All In: (The Naturals #3) (2 page)

T
here was a difference between
presumed dead
and
dead
, a difference between coming back to a dressing room that
was drenched in my mother’s blood and being told that after five long years, there was a body.

When I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, I had prayed every night that someone would find my mother, that the police would be proven wrong, that somehow, despite the evidence, despite
the amount of blood she’d lost, she’d turn up. Alive.

Eventually, I had stopped hoping and started praying that the authorities would find my mother’s body. I had imagined being called in to identify the remains. I’d imagined saying
good-bye. I had imagined burying her.

I hadn’t imagined this.

“They’re sure it’s her?” I asked, my voice small, but steady.

My father and I were sitting on opposite sides of a porch swing, just the two of us, the closest thing to privacy Nonna’s house could afford.

“The location’s right.” He didn’t look at me as he replied, staring out into the night. “So is the timing. They’re trying to match dental records, but you two
moved around so much….” He seemed to realize, then, that he was telling me something I already knew.

My mother’s dental records would be hard to come by.

“They found this.” My father held out a thin silver chain. A small red stone hung on the end.

My throat closed up.

Hers.

I swallowed, pushing the thought down, like I could unthink it by sheer force of will. My father tried to hand me the necklace. I shook my head.

Hers.

I’d known my mother was almost certainly dead. I’d
known
that. I’d believed it. But now, looking at the necklace she’d worn that night, I couldn’t
breathe.

“That’s evidence.” I forced the words out. “The police shouldn’t have given it to you. It’s evidence.”

What were they thinking?
I’d only been working with the FBI for six months. Almost all of that time had been spent behind the scenes, and even I knew you didn’t break chain
of evidence just so a halfway-orphaned girl could have something that had belonged to her mother.

“There weren’t any prints on it,” my father assured me. “Or trace evidence.”

“Tell them to keep it,” I ground out, standing up and walking to the edge of the porch. “They may need it. For identification.”

It had been five years. If they were looking for dental records, there probably wasn’t anything left for me
to
identify.
Nothing but bones.

“Cassie—”

I tuned out. I didn’t want to listen to a man who’d barely known my mother telling me that the police had no leads, that they thought it was all right to compromise evidence, because
none of them expected this case to be solved.

After five years, we had a body. That was a lead.
Notches in the bones. The way she was buried. The place her killer had laid her to rest.
There had to be
something
. Some hint
of what had happened.

He came after you with a knife.
I slipped into my mother’s perspective, trying to work out what had happened that day, as I had so many times before.
He surprised you. You
fought.

“I want to see the scene.” I turned back to my father. “The place where they found the body, I want to see it.”

My father was the one who’d signed off on my enrolling in Agent Briggs’s gifted program, but he had no idea what kind of “education” I was receiving. He didn’t know
what the program really was. He didn’t know what I could do. Killers and victims, UNSUBs and bodies—this was my language.
Mine.
And what had happened to my mother?

That was mine, too.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Cassie.”

It’s not your decision.
I thought the words, but didn’t say them out loud. There was no point in arguing with him. If I wanted access—to the site, to pictures, to
whatever scraps of evidence there might be—Vincent Battaglia wasn’t the person to ask.

“Cassie?” My father stood and took a hesitant step toward me. “If you want to talk about this—”

I turned around and shook my head. “I’m fine,” I said, cutting off his offer. I pushed down the lump rising in my throat. “I just want to go back to school.”

“School” was overstating things. The Naturals program consisted of a grand total of five students, and our lessons had what you would call
practical
applications
. We weren’t just pupils. We were resources to be used.

An elite team.

Each of the five of us had a skill, an aptitude honed to perfection by the lives we’d lived growing up.

None of us had normal childhoods.
Those were the words I kept thinking, over and over again, four days later as I stood at the end of my grandmother’s drive, waiting for my ride
to arrive.
If we had, we wouldn’t be Naturals.

Instead of thinking of the way I’d grown up, going from town to town with a mother who conned people into thinking she was psychic, I thought about the others—about Dean’s
psychopath of a father and the way Michael had learned to read emotions as a means of survival. About Sloane and Lia and the things I suspected about their childhoods.

Thinking about my fellow Naturals came with a particular brand of homesickness. I wanted them here—all of them, any of them—so badly that I almost couldn’t breathe.

“Dance it off.”
I could hear my mother’s voice in my memory. I could see her, wrapped in a royal blue scarf, her red hair damp from cold and snow as she flipped the
car radio on and turned it up.

That had been our ritual. Every time we moved—from one town to the next, from one mark to the next, from one show to the next—she turned on the music, and we danced in our seats
until we forgot about everything and everyone we’d left behind.

My mother wasn’t a person who’d believed in missing anything for long.

“You’re looking deep in thought.” A low, no-nonsense voice brought me back to the present.

I pushed back against the memories—and the deluge of emotions that wanted to come with them. “Hey, Judd.”

The man the FBI had hired to look after us studied me for a moment, then picked up my bag and swung it into the trunk. “You going to say good-bye?” he asked, nodding toward the
porch.

I turned back to see Nonna standing there. She loved me. Fiercely. Determinedly.
From the moment you met me.
The least I owed her was a good-bye.

“Cassandra?” Nonna’s tone was brisk as I approached. “You forget something?”

For years, I’d believed that I was broken, that my ability to love—fiercely, determinedly, freely—had died with my mother.

The past few months had taught me I was wrong.

I wrapped my arms around my grandmother, and she latched hers around me and held on for dear life.

“I should go,” I said after a moment.

She tapped my cheek with a little more oomph than necessary. “You call if you need anything,” she ordered. “Anything.”

I nodded.

She paused. “I am sorry,” she said carefully. “About your mother.”

Nonna had never met my mother. She didn’t know the first thing about her. I’d never told my father’s family about my mom’s laugh, or the games she’d used to teach
me to read people, or the way we’d said
no matter what
instead of
I love you
, because she didn’t just love me—she loved me forever and ever, no matter what.

“Thanks,” I told my grandmother. My voice came out slightly hoarse. I tamped down on the grief rising up inside me. Sooner or later, it would catch up to me.

I had always been better at compartmentalizing than ridding myself of unwanted emotions altogether.

As I turned away from Nonna’s prying eyes and walked back to Judd and the car, I couldn’t banish the memory of my mom’s voice.

Dance it off.

J
udd drove in silence. He left it to me to break it, if and when I was ready to do so.

“The police found a body.” It took me ten minutes to push those words past the edge of my lips. “They think it’s my mother’s.”

“I heard,” Judd said simply. “Briggs got a call.”

Special Agent Tanner Briggs was one of the Naturals program’s two FBI supervisors. He’d been the one to recruit me, and he’d used my mother’s case to do it.

Of course he’d gotten a call.

“I want to see the body,” I told Judd, staring out at the road in front of us. Later, I could process. Later, I could grieve. Answers, facts,
that
was what I needed now.
“Pictures of the crime scene,” I continued, “anything Briggs can get from the locals, I want to see it.”

Judd waited a beat. “That all?”

No. That wasn’t all. I wanted, desperately, for the body the police had found not to be my mother. And I wanted it to be her. And it didn’t matter that those things were
contradictory. It didn’t matter that I was setting myself up to lose, no matter what.

I bit down, my teeth digging into the inside of my cheek. After a moment, I answered Judd’s question out loud. “No, that’s not all. I also want to take down the person who did
this to her.”

That, at least, was simple. That was clear. I’d joined the Naturals program to put killers behind bars. My mother deserved justice. I deserved justice, for everything I’d lost.

“I ought to tell you that hunting down the person who killed her won’t bring her back.” Judd switched lanes, seemingly paying more attention to the road than to me. I
wasn’t fooled. Judd was a former marine sniper, always aware of his surroundings. “I ought to tell you,” he continued, “that obsessing over this case won’t make it
hurt any less.”

“But you won’t,” I said.

You know what it’s like to have your world torn apart. You know what it’s like to wake up each day to the awareness that the monster who tore it apart is still out there, free to
do it again.

Judd wouldn’t tell me I needed to let this go. He couldn’t.

“What would you do,” I said softly, “if it were Scarlett? If there were a lead, no matter how small, on her case?”

I’d never spoken Judd’s daughter’s name in his presence before. Until recently, I hadn’t even been aware she existed. I didn’t know much about her, other than the
fact that she’d been the victim of a serial killer known as Nightshade.

The one thing I did know was how Judd would have felt if there were a development in that case.

“It was different for me,” Judd said finally, his eyes fixed out on the road. “There was a body. Don’t know if that makes it better or worse. Better, probably, because I
didn’t have to wonder.” His teeth clamped together for a moment. “Worse,” he continued, “because that’s something no father should ever see.”

I tried to imagine what Judd must have gone through when he saw his daughter’s body and immediately wished that I could stop. Judd was a man with a high tolerance for pain and a face that
hid nine-tenths of what he felt. But when he saw his daughter’s lifeless body, there would have been no hiding, no gritting his teeth through the pain—nothing but the roar in his ears
and a devastation I knew all too well.

If it were Scarlett whose body had just been found, Scarlett whose necklace had just turned up, you wouldn’t sit idly by. You couldn’t—no matter the cost.

“You’ll tell Briggs and Sterling to get me the files?” I said. Judd wasn’t an FBI agent. His first and only priority was the well-being of the Bureau’s teenage
assets. He was the final word on our involvement in any case.

Including my mother’s.

You understand,
I thought, staring at him.
Whether you want to or not—you do.

“You can look at the files,” Judd told me. He pulled the car into a private airstrip, then fixed me with a look. “But you’re not doing it alone.”

T
he private jet seated twelve, but when I stepped onto the plane, only five of those seats were filled. Agents Sterling and Briggs
sat at the front of the plane, on opposite sides of the aisle. She was looking at a file. He was looking at his watch.