All In: (The Naturals #3) (27 page)

“You’re leaving?” Tory asked Sloane.

“There is a ninety-eight-point-seven percent chance that statement is accurate.”

“I’m sorry you can’t stay.” Tory hesitated again, and she said, softly, “Aaron really did want to get to know you.”

“Aaron told you about me?” Sloane’s voice wavered slightly.

“I knew he had a half sister he’d never met,” Tory replied. “He wondered about you, you know. When you stepped in front of him that night at the show, and I saw your
eyes…” She paused. “I did the math.”

“Strictly speaking, that wasn’t a mathematical calculation.”

“You matter to him,” Tory said. I knew, in the pit of my stomach, that it cost her to say the words, because there was a part of her that couldn’t be sure that
she
mattered to Aaron. “You mattered to him before he even knew who you were.”

Sloane absorbed that statement. She pressed her lips together and then blurted out, “I have gathered that there is an overwhelmingly large chance that your relationship with Aaron is
intimate and/or sexual in nature.”

Tory didn’t flinch. She wasn’t the type to let you see her hurting.

“When I was three…” Sloane trailed off, averting her eyes so that she wasn’t looking straight at Tory. “Grayson Shaw came to my mother’s apartment to meet
me.” The words were costing Sloane to say—but they were even harder for Tory to hear. “My mother dressed me up in a white dress and left me in the bedroom and told me that if I
was a good girl, my daddy would want us.”

The white dress,
I thought, my stomach twisting and my heart aching for Sloane. I knew how this story ended.

“He didn’t want me.” Sloane didn’t go into the particulars of what had happened that afternoon. “And he didn’t want my mother so much after that.”

“Trust me, kid,” Tory replied, steel in her voice, “I’ve learned my lesson about getting in bed with Shaws.”

“No,” Sloane said fiercely. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not good at this. I’m not good at talking to people, but…” She sucked in a breath of air.
“Aaron brought the FBI evidence that Beau acted in self-defense—evidence they never would have seen otherwise. I’m told there’s a very high probability he did that for you.
I thought that Aaron was like his father. I thought…”

She’d thought Tory was like her mother. Like her.

“Aaron fights for you,” Sloane said fiercely. “You say I matter to him, but you matter, too.”

“Beau was cleared of all charges this morning,” Tory said finally, her voice rough. “That was Aaron?”

Sloane nodded.

Before Tory could reply, my phone rang in my bag. I considered ignoring it or declining the call again, but what was the point? Now that we’d been pulled off the case, there was nothing
left to distract me. Nowhere else to run.

“Hello.” I turned away from the group as I answered.

“Cassie.”

My father had a way of saying my name, like it was a word in a foreign language, one he could get by in, but would never fluently speak.

“They got the test results back.” I said it so that he wouldn’t have to. “The blood they found. It’s hers, isn’t it?” He didn’t reply. “The
body they found,” I pressed on. “It’s her.”

On the other end of the phone line, I heard a sharp intake of breath. I heard him jaggedly let it out.

While I waited for my father to find his voice and tell me what I already knew, I walked toward the exit. I stepped out into the sunshine and a light January chill. There was a fountain out
front—massive and the color of onyx. I came to stand at the edge of it and looked down. My reflection flickered over the surface, dark and shadowed.

“It’s her.”

I realized, when my father said the words, that he was crying.
For a woman you barely knew?
I wondered.
Or for the daughter you don’t know any better?

“Nonna wants you to come home,” my father said. “I can get an extended leave. We’ll take care of the funeral, bury her here—”

“No,” I said. I heard the pitter-patter of small feet as a child ran up to the fountain next to me. A little girl—the same one I’d seen that day at the candy shop. Today
she was wearing a purple dress and had a white origami flower tucked behind one ear.

“No,” I said again, the word ripping its way out of my throat. “I’ll take care of it. She’s
my
mother.”

Mine.
The necklace and the shroud she’d been wrapped in and the blood-spattered walls, the memories, the good and the bad—this was
my
tragedy, the great unanswered
question of
my
life.

My mother and I had never had a home, never stayed anywhere very long. But I thought she’d like being laid to rest near me.

My father didn’t argue with me. He never did. I hung up the phone. Beside me, the little girl solemnly considered the penny in her hand. Her bright hair caught in the sun.

“Are you making a wish?” I asked.

She stared at me for a moment. “I don’t believe in wishes.”

“Laurel!” A woman in her mid-twenties appeared at the little girl’s side. She had strawberry blond hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. She eyed me warily, then pulled her
daughter close. “Did you make your wish?” she asked.

I didn’t hear the girl’s reply. I stopped hearing anything, stopped registering any sound other than the running water in the fountain.

My mother was dead. For five years, she’d
been
dead. I was supposed to feel something. I was supposed to mourn her and grieve and move on.

“Hey.” Dean came up beside me. He wove his hand into mine. Michael took one look at my face and put a hand on my shoulder.

He hadn’t touched me—not once—since I’d chosen Dean.

“You’re crying.” Sloane stopped short in front of us. “Don’t cry, Cassie.”

I’m not.
My face was wet, but I didn’t feel like I was crying. I didn’t feel anything.

“You’re an ugly crier,” Lia said. She brushed my hair lightly out of my face. “Hideous.”

I let out a choked laugh.

My mother’s dead. She’s dust, and she’s bones, and the person who took her away from me buried her. He buried her in her best color.

He took that away from me, too.

I let myself be bundled away. I let myself retreat into Dean and Michael, Lia and Sloane. But as the valets pulled our cars around, I couldn’t help glancing back over my shoulder.

At the little red-haired girl and her mother. At the man who joined them and tossed his own coin into the fountain before lifting the girl onto his shoulders once more.

T
he private airstrip was clear, but for the jet. It sat on the runway, ready to spirit us to safety.
This isn’t over. It
isn’t done.
The objection was just a whisper in my head this time, drowned out by a dull roar in my ears and the numbness that had settled over my whole body.

The agony of not knowing what had happened to my mother—of never being able to silence that last sliver of
maybe
—had been with me so long, it felt like a flesh-and-blood
part of me. And now, that part of me was gone. Now, I knew. Not just in my gut. Not just as a matter of deduction.

I
knew
.

I felt hollow, empty inside where the uncertainty had been.
She loved me more than anything.
I tried to summon up the memory of her arms around me, what she smelled like. But all I
could think was that one day, Lorelai Hobbes had been my mother and a mentalist and the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, and the next, she was just a body.

And now, just bones.

“Come on,” Michael said. “Last one on the plane gets their initials shaved into Dean’s head.”

Every time I felt myself going under, they pulled me back up.

Dean was the last one on the plane. I went in front of him, trying to fight through the fog with each step. I was better than this—better than giving in to the numbness and going hollow
inside because I’d found out something I already knew.

I knew.
I made myself think the words.
I always knew. If she’d survived, she would have come back for me. Somehow, some way. If she’d survived, she wouldn’t have
left me alone.

By the time I turned down the aisle, Lia, Michael, and Sloane had already claimed seats near the back. On the first seat to my left, there was an envelope with Judd’s name on it, written
in careful cursive scrawl. I paused.

Somewhere, beneath the numbness and under the fog, I felt something.

This isn’t over,
I thought.
This isn’t done.

I picked the envelope up. “Where’s Judd?” I said. My voice was rough against my throat.

Dean eyed the envelope in my hand. “He’s talking to the pilot.”

My heart beat once in the time it took Dean to turn around and go for the cockpit.

This wasn’t Agent Sterling’s handwriting. It wasn’t Agent Briggs’s. I’d learned, months ago, to stop telling myself
it’s nothing, it’s probably
nothing
when the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

“Judd.” Dean’s voice reached me a second before I turned toward the cockpit myself.

“Just a little electrical trouble,” Judd assured Dean. “We’re taking care of it.”

This isn’t over. This isn’t done.

I held the envelope wordlessly out to Judd. My hand didn’t shake. I didn’t say a word. Judd eyed it for a moment, then looked at me.

“It was on the seat.” Dean was my voice when I had none.

Judd took the envelope. He turned his back on us to open it. Fifteen seconds later, he turned back around.

“Get off the plane.” Judd’s voice was gruff, no-nonsense, calm.

Michael responded like Judd had shouted. He grabbed his bag and Sloane’s. He pushed Sloane lightly in front of him and turned to Lia. He didn’t say anything—whatever she saw in
his face was enough.

Off the plane. Into Judd’s rental car.
Michael didn’t say a word about leaving his own car behind.

“The envelope,” Dean said as we pulled away from the runway. “Who was it from?”

Judd gritted his teeth. “He signed it ‘an old friend.’”

I froze, unable to exhale, a breath turning stale in my lungs.

“The man who killed your daughter.” Lia was the only one with balls enough to say it out loud. “Nightshade. What did he want?”

I forced myself to start breathing again.

“To warn us,” I answered without meaning to. “Threaten us. Those electrical problems with the plane. They weren’t an accident, were they?”

Judd was already on the phone with Sterling and Briggs.

Nightshade’s here in Vegas,
I thought.
And he doesn’t want us to leave.

I’d feared that thinking about Scarlett’s killer might conjure him up like a ghost in the mirror. I’d known that our UNSUB was attempting to attract the attention of Nightshade
and the others like him. I hadn’t thought about what it would mean if the UNSUB succeeded.
The organization—group—cult—

They’re here.

Five minutes later, Judd was at the airport ticket counter, attempting to book us on the next commercial flight
anywhere
. But the moment the woman behind the counter typed his name into
the computer, her brow knit.

“I already have tickets reserved under your name,” she said. “Six of them.”

I knew before I’d even fully processed what she was saying that this was Nightshade’s doing, too.
You chose Scarlett for your ninth,
I thought, unable to stop myself.
You chose her because she mattered to Sterling and Briggs and they dared to think they might stop you. You chose her because she was a challenge.

Of all of Nightshade’s victims, Scarlett was his greatest feat. She would be the one he went back to. The one he re-lived.
You’ve watched Judd, haven’t you? Every now and
again, you like to remind yourself of what you took from him—from all of them.

I wanted that guess to be off the mark. I wanted to be wrong. But the fact that Nightshade wanted us to stay in Vegas—the fact that Nightshade even knew there
was
an
“us”…

Six tickets.
The woman behind the counter printed them off and handed them to Judd. I knew before I looked that they would have our names on them.

First names. Last names.

The flight was to D.C.

You know who we are. You know where we live.
The implications were chilling. Nightshade had been watching—quite possibly since he’d killed Scarlett Hawkins and Judd had
moved in with Dean.

Killers don’t just stop,
I thought, but in this group, they did.
Nine and done.
Those were the rules.
Some killers take trophies,
I thought.
To re-live what
they’ve done, to get some portion of that rush.

If Nightshade had been watching off and on, whenever he needed a fix—if he was in Vegas—then he knew what was happening here.

You’ve never killed Judd—never killed us, because the rules say you stop at nine. But an organization like yours—a cult like yours—would have a way of dealing with
threats.

Lia had said it herself: if the Vegas UNSUB had been a part of this group, he would be dead. And if the cult realized that we’d made the connection, if they saw
us
as a
threat…