,” he said.

This was a man with children, maybe even grandchildren, even if he was a higher-up at the FBI. I could use that.

“I’m a target,” I said, allowing my eyes to go wide. “Keeping this information from me makes me vulnerable. The more I know about this UNSUB, the safer I am.”

“We can keep you safe.” The director spoke like a man used to having his words taken as law.

“That’s what Agent Briggs said four days ago,” I said, “and now this guy is coming at me through Sloane.”

“Cassie—” Agent Briggs started to talk to me in the same voice the director used—like I was a little kid, like they hadn’t brought me here to solve cases in the first place.

“The UNSUB struck again, didn’t he?” My question—which was a guess, really—was met with absolute silence.

I was right.

“This UNSUB wants me.” I worked my way through the logic. “You tried to keep him away from me. Whatever’s in that box, it’s a step up from what the UNSUB sent me last time. A warning for you, a present for me. If he thinks you’re keeping it from me, things are only going to get worse.”

The director nodded to Agent Briggs. “Open the box.”

Briggs put on a pair of gloves. He pulled on the edge of the ribbon, and the bow came undone. He set the card to the side and lifted the lid off the box.

White tissue paper.

Carefully, he opened the tissue paper. A ringlet of hair lay in the box. It was blond.

“Open the card,” I said, my voice catching in my throat.

Briggs opened the envelope and pulled out a card. Like the last one, it was white, elegant, but plain. Briggs opened the card, and a photograph fell out.

I caught sight of the girl in the picture before they could obscure it from me. Her wrists were bound behind her body. Her face was swollen, and dried blood had crusted around her scalp. Her eyes were filled with tears and so much fear that I could hear her screaming behind the duct-tape gag.

She had dirty blond hair and a baby face.

“She’s too young,” I said, my stomach twisting. The girl in the picture was fifteen, maybe sixteen—and none of the UNSUB’s other victims had been minors.

This girl was younger than me.

“Briggs.” Locke picked up the photo and held it out to him. “Look at the newspaper.”

I’d been so fixated on the girl’s face that I hadn’t noticed the newspaper carefully poised against her chest.

“She was alive this time yesterday,” Briggs said, and that was when I knew—why this present was different from the last one, why the hair in the box was blond.

“You took her,” I said softly, “because they took me.”

Locke caught my eye, and I knew she’d heard me. She agreed with me. Guilt rose like nausea in the back of my throat. I pushed it down. I could process this later. I could hate the UNSUB—and myself—for the blood and bruises on this girl’s face later. But right now, I had to hold it together.

I had to do something.

“Who is she?” I asked. If taking this girl was the killer’s way of lashing out because the FBI had tried to keep him from me, she wouldn’t be just anyone. This girl didn’t fit with the victimology of the UNSUB’s other victims, but if there was one thing I knew about this killer, it was that he always chose his targets for a reason.

“Ms. Hobbes, I appreciate your personal interest in this case, but that information is above your pay grade.”

I gave the director a look. “You don’t pay me. And if the killer is watching, and you insist on keeping me locked up out of reach, it’s going to get worse.”

Why couldn’t he see that? Why couldn’t Briggs? It was obvious. The FBI wanted to keep me out of this, but the killer wanted me in.

“What does the card say?” Locke asked. “The picture is only part of the message.”

Briggs looked at me, then at the director. Then he flipped the card around so that we could read it for ourselves.

CASSIE—WON’T IT LOOK BETTER RED?

The implication was clear. This girl was alive. But she wouldn’t be for long.

“Who is she?” I asked again.

Briggs kept his mouth clamped shut. He had priorities, and keeping his job was number one.

“Genevieve Ridgerton.” Locke answered my question, her voice flat. “Her father is a U.S. senator.”

Genevieve. So now the girl the UNSUB had taken because of me, the girl the UNSUB had hurt because of me, had a name.

The director took a step toward Locke. “That information is need-to-know, Agent Locke.”

She waved off his objection. “Cassie’s right. Genevieve was taken as a deliberate strike at us. We put protection on Cassie, we kept her from leaving the house, and this was the direct response. We’re no closer to catching this monster than we were four days ago, and he will kill Genevieve unless we give him a reason not to.”

He would kill Genevieve because of me.

“What are you suggesting?” The director said those words in a tone brimming with warning, but Locke responded as if the question had been posed in earnest.

“I’m suggesting that we give this killer exactly what he wants. We deal Cassie in. We take her with us and pay another visit to the crime scene.”

“You really think she’ll find something we missed?”

Locke shot me an apologetic look. “No—but I think that if we take Cassie to the crime scene, the killer might follow.”

“We’re not training these kids to play bait,” Agent Briggs said sharply.

The director turned his attention from Locke to Briggs. “You promised me three cold cases by the end of the year,” he said. “So far, your Naturals have delivered one.”

I could feel the dynamics in the room shifting. Agent Briggs didn’t want to risk something happening to one of his precious Naturals. The director was skeptical that our abilities were worth the cost of this program, and whatever objections he had to bringing a seventeen-year-old to a crime scene must have been outweighed by the fact that this situation could have major political ramifications.

This UNSUB hadn’t chosen a senator’s daughter by chance.

“Take her with you to the club, Briggs,” the director grunted. “If anyone asks, she’s a witness.” He turned to me. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, Cassandra.”

I knew that. I also knew that I did want to—and not just because Locke might be right about my presence being enough to lure the killer out. I couldn’t just sit back and watch this happen.

Behavior. Personality. Environment.

Victimology. MO. Signature.

I was a Natural—and as sick as it was, I had a relationship with this UNSUB. If they brought me to the crime scene, I might see something the others had missed.

“I’ll go,” I told the director. “But I’m bringing backup of my own.”

CHAPTER 31

Club Muse was an eighteen-and-over establishment. They only served alcohol to patrons wearing twenty-one-plus wristbands. And yet, somehow, Genevieve Ridgerton, who was neither eighteen nor twenty-one, had—according to all witness reports—been more than a little tipsy when she’d disappeared from the Club Muse bathroom three nights earlier.

Director Sterling had reluctantly agreed to allow me to bring two of the others with me to the crime scene, and then he’d put as much distance between us and him as possible. As a result, Briggs and Locke were the ones who escorted me to the club—and they were the ones who’d decided which of my housemates got to tag along.

Sloane was currently walking the inside perimeter of the club, looking for points of entry and doing some sort of calculation involving maximum occupancy, the popularity of the band playing, total amount of alcohol consumed, and the line for the bathroom.

Dean, Locke, and I were tracing Genevieve’s last steps.

“Two unisex bathrooms. Dead bolts on each of the doors.” Dean’s dark eyes scanned the area with almost military precision.

“Genevieve was in line with a friend,” Locke told us. “The friend went into Bathroom A, leaving Genevieve next in line. When the friend came out, Genevieve wasn’t in line. The friend assumed she was in the second bathroom and went back to the bar. She never saw Genevieve again.”

I thought of the Genevieve I’d seen in the UNSUB’s picture, the Genevieve with bruises and blood crusted on her scalp. Then I pushed that image out of my head and forced myself to think about the events that had led to her abduction.

“Okay,” I said. “So I’m Genevieve. I’m a little drunk, maybe more than a little. I stumble my way through the crowd, wait in line. My friend goes into one of the bathrooms. The next one opens up.” I weaved on my feet a bit as I walked through the motions the girl would have taken. “I slip into the bathroom. Maybe I remember to throw the dead bolt. Maybe I don’t.”

Mulling that over, I scanned the room: a toilet, a sink, a broken mirror. Had the mirror been that way before Genevieve was taken? Or had it gotten broken when she was abducted? I turned three hundred and sixty degrees, taking it all in and trying to ignore just how disgusting the bathrooms at eighteen-and-over clubs really were. The floor was permanently sticky. I didn’t even want to look at the toilet, and there was graffiti scrawled across every surface of the bathroom walls.

“If you forgot to bolt the door, I might have followed you in.”

It took me a moment to realize that Dean was speaking from the UNSUB’s perspective. He took a step toward me, making the small space feel even smaller. I stumbled backward, but there was nowhere to go.

“Sorry,” he said, holding his hands up. Channeling Genevieve, I felt my lips curl into a loopy smile. After all, this was a club, and he was kind of cute.…

A second later, Dean had his hand over my mouth. “I could have chloroformed you.”

I twisted out of his hold, all too aware of how close my body was to his. “You didn’t.”

“No,” he agreed, his eyes on mine. “I didn’t.”

This time, he wrapped a hand around my waist. I leaned into him.

“Maybe I’m not just a little drunk,” I said. “Maybe I’m drunker than I should be.”

Dean caught on. “Maybe I slipped a little something extra into your drink.”

“It’s five feet from the bathroom door to the nearest emergency exit.” Sloane issued that observation from just outside the bathroom door. Clearly, she had better sense than to join the two of us in already cramped—and disgusting—quarters.

That went double for Agent Locke. “We have a witness who can place Genevieve going into this bathroom,” she said. “But no one remembers seeing her leave.”

Given that Genevieve probably wasn’t the only tipsy person in Club Muse that night, I wasn’t terribly surprised. It was scary to think how easy it might have been to lead a drugged girl out of the bathroom, down the hallway, and out the door.

“Nine seconds,” Sloane said. “Even if you account for a sluggish gait on Genevieve’s part, the distance between the bathroom and the closest exit is small enough that someone could have gotten her out of here in nine seconds.”

You chose Genevieve. You waited for exactly the right moment. You only needed nine seconds.

This UNSUB was meticulous. A planner.

You do everything for a reason, I thought, and the reason you took this girl is me.

“Okay, kiddies, playtime’s over.” Agent Locke had done an admirable job of fading into the background and letting us work, but clearly, she was on a timetable. “For what it’s worth, I reached the same conclusion you did. Two of the previous victims had traces of GHB in their systems. The UNSUB most likely slipped something into Genevieve’s drink and walked her right out the emergency exit with no one the wiser.”

Belatedly, I realized that Dean still had his arm wrapped around my waist. A second later, he must have realized the same thing, because he pulled away from me and took a step back.

“Any sign of the UNSUB outside?” he asked.

It was easy to forget that I wasn’t actually here as a profiler. I was here as bait, and the FBI was hoping I’d bring the killer straight to them.

“Plainclothes agents are canvassing the streets as we speak,” Agent Locke told us, “masquerading as volunteers, handing out flyers, and looking for people who might have information about Genevieve’s disappearance.”

Dean leaned back against the wall. “But you’re really just making a list of the people who approach the agents?”

Locke nodded. “Got it in one. I’m even patching a video feed through to Michael and Lia back at the house so they can analyze anyone who approaches.”

Apparently, Locke wasn’t above taking advantage of the director’s authorization to involve Naturals in this case.

She pushed a strand of stray hair out of her face. “Cassie, we need you to make a few more appearances outside. I’d have you handing out flyers if I thought we could get away with it, but even I’m not willing to push Briggs that far.”

I tried to put myself in the UNSUB’s shoes. He’d wanted me out of the house; I was out of the house. He’d wanted me involved in this case; now I was standing in the middle of the crime scene.

“Have you seen everything you need to see here?” Agent Locke asked me.

I glanced over at Dean, who was still keeping his distance.

You wanted me involved in this case.

You do everything for a reason.

The reason you took this girl is me.

“No.” I didn’t explain myself to Agent Locke. I didn’t have an explanation. But I knew in my gut that we couldn’t leave yet. If this was part of the UNSUB’s plan, if the UNSUB had wanted me to come here …

“We’re missing something.”

Something the UNSUB would have expected me to see. Something I was supposed to find, something that was supposed to hold meaning for me.

Slowly, I turned around, taking in the three-sixty view once more. I looked under the sink. I ran my fingers gingerly along the edges of the broken mirror.

Nothing.

Methodically, I raked my eyes over the graffiti on the walls. Initials and hearts, curse words and slurs, doodles, song lyrics …

“There.” A single line of text caught my eye. At first, I didn’t even read the words. All I saw were the letters: not quite cursive and not quite print, the same hyperstylized handwriting as on the cards that came with each black box.

FOR A GOOD TIME

The sentence cut off there. Frantically, I ran my finger over the wall, sorting through text, looking for that handwriting to pick up again.

CALL 567-3524. GUARANTEED

A phone number. My heart skipped a beat, but I forced myself to keep going: up and down the walls of the bathroom, looking for another line.

Another clue.

I found it near the mirror.

PLUS ONE. KOLA AND THORN.

Kola and Thorn? The more I read, the more the UNSUB’s message sounded like gibberish.

“Cassie?” Agent Locke cleared her throat. I ignored her. There had to be more. I started at the top and went through all of the graffiti again. Once I was sure there was nothing else, I walked out of the bathroom to get some air. Locke, Dean, and Sloane had been joined by Agent Briggs.

“We need you to make another appearance outside, Cassie.” Agent Briggs clearly considered that an order.

“The UNSUB’s not there,” I told them.

The FBI thought that by bringing me here, they’d been laying a trap for my killer, but they were wrong. The UNSUB was the one laying a trap for us.

“I need a pen,” I said.

After several seconds, Briggs gave me a pen.

“Paper?”

He removed a notebook from his lapel pocket and handed it to me.

“The UNSUB left us a message,” I said, but what I really meant was that he’d left me a message.

I scrawled the words onto the page, then handed it to Briggs.

“For a good time, call 567-3524. Guaranteed plus one. Kola and Thorn.” Briggs lifted his eyes from the page to meet mine. “You’re sure this is from the UNSUB?”

“It matches the cards,” I told him. The way my name had looked in the killer’s script was burned into my mind. “I’m sure.”

To them, the cards were evidence. But to me, they were personal. Without even thinking about it, I reached for my cell phone.

“What are you doing?” Dean asked me.

I pressed my lips into a firm line. “Calling the number.”

Nobody stopped me.

“I’m sorry, the number you have dialed is not in service. Please try your call again later.”

I hung up, looked down at the floor, then shook my head.

“No area code,” Sloane said. “Are we thinking DC? Virginia? Maryland? That’s eleven possible area codes within a hundred-mile radius.”

“Starmans.” Agent Briggs was on his cell phone immediately. “I’m going to read you a telephone number. I need you to try it with every area code within a three-hour driving distance of this location.”

“Can I see your phone, Cassie?” Sloane’s request distracted me from Briggs’s conversation. Unsure why she wanted it, I handed her my phone. She stared at it for a minute, her lips moving rapidly, but no sounds coming out. Finally she looked up. “It’s not a phone number—or at least, not one you’re supposed to call.”

I waited for an explanation. She obliged.

“567-3524. On a telephone, five, six, three, two, and four each correspond to three letters on the keypad. Seven is a four-letter number: P, Q, R, and S. That’s two thousand nine hundred and sixteen possible seven-letter combinations for 567-3524.”

I wondered how long it would take Sloane to run through the two thousand nine hundred and sixteen possible combinations.

“Lorelai.”

“What?” The sound of my mother’s name was like a bucket of ice water thrown directly into my face.

“567-3524 is the telephone number that corresponds to the word Lorelai. It also spells lose-lag, lop-flag, and Jose-jag, but the only seven-letter, single-word possibility—”

“Is Lorelai.” I finished Sloane’s sentence and translated the message with that meaning.

For a good time, call Lorelai. Guaranteed plus one. Kola and Thorn.

“Plus one,” Dean read over my shoulder. “You think the UNSUB is trying to tell us that we’ve got another victim on our hands?”

For a good time, call Lorelai.

Now I had ironclad proof that this case had something to do with my mother’s. That was why the UNSUB had wanted me to come here. He’d left me this message—complete with a “guaranteed plus one.” Someone the UNSUB had already attacked? Someone he was planning on attacking?

I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that if I didn’t solve this, if we didn’t solve this, someone else was going to die.

Genevieve Ridgerton. Plus one. How many people are you going to kill because of me? I asked silently.

There was no answer, just the realization that everything was playing out exactly as the UNSUB had intended. Every discovery I’d made had been choreographed. I was playing a part.

Unable to stop myself, I turned my attention to the last line of the message.

Kola and Thorn.

“Symbolism?” Dean asked me, following my thoughts exactly. “Kola. Cola. Drinking. Thorn. Rose. Blood …”

“An anagram?” Sloane had that faraway look in her eye, the same one she’d gotten the day I met her, kneeling over a pile of glass. “Ankh onto lard. Hot nodal nark. Land rand hook. Oak land north.”

“North Oakland,” Dean cut in. “That’s in Arlington.”

For a good time, call Lorelai. Guaranteed plus one. North Oakland.

“We need a list of every building on North Oakland,” I said, my body buzzing with a sudden rush of adrenaline.

“What are we looking for?” Briggs asked me.

I didn’t have an answer—a warehouse, maybe, or an abandoned apartment. I tried to focus, but I couldn’t quite rid my brain of the sound of my mother’s name, and I realized suddenly that if this killer knew me half as well as he thought he did, there was another possibility.

For a good time, call Lorelai.

The dressing room. The blood. I swallowed. “I’m not sure,” I said. “But I think you might be looking for a theater.”

CHAPTER 32

“We’ve got a body at a small, independent theater in Arlington.” Agent Briggs’s fingers curled into his palms as he delivered the news, but he fought the urge to clench his fists. “It’s not Genevieve Ridgerton.”

I didn’t know whether to be relieved or upset. Somewhere, fifteen-year-old Genevieve might still be alive. But now we were dealing with body number eight.

Our UNSUB’s “plus one.”

“Starmans, Vance, Brooks: I want the three of you to take the kids back to the house. I want one of you posted at the front door, one at the back door, and one with Cassie at all times.” Agent Briggs turned and started walking out of the club, a signal to the rest of us that he was so confident that we would follow his orders that he didn’t even need to stay here to see them through.

I didn’t need Lia or Michael here to tell me that his confidence was a lie.

“I’m going with you,” I said, following him outside. “The exact same logic that let you bring me here applies in Arlington. The UNSUB turned this into a little treasure hunt. He wants to see me follow it to the end.”

“I don’t care what he wants,” Briggs cut in. “I want to keep you safe.”

His tone was uncompromising and full of warning, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Why? Because I’m valuable? Because Naturals work so well as a team, and you’d hate to throw that off?”

Agent Briggs closed the space between us and brought his face down level with mine. “Do you really think that little of me?” he asked quietly. “I’m ambitious. I’m driven. I’m single-minded, but do you really think that I would knowingly put any of you in danger?”

I thought of the moment we’d met. The pen without the cap. His preference for basketball over golf.

“No,” I said. “But we both know that this case is killing you. It’s killing Locke, and now there’s a senator’s daughter involved. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have sent someone to check out that theater. We wouldn’t have discovered the body for hours, maybe days—and who knows what our UNSUB would have done to Genevieve in the meantime?

If you don’t want to use me as bait anymore, fine. But you need to take me with you. You need to take all three of us with you, because we might see something that you can’t.”

That was the whole reason Briggs had started the Naturals program. The whole reason that he’d come to twelve-year-old Dean. No matter how long they did this job, or how much training they had, these agents would never have instincts as finely honed as ours.

“Let her come.” Locke placed a hand on Briggs’s arm, and for the first time, I wondered if there was anything between the two of them other than work. “If Cassie’s old enough to play bait, she’s old enough to learn from the experience.” Locke glanced around the room—at Sloane and Dean. “They all are.”

Forty-five minutes later, we pulled up to 4587 North Oakland Street. The local police were already there, but at the FBI’s insistence, they hadn’t touched a thing. Dean, Sloane, and I waited in the car with Agents Starmans and Vance until the local PD had been cleared off the scene, and then they brought us up to the third floor.

To this tiny theater’s only dressing room. I made it halfway down the hall before Agent Briggs stepped out of the room, blocking the entrance.

“You don’t need to see this, Cassie,” he said.

I could smell it—not rotten, not yet, but coppery: rust with just a hint of decay. I pushed past Briggs. He let me.

The room was rectangular. There was blood smeared across the light switch, blood pooled near the door. The entire left-hand side of the room was lined with mirrors, like a dance studio.

Like my mother’s dressing room.

My limbs felt heavy all of a sudden. My lips were numb. I couldn’t breathe, and just like that, I was right back—

The door is slightly ajar. I push it open. There’s something wet and squishy beneath my feet, and the smell—

I grope for the light switch. My fingers touch something warm and sticky on the wall. Frantically, I search for the light switch—

Don’t turn it on. Don’t turn it on. Don’t turn it on.

I turn it on.

I’m standing in blood. There’s blood on the walls, blood on my hands. A lamp lies shattered on the wood floor. A desk is upturned, and there’s a jagged line in the floorboards.

From the knife.

Pressure on my shoulders forced me to stop reliving the memory. Hands. Dean’s hands, I realized. He brought his face very close to mine.

“Stay in control,” he said, his voice steady and warm. “Every time you go back there, every time you see it—it’s just blood, just a crime scene, just a body.” He dropped his hands to his sides. “That’s all it is, Cassie. That’s all you can let it be.”

I wondered which memories he relived over and over—wondered about the bodies and the blood. But right now, in this moment, I was just glad that he was here, that I wasn’t alone.

I took his advice. I forced myself to look at the mirror, smeared with blood. I could make out handprints, finger tracks, like the victim had used the mirror to pull herself along the ground after she was too weak to walk.

“Time of death was late last night,” Briggs said. “We’ll have Forensics in here to see if they can lift any fingerprints besides the victim’s off the mirror.”

“That’s not her blood.”

I glanced over at Sloane and realized that she was kneeling next to the body. For the first time, I looked at the victim. Her hair was red. She’d obviously been stabbed repeatedly.

“The medical examiner will tell you the same thing,” Sloane continued. “This woman is five feet tall, approximately a hundred and ten pounds. Given her size, we’re looking at death from exsanguination with the loss of three quarts of blood, maybe less. She’s wearing jeans and a cashmere top. Cashmere—and other forms of wool—can absorb up to thirty percent of its weight in moisture without even appearing damp. Since the deepest wounds are concentrated over her stomach and chest areas, and her top and jeans were both tight, she’d have had to bleed through the fabric before dripping all over the floor.”

I looked at the woman’s clothes. Sure enough, they were soaked with blood.

“By the time her clothes were saturated enough to leave a puddle of that size on the floor over there”—Sloane gestured toward the door—“our victim wouldn’t have been conscious to fight off her attacker, let alone lead him on a merry chase through the room. She’s too small, she doesn’t have enough blood, the fabrics she’s wearing don’t expel liquid quickly enough—the numbers don’t add up.”

“She’s right.” Agent Briggs stood up from examining the floor. “There’s a knife mark on the floor over here. If it was made with a bloody knife, there would be blood embedded in the scratch, but there’s not, meaning that either the UNSUB missed at his first attempt at stabbing the woman—which certainly doesn’t seem likely, given her size and the fact that he would have had the element of surprise—or the UNSUB deliberately made these marks with a clean knife.”

I put myself in the victim’s shoes. She was eight or nine inches shorter than my mother’s five-nine, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have fought. But even if the UNSUB had come after her in the exact same way, what were the chances that the scene would have looked this much like my mother’s dressing room? The mirrors on the wall, the blood smeared on the light switch, the dark liquid pooled by the door.

Something about this didn’t feel right.

“She’s left-handed.”

I turned to look at Dean, and he continued, “Victim’s wearing her watch on her right hand, and her manicure is more chipped on her left hand than her right,” he said. “Was your mother left-handed, Cassie?”

I shook my head and realized where he was going with this. “They wouldn’t have fought off an attacker in the same way,” I said.

Dean gave a brief nod of agreement. “If anything, we’d expect spatter on this wall.” He gestured to the plain wall opposite the mirrors. It was clean.

“The UNSUB didn’t kill her here.” Locke was the first one who said it out loud. “There’s virtually no blood pooled around the body. She was killed somewhere else.”

You killed her. You brought her here. You painted the room in blood.

“For a good time, call Lorelai,” I murmured.

“Cassie?” Agent Locke raised an eyebrow at me. I answered the question that went along with the eyebrow raise.

“She’s just a prop,” I said, looking at the woman, wishing I knew her name, wishing that I could still make out the features of her face. “This is a set. This entire thing was staged to look like my mother’s death. Exactly like it.” My stomach twisted sharply.

“Okay,” Agent Locke said. “So I’m the killer. I’m fixated on you, and I’m fixated on your mother. Maybe she was my first kill, but this time, it isn’t about your mother.”

“It’s about you.” Dean picked up where Agent Locke had left off. “I’m not trying to relive her death. I’m trying to force you to relive discovering her.”

The UNSUB had wanted me here. The presents, the coded message, and now this—a corpse dumped in a crime scene strikingly like my mother’s.

“Briggs.” One of Briggs’s agents—Starmans—stuck his head into the room. “Medical examiner and the forensics team are here. Do you want me to hold them off?”

Briggs looked at Dean, at me, and then at Sloane, still kneeling next to the body. We’d been careful not to touch anything or disturb the crime scene, but plopping three teenagers down in the middle of a murder investigation wasn’t exactly covert. Briggs, Locke, and their team obviously knew about us, but I wasn’t convinced that the rest of the FBI did, and Briggs confirmed that when he glanced from Starmans to Locke.

“Get them out of here, Starmans,” Briggs said. “I want you, Brooks, and Vance rotating through on Cassie’s protection detail. Director Sterling has offered some of his best men for surveillance. They’ll keep an eye on the house from the outside, but I want one of you with Cassie at all times, and tell Judd that the house arrest is still in effect. No one leaves that house until this killer is caught.”

I didn’t fight the orders.

I didn’t fight to stay there in the room, looking for clues.

There weren’t any. This was never about me figuring out who this killer was. This was always, always about the UNSUB playing with me, forcing me to relive the worst day of my life.

Sloane slipped an arm around my waist. “There are fourteen varieties of hugs,” she said. “This is one of them.”

Locke put a hand on my shoulder and steered the two of us out of the room, Dean on our heels.

This is a game. I heard Dean’s voice echoing through my memory. It’s always a game. That was what he’d told Michael, and at the time, I’d agreed. To the killer, this was a game—and suddenly, I couldn’t help thinking that the good guys might not win this one.

We might lose.

I might lose.

CHAPTER 33

I wasn’t allowed to go into the house until Judd and the agents on my protection detail had swept it, and even then, Agent Starmans accompanied me to my bedroom.

“You okay?” he asked, giving me a sidelong glance.

“Fine,” I replied. It was a stock answer, perfected around the Sunday night dinner table. I was a survivor. Whatever life threw at me, I came out okay, and the rest of the world thought I was great. I’d been faking things for so long that, until the past few weeks with Michael, Dean, Lia, and Sloane, I’d forgotten what it was like to be real.

“You’re a tough kid,” Agent Starmans told me.

I wasn’t in the mood to talk, and I especially wasn’t in the mood to be patted metaphorically on the head. All I wanted was to be left alone and given a chance to process, to recover.

“You’re divorced,” I replied. “Sometime within the past four years, maybe five. Long enough ago that you should have moved on.”

I normally made it a rule not to take the things I deduced about people and turn them into weapons, but I needed space. I needed to breathe. I stood and walked over to the window. Agent Starmans cleared his throat.

“What do you think the UNSUB is going to do?” I asked wearily. “Take me out with a sniper rifle?”

Not this killer. He’d want up close and personal. You didn’t have to be a Natural profiler to see that.

“Why don’t you cut the poor agent some slack, Colorado? I’m fairly certain making grown men cry is Lia’s specialty, not yours.” Michael didn’t bother knocking before entering the room and giving Agent Starmans his most charming smile.

“I’m not making anyone cry,” I said mutinously.

Michael turned his gaze on me. “Underneath your ticked-off-that-they-won’t-leave-me-alone-and-even-more-ticked-off-that-I’m-scared-to-actually-be-alone exterior, I detect a slight trace of guilt, which suggests that you did say something below the belt, and you’re feeling the tiniest bit bad for using your powers for evil, and he”—Michael jerked his head toward Agent Starmans—“is fighting down-turned lips and furrowed eyebrows. I don’t need to tell you what that means, do I?”

“Please don’t,” Agent Starmans muttered.

“Of course, there’s also his posture, which suggests some level of sexual frustration—”

Agent Starmans took a step forward. He towered over Michael, but Michael just kept smiling, undeterred.

“No offense.”

“I’ll be out in the hall,” Agent Starmans said. “Keep the door open.”

It took me a moment after the agent retreated to realize that Michael had put him on the spot on purpose.

“Were you really reading his posture?” I whispered.

Michael ducked his head next to mine, a delightfully wicked smile on his face. “Unlike you, I have no problems using my ability for nefarious purposes.” He reached up and ran his thumb over the edge of my lip and onto my cheek. “You have something on your face.”

“Liar.”

He brushed his thumb over my other cheek. “I never lie about a pretty girl’s face. You’re carrying so much tension in yours that I have to ask: should I be worried about you?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Liar,” Michael whispered back.

For a second, I could almost forget everything that had happened today: Genevieve Ridgerton; the coded message on the bathroom wall; the UNSUB butchering a woman and using her body as a prop to recreate my mother’s death; the fact that all of this killer’s actions were designed to manipulate me.

“You’re doing it again,” Michael said, and this time, he ran the middle and index fingers of each hand along the lines of my jaw.

In the hallway, Agent Starmans took a step back. And then another, until he was almost out of sight.

“Are you touching me just to make him uncomfortable?” I asked Michael, keeping my voice low enough that the agent wouldn’t overhear.

“Not just to make him uncomfortable.”

My lips twitched. Even the possibility of a smile felt foreign on my face.

“Now,” Michael said, “are you going to tell me what happened today, or do I have to drag it out of Dean?”

I gave him a skeptical look. Michael amended his previous statement. “Are you going to tell me what happened today, or am I going to have to have Lia drag it out of Dean?”

Knowing Lia, she’d probably managed to pry at least half of the story out of Dean already—and with my luck, she would pass it on to Michael with embellishments. It was better that he heard it from me—so I started at the beginning with Club Muse and the message on the bathroom wall and didn’t stop until I’d told him about the crime scene in Arlington and its resemblance to my mother’s.

“You think the similarity was intentional,” Michael said.

I nodded. Michael didn’t ask me to elaborate, and I realized how much of our conversation happened in silence, with him reading my face and me knowing exactly how he’d respond.

“The theory is that the UNSUB staged all of this for me,” I said finally. “It wasn’t about the UNSUB reliving the kill. It was about making me relive it.”

Michael stared at me. “Say the second sentence again.”

“It wasn’t about the UNSUB reliving the kill,” I repeated.

“There,” Michael said. “Every time you say the words reliving the kill, you duck your head slightly to the right. It’s like you’re shaking your head or being bashful or … something.”

I opened my mouth to tell him that he was wrong, that he was reading too much into that single sentence, but I couldn’t form the words, because he was right. I didn’t know why I felt like I was missing something, but I did. If Michael had seen some hint of that in my facial expression …

Maybe my body knew something that I didn’t.

“It wasn’t about the UNSUB reliving the kill,” I said again. That was true. I knew it was true. But now that Michael had pointed it out, I could feel my gut telling me, loud and clear, that it wasn’t the whole truth.

“I’m missing something.” The horror at the crime scene had been familiar. Almost too familiar. What kind of killer remembered the details of a crime scene so exactly? The splatter, the blood on the mirrors and the light switch, the knife marks on the floor …

“Tell me what you’re thinking.” Michael’s words penetrated my thoughts. I focused on his hazel eyes. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shadow in the doorway. Agent Starmans. Had he overheard us? Was he trying to overhear us?

Michael grabbed my neck. He pulled me toward him. When Agent Starmans glanced in the room, all he saw was Michael and me.

Kissing.

The kiss in the pool was nothing compared to this. Then, our lips had barely brushed. Now, my lips were opening. Our mouths were crushed together. His hand traveled from my neck down to my lower back. My lips tingled, and I leaned into the kiss, shifting my body until I could feel the heat from his in my arms, my chest, my stomach.

On some level, I was aware of the fact that Agent Starmans had hightailed it back down the hall, leaving me alone with Michael. On some level, I was aware of the fact that now was not a time for kissing, of the vortex of emotion I felt when I looked at Michael, of the sound of someone else coming down the hallway.

My fingers curled into claws. I dug them into his T-shirt, his hair. And then finally—finally—I realized what I was doing. What we were doing.

I pulled back, then hesitated. Michael dropped his hands from my back. There was a soft smile on his face, a look of wonderment in his eyes. This was Michael without layers. This was Michael and me—and Dean was standing in the doorway.

“Dean.” I forced myself not to scramble backward, not to lean away from Michael in any way. I wouldn’t do that to him. The kiss might have started as a distraction, he might have taken advantage of the moment, but I’d kissed him back, and I wasn’t going to turn around and make him feel like nothing just because Dean was standing in the doorway and there was something there between him and me, too.

Michael had never made any secret of the fact that he was pursuing me. Dean had fought any attraction he felt for me every step of the way.

“We need to talk,” Dean said.

“Whatever you have to say,” Michael drawled, “you can say in front of me.”

I gave Michael a look.

“Whatever you have to say, you can say in front of me, unless Cassie wishes to speak to you privately, in which case I completely respect her right to do so,” Michael corrected himself.

“No,” Dean said. “Stay. It’s fine.”

He didn’t sound fine—and if I was picking up on that, I didn’t want to know how easy it was for Michael to see what Dean was feeling.

“I brought you this,” Dean said, holding out a file. At first, I thought it was the case file for our UNSUB, but then I saw the label on the file. LORELAI HOBBES.

“My mother’s file?”

“Locke snuck me a copy,” Dean said. “She thought there might be something here, and she was right. The attack on your mother was poorly planned. It was emotional. It was messy. And what we saw today—”

“Wasn’t any of those things,” I finished. Dean had just put into words the feeling I’d been on the verge of explaining to Michael. A killer could grow and change, their MO could develop, but the emotions, the rage, the titillation—that didn’t just go away. Whoever had attacked my mom would have been too overwhelmed by adrenaline to commit the minutiae of the scene to memory.

The person responsible for the blood in my mother’s dressing room five years ago wouldn’t have been able to reenact her murder so coldly today.

This wasn’t about reliving a kill.

“Even if I’m evolving,” Dean said, “even if I’ve gotten good at what I do—seeing you, Cassie, seeing your mother in you, I’d be frenzied.” Dean slipped a picture of my mother’s crime scene out of the folder. Then he laid a second picture down next to it, of the scene today. Looking at the two photos side by side, I accepted what my gut was telling me, what Dean was telling me.

If you were the one who killed my mother, I told the UNSUB, if every woman you’ve killed since is a way to relive that moment, wouldn’t her death mean something to you? How could you possibly stage a scene like that and not lose control?

The UNSUB responsible for the corpse I’d seen today was meticulous. Methodical. The type who needed to be in control and always had a plan.

The person who’d killed my mother was none of those things.

How is that even possible? I wondered.

“Look at the light switches.”

I turned around. Sloane was directly behind me, staring at the pictures. Lia entered the room a moment later.

“I took care of Agent Starmans,” she said. “He has somehow developed the impression that he is urgently needed in the kitchen.” Dean gave her an exasperated look. “What?” she said. “I thought Cassie might want some privacy.”

I didn’t really think five people counted as “privacy,” but I was too stuck on Sloane’s words to nitpick Lia’s. “Why am I looking at the light switches?”

“There’s a single smear of blood on the light switch and plate in both photos,” Sloane said. “But in this one”—she gestured to the photo of the scene today—“the blood is on the top of the switch. And in this one, it’s on the bottom.”

“And the translation, for those of us who don’t spend hours working on physical simulations in the basement?” Lia asked.

“In one of the photos, the light switch got smeared with blood when someone with bloody hands turned it off,” Sloane said. “But in the other one, it happened when the light was turned on.”

My fingers touch something warm and sticky on the wall. Frantically, I search for the light switch. My fingers find it. I don’t care that they’re covered in warm, wet liquid.

I. Need. It. On.

“I turned the light on,” I said. “When I came back to my mother’s dressing room—there was blood on my hands when I turned the light on.”

But if there had only been one smear of blood on the switch, and that smear of blood was from my hand …

My mother’s killer wouldn’t have known it was there. The only people who would have known about the blood on the light switch were the people who’d seen the crime scene after I’d returned to the dressing room. After I’d turned the light on. After I’d accidentally coated the switch in blood.

And yet, our UNSUB, who had meticulously recreated my mother’s murder scene, had included that detail.

You weren’t reliving the kill, I thought, allowing myself to finally give life to the words, because you weren’t the one who killed my mother.

But who else could this UNSUB—who was unquestionably fixated on my mom, on me—possibly be? My mind raced through the day’s events.

The gift, sent to me, but addressed to Sloane.

Genevieve Ridgerton.

The message on the bathroom wall.

The theater in Arlington.

Every detail had been planned. This killer had known exactly what I would do at every step along the way—but not just me. He’d known what all of us would do. He’d known that sending a package to Sloane was his best chance of getting it to me. He’d known that Briggs and Locke would cave and bring me to the crime scene. He’d known that I’d find the message, and that someone else would decode it. He’d known that we would find the theater in Arlington, that the agents would let me see it.

“The code,” I said, backtracking out loud. The others looked at me. “The UNSUB left a message for me, but I couldn’t have decoded it. Not alone.” If the UNSUB was so set on forcing me to relive my mother’s murder, why leave a message I might not be able to understand?

Had the UNSUB known Sloane would be there? Did he expect her to decode it? Did he know what she could do? And if he did …

You know about my mother’s case. What if you know about the program, too?

“Lia, the lipstick.” I tried to keep my voice steady, tried not to let the panic in my chest worm its way to the surface. “The Rose Red lipstick—where did you get it?”

A few days ago, it had seemed benign: a cruel irony, but nothing more. Now—

“Lia?”

“I told you,” Lia said, “I bought it.”

I hadn’t recognized the lie the first time around.

“Where did you get it, Lia?”

Lia opened her mouth to dish out a retort, then closed it again. Her eyes studied mine. “It was a gift,” she said quietly. “I don’t know from who. Someone left a bag of makeup on my bed last week. I just assumed I had a makeup fairy.” She paused. “Honestly, I thought it might be from Sloane.”

“I haven’t stolen makeup in months.” Sloane’s eyes were wide. My stomach lurched.

There was a chance that the UNSUB knew about the program.

The only people who would have been able to reconstruct my mother’s crime scene so exactly, the only people who would have known about the blood on the light switch, were people who had access to the crime-scene photos.

And someone had left a tube of my mother’s favorite lipstick on Lia’s bed.

Inside our house.

CHAPTER 34

“Cassie?” Lia was the first one to break the silence. “Are you okay? You look … not good.”

I was going to go out on a limb and guess that was about as diplomatic as Lia got.

“I need to call Agent Briggs,” I said, and then I paused. “I don’t have his number.”

Dean fished his phone out of his pocket. “There are only four numbers in my contacts,” he said. “Briggs is one of them.”

The other three were Locke, Lia, and Judd. My hands shaking, I dialed Agent Briggs.

No answer.

I called Locke.

Please answer. Please answer. Please, please answer.

“Dean?”

Like Agent Briggs, Locke didn’t bother with hello.

“No,” I said. “It’s me.”

“Cassie? Is everything okay?”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

“Are you alone?”

“No.”

Locke must have heard something in my voice, because she flipped into agent mode in a heartbeat. “Can you talk openly?”

I heard steps in the hallway. Agent Starmans opened the door without knocking, glared pointedly at Lia, then resumed standing guard, right outside the door.

“Cassie,” Locke said sharply. “Can you talk?”

“I don’t know.”

I didn’t know anything except for the fact that there was a very real possibility that the killer had been inside our house—for all I knew, the killer could be inside the house now. If the UNSUB had access to FBI files, if he had access to us …

“Cassie, I need you to listen to me. Hang up the phone. Tell whoever’s around you that I’m in the middle of something and I’ll stop by the house as soon as I’m done. Then take the phone, go to the bathroom, and call me back.”

I did what she told me to do. I hung up the phone. I repeated her words to the rest of the room—and to Agent Starmans, who was standing right outside.

“What did she say?” Lia asked, her eyes locked on to my face, ready to call me out the second a lie passed my lips.

“She said, ‘I’m in the middle of something, and I’ll stop by the house as soon as I’m done.’”

Technically, Agent Locke had said those exact words. I wasn’t lying—and I’d just have to take the chance that Lia wouldn’t pick up any cues that I was withholding a chunk of the truth.

“Are you okay?” Dean asked.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” I said, hoping they’d read that as me not wanting to admit that I wasn’t okay. I walked out of the room without ever looking Michael in the eye.

The second I closed the bathroom door behind me, I locked it. I turned on the sink faucet, and then I called Agent Locke back.

“I’m alone,” I said softly, letting the sound of running water mask my words for everyone but her.

“Okay,” Locke said. “Now, take a deep breath. Stay calm. And tell me what’s wrong.”

I told her. She cursed softly under her breath.

“Did you call Briggs?” she asked.

“I tried,” I said. “He’s not picking up his phone.”

“Cassie, I need to tell you something, and I want you to promise me that you’re going to keep it together. Briggs is in a meeting with Director Sterling. We have reason to believe that there might be a leak in our unit. Until we get firm evidence to the contrary, we have to assume that your protection detail has been compromised. I need you to get out: quietly, quickly, and without drawing anyone’s attention.”

I thought about Agent Starmans, out in the hallway, and about the other agents downstairs. I’d been so caught up in the case I hadn’t paid attention to them.

To any of them.

“I’ll call Starmans and the others,” Locke said. “I should be able to buy you a few minutes unguarded.”

“I have to get out of here,” I said. The idea that the UNSUB might be one of the people who was supposed to protect me—

“You have to calm down,” Locke said, her voice firm. “You live in a house full of very perceptive people. If you panic, they’ll know it.”

Michael. She was talking about Michael.

“He doesn’t have anything to do with this,” I said.

“I never said he did,” Locke replied, “but I’ve known Michael for longer than you have, Cassie, and he’s got a history of doing stupid things for girls. The last thing we need right now is someone playing hero.”

I thought of the way that Michael had slammed Dean into the wall when Dean had called the killer’s obsession with me a game. I thought of Michael in the pool, telling me about a time when he’d lost it.

“I have to go,” I said. The farther away I was from Michael, the safer he’d be. If I left, the UNSUB would follow. We could flush this psychopath out. “I’ll call you once I’m clear.”

“Cassie, if you hang up this phone and do something stupid,” Locke said, channeling Nonna and my mother and Agent Briggs all at once, “I will spend the next five years of your life making sure you deeply, deeply regret it. I want you to find Dean. If anyone in that house knows how to spot a killer, it’s him, and I trust him to keep you safe. He knows the combination to the safe in Briggs’s study. Tell him I said to use it.”

It took me a moment to realize that the safe in question must be a gun safe.

“Get to Dean and get out of the house, Cassie. Don’t let anyone else see you leave. I’ll send the coordinates of our DC safe house. Briggs and I will meet you there.”

I nodded, knowing that she couldn’t see me, but unable to form intelligible words.

“Stay. Calm.”

I nodded again and finally managed to say, “Okay.”

“You can do this,” Agent Locke said. “You and Dean are an incredible team, and I’m not going to let anything happen to either of you.”

Three sharp raps on the bathroom door made me jump, but I forced myself to follow Locke’s primary directive and stay calm. I could do this. I had to do this. Hanging up the phone, I stuffed it into my back pocket, turned the faucet off, and glanced at the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me.”

Michael. I cursed inside, because there was calm and there was calm, and with Michael’s knack for emotions, he’d know in a heartbeat if I was faking.

Calm. Calm. Calm.

I couldn’t be angry. I couldn’t be scared. I couldn’t be panicked or guilty or show any signs that I’d just talked to Agent Locke—not if I wanted to keep Michael out of this. At the last second, as I opened the door, I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to do it.

He was going to realize that something was wrong—so I did the only thing I could think of to do. I opened the door, and I lied.

“Look,” I said, allowing the bevy of emotions I’d been holding back to show on my face, allowing him to see how tired I was, how overwhelmed, how upset. “If this is about the kiss, I really just cannot deal with this right now.” I paused and let those words sink in. “I can’t deal with you.”

I saw it the second the words hit their mark, because Michael’s facial expression utterly changed. He didn’t look angry or sad—he looked like he couldn’t have cared less. He looked like the boy I’d met in the diner: layers upon layers, mask upon mask.

I brushed past him before he could see that it hurt me to hurt him. Hitting the final nail in the coffin, I stalked down the hallway, knowing he was watching me, and I walked right up to Dean.

“I need your help,” I said, my voice low.

Dean glanced over my shoulder. I knew he was looking at Michael. I knew Michael was glaring at him, but I didn’t turn around.

I couldn’t let myself turn around.

Dean nodded, and a second later, I followed him up to the third floor, to his room. True to Agent Locke’s words, Agent Starmans received a phone call that kept him from following.

“Sorry—” I started to say, but Dean cut me off.

“Don’t apologize,” he said. “Just tell me what you need.”

I thought of the way he’d looked, walking in on Michael and me. “Locke wants me out of the house,” I said. “Either there’s a leak in the FBI and the UNSUB has a way in, or the UNSUB is already here and we just don’t know it. Locke said to tell you to use the combination to the safe in the study.”

Dean’s phone buzzed. A new text.

“That will be the location to the safe house,” I said. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to get down to the study and out of the house without anyone seeing us, but—”

“I do.” Dean kept things simple: no more words than absolutely necessary. “There’s a back staircase. They blocked it off years ago: too unsteady. Nobody but Judd even knows it’s there. If we can get down to the basement, I know a way out. Here.” He threw me a sweatshirt off his bed. “Put this on. You’re freezing.”

It was the middle of summer. In Virginia. I shouldn’t have been freezing, but my body was doing its best to go into shock. I slipped the sweatshirt on as Dean ushered me down the back staircase and into the study. I kept watch at the door as he knelt next to the safe.

“Do you know how to shoot?” he asked me.

I shook my head. That particular skill hadn’t been part of my mother’s training. Maybe if it had been, she’d have still been alive.

Dean loaded one of the guns and tucked it into the waistband of his jeans. He left the other one where it was and shut the safe. Two minutes later, we’d made it to the basement, and a minute after that, we were on our way to the safe house.

YOU

You weren’t supposed to make mistakes. The plan was supposed to be perfect. And for a few hours, it was.

But you messed it up. You always mess everything up—and there His voice is again in your head, and you’re thirteen years old and cowering in the corner, wondering if it will be fists or his belt or a poker from the fire.

And the worst thing is, you’re alone. Surrounded by people or throwing your hands up to protect your face, it doesn’t matter. You’re always alone.

That’s why you can’t mess this up. That’s why it has to be perfect from here on out. That’s why you have to be perfect.

You can’t lose Cassie. You won’t.

You’ll love her, or you’ll kill her, but either way, she’s going to be yours.

CHAPTER 35

The safe house looked like any other house. Dean went in first. He pulled his gun and held it expertly in front of his body as he cleared the foyer, the living room, the kitchen. I stayed close behind him. We’d made our way back to the foyer when the knob on the front door began to turn.

Dean stepped forward, pushing me further back. He held the gun out steadily. I waited, praying that it was Briggs and Locke on the other side of the door. The hinges creaked. The door slowly opened.

“Michael?”

Dean lowered his weapon. For a split second, I felt a burst of relief, warm and sure, radiating out from the center of my body. I expelled the breath caught in my throat. My heart started to beat again.

And then I saw the gun in Michael’s hand.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. Looking at him, at the gun, I felt like the stupid girl in the horror movie, the one who couldn’t see what was right in front of her face. The one who went to check on the radiator in the basement when there was a masked murderer on the loose.

Michael was here.

Michael had a gun.

The UNSUB had a source on the inside.

No.

“Why do you have a gun?” I asked dumbly. I couldn’t keep from taking a step toward Michael, even though I couldn’t quite read the look on his face.

In front of me, Dean raised his right arm, gun in hand. “Put it down, Townsend.”

Michael was going to put down the gun. That was what I told myself. He was going to put down the gun, and this was all going to be some kind of mistake. I’d seen Michael on the verge of violence. He’d told me himself that the potential for losing it was in him, but I knew Michael. He wasn’t dangerous. He wasn’t a killer. The boy I knew wasn’t just a mask worn by someone who knew how to manipulate emotions as well as he could read them.

This was Michael. He called me Colorado, and he read Jane Austen, and I could still feel his lips on mine. He was going to put down the gun.

But he didn’t. Instead, he lifted it up, training the weapon on Dean.

The two of them stared at each other. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck. I took a step forward, then another one. I couldn’t stay in the background.

Michael had a gun trained on Dean.

Dean had a gun trained on Michael.

“I’m warning you, Michael. Put it down.” Dean sounded calm. Absolutely, utterly calm in a way that made my stomach churn, because I knew suddenly that he could pull the trigger. He wouldn’t second-guess himself. He wouldn’t hesitate.

If he thought I was in danger, he would put a bullet in Michael’s head.

“You put it down,” Michael replied. “Cassie—”

I cut Michael off. I couldn’t listen to a word either of them had to say, not when we were a hair’s breadth away from disaster. “Put it down, Michael,” I said. “Please.”

Michael’s gaze wavered. For the first time, he looked from Dean to me, and I saw it the moment he realized that I wasn’t afraid of Dean. That I was afraid of him.

“You were gone. Dean was gone. One of Briggs’s guns was gone.” Michael took a ragged breath. The guarded expression fell from his face, bit by bit, until I was looking at the boy I’d kissed: confused and hurting, longing for me, terrified for me, breakable. “I would never hurt you, Cassie.”

Something came undone inside of me. This was Michael—the same Michael he’d always been.

Beside me, Dean repeated his command for Michael to lower the gun. Michael closed his eyes. He lowered his weapon, and the second he did, the sound of gunfire tore through the air.

One shot. Two shots.

My ears ringing, my gut twisting, bile rising in my throat, I tried to figure out which gun had gone off. Michael’s hand was by his side. His mouth opened in a tiny O, and I watched with horror as red blossomed across his pale blue shirt. He’d been hit. Twice. Once in the shoulder. Once in the leg. His eyes rolled back in his head. The gun dropped from his fingertips.

He fell.

I turned to see Dean with the gun still in his hand. He was aiming at me.

No. No no no no no no no.

And that was when I heard a voice behind me and realized that Dean wasn’t the one holding the gun that had gone off. He wasn’t aiming at me. He was aiming at the person standing behind me. The one who’d shot Michael.

He was aiming at Special Agent Lacey Locke.