The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (33 page)

But we weren’t, and this time, we’d won. That hunting knife wouldn’t slice into another girl’s skin. Her hands wouldn’t be bound behind her back. She wouldn’t
feel burning metal melting through her flesh.

We’d saved that girl at the coffee shop, the same way we’d saved little Mackenzie McBride. Another victim would be dead right now if I hadn’t sat down across the table from
Daniel Redding. If Sterling hadn’t wound him up enough to bait him into torturing us with the truth. If Lia hadn’t been there behind the mirror, reading Redding for deception and
finding none. If Sloane hadn’t realized that Lia’s ability
wasn’t
on the fritz.

If Michael and I had never met Clark, if Dean hadn’t gone out to visit Trina, how would this have played out?

Dean was off dealing with the news in his own way. Michael had retreated to working on his car. I was standing in the backyard, eyeing the trash can, the Rose Red lipstick in my hand.

I’d joined the Naturals program in hopes that I might be able to save some other little girl from coming back to a blood-drenched room. That was what we were doing. We were saving people.
And still, I couldn’t throw away the lipstick, I couldn’t shut the door on my past.

You will never find the man who murdered your mother.
How could Redding possibly know that? He couldn’t. But still, I couldn’t push down the part of my brain that thought,
Prisoners chat.
How had Dean’s father even known that I had a dead mother?

“Don’t.” Michael came up behind me. I closed my fingers around the lipstick and slipped it into the front pocket of my jeans.

“Don’t what?” I asked.

“Don’t think about something that makes you feel small and scared and like you’re stuck in a tunnel with no light at the end.”

“You’re standing behind me,” I said without turning around. “How could you possibly get a read on my emotions from there?”

Michael crossed to stand in front of me. “I could tell you,” he intoned, “but then I’d have to kill you.” He paused. “Too soon?”

“To be making jokes about killing me?” I asked dryly. “Never.”

Michael reached out and brushed a strand of hair out of my face. I froze.

“I know,” he said. “I know that you care about him. I know that you’re attracted to him. I know that when he hurts, it hurts you. I know that he never looks at you the
way he looks at Lia, that you’re not a
sister
to him. I know that he wants you. He’s in over his head with you. But I also know that half the time, he
hates
that he wants
you.”

I thought of Dean on the stairs, telling me that he felt something, but unsure that it was
enough
.

“That’s the difference between the two of us,” Michael told me. “I don’t just want you.” Now both of his hands were on my face. “I
want
to want
you.”

Michael wasn’t a person who let himself want things. He certainly didn’t admit to wanting them. He didn’t let anything under his skin. He expected to be disappointed.

“I’m here, Cassie. I know what I feel, and I know that when you let your guard down, when you let yourself, you feel it, too.” He ran his fingers lightly over the back of my
neck. “I know that you’re scared.”

My heart pounded so hard, I could feel it in my stomach. A mishmash of memories rushed through my head, like water exploding out of a broken faucet.

Michael walking into the diner where I’d worked in Colorado. Michael in the swimming pool, bringing his lips to meet mine during a midnight swim. Michael easing himself down next to me
on the couch. Michael dancing with me on the lawn. Michael working on that death trap of a car.

Michael taking a step back and trying to be the good guy. For me.

But it wasn’t just Michael in my head; it was also Dean.

Dean sitting next to me on the steps, his knee brushing against mine. My hand, bathing his bloody knuckles. The secrets we’d traded. Kneeling in the dirt next to the beat-up picket
fence at his old house.

Michael was right. I
was
scared. I was scared of my own emotions, scared of wanting and longing and
loving
. Scared of hurting either one of them.

Scared of losing someone I cared about when I’d already lost so much.

But Michael was there, telling me how
he
felt. He was leveling the playing field. He was asking me to choose.

He was saying
Pick me
.

Michael didn’t pull me toward him. He didn’t lean forward. This was my decision, but he was so close, and slowly, my hands found their way to his shoulders.

His face.

And still, he waited—for me to say the words, or for me to close the space between my mouth and his. I shut my eyes.

The next time my lips touch yours,
I thought, remembering his words,
the only person you’re going to be thinking about is me.

The rush in my head went silent. I opened my eyes, and—

Mariachi music started blaring all around us. I jumped a foot and a half in the air, and Michael nearly lost his balance on his bad leg. We turned in unison to see Lia toying with a set of
speakers.

“Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” she called over the sound of the music.

“‘Feliz Navidad’?” Michael said. “Really, Lia?
Really?
”

“You’re right,” she said, sounding as sedate and chastened as a person could while yelling to be heard over the sounds of an extremely inappropriately timed Christmas carol.
“It’s barely even October. I’ll change the song.”

Sloane stuck her head out of the back door. “Hey, guys,” she said, sounding more chipper than she had in days. “Did you know that a power saw produces noise at one hundred and
ten decibels?”

There was murder on Michael’s face, but even he didn’t have the heart to glare at Sloane. “No,” he said, sighing. “I didn’t.”

“A motorcycle is closer to a hundred,” Sloane prattled on happily at high volume. “I’m betting this music is at one hundred and three. And a half. One hundred and three
and a half.”

Lia finally switched the song to one of her dance tracks. “Come on,” she said, chancing coming within throttling range to take me by one hand and Sloane by another. “We caught
the bad guy.” She pulled the two of us out onto the lawn, her hips swaying to the beat of the music, her eyes daring me to object. “I think this calls for a celebration. Don’t
you?”

I
woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. I should have expected the nightmares. They’d plagued me on and off for five years. Of
course Redding’s mind games had brought them back.

It’s not just that,
I thought in a moment of brutal honesty with myself.
They come back when I’m stressed. When things are changing.

This wasn’t just about Redding. It was about Michael and Dean, but most of all, it was about me. Sloane had asked me once, in a game of Truth or Dare, how many people I loved. Not just
romantic love—any kind of love. At the time, I’d wondered if growing up with only my mother for company—and then losing her the way I had—had cut my ability to love other
people off at the knees.

My answer had been
one
.

But now…

You want to know why you, in particular, concern me, Cassie?
Agent Sterling’s words rang in my ears.
You’re the one who really feels things. You won’t ever be able to
stop caring. It will always be personal.

I cared about the victims we fought for—the Mackenzie McBrides and the nameless girls at coffee shops. I cared about the people in this house—not just Michael and Dean, but Sloane
and Lia. Lia, who would have thrown herself on an open flame for Dean.

Lia, who’d flung herself in the middle of my moment with Michael with that same determination.

I tried to lull my mind into silence and myself back to sleep.

Mackenzie McBride. The girl in the coffee shop.
My thoughts circled back.
Why?
I turned my head to the side on my pillow. My chest rose and fell with steady, even breaths.

The FBI had gotten Mackenzie McBride’s case wrong. They’d missed the villain hiding in plain sight. But we hadn’t missed anything on this case. Christopher Simms
was
the
villain. They’d caught him in the act. He’d had supplies in his truck—bindings for the girl’s ankles and wrists, a knife, the brand.

The girl in the coffee shop.
That was what I kept coming back to. Who was Christopher’s intended victim? Redding had known that someone was scheduled to die. He’d told us to
expect it.

How do you choose who dies?

I don’t.

Clark had chosen Emerson.

Christopher had chosen his mother.

Fogle had been nothing but a complication that needed to be dealt with.

So who chose the girl?

There was no getting away from that question. Maybe it was nothing, but I slipped out of my bed, out of the room. The house was silent, but for the sound of my own light footsteps as I made my
way down the stairs. The door to the study—Agent Sterling’s temporary lodging—was open a crack. The faint glow of lamplight from inside the room told me that she wasn’t
asleep, either.

I hovered at the door. I couldn’t quite bring myself to knock. Suddenly, the door flew inward. Agent Sterling stood on the other side, her brown hair loose and messy, her face free of
makeup, and her gun at the ready. When she saw me, she let out a breath and lowered the weapon.

“Cassie,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” I responded automatically.

“You live directly outside my door?”

“You’re on edge, too,” I told her, reading that much in her behavior, the fact that she’d answered the door with a gun. “You can’t sleep. Neither can
I.”

She shook her head in chagrin—though whether that emotion was directed at herself or at me, I couldn’t tell—and then she took a step back, inviting me into the room. I crossed
the threshold, and she shut the door behind me, flipping on the overhead light.

I’d forgotten that Briggs’s study was full of taxidermy—predators, posed seconds before they struck. “No wonder you can’t sleep,” I told her.

She bit back a smile. “He’s always had a flair for the dramatic.” She sat down on the end of the folded-out couch. With her hair loose, she looked younger. “Why
can’t you sleep?” she asked. “Ankle tracker giving you problems?”

I glanced down at my feet, bewildered, as if they had only just appeared on my body. The constant weight on my right ankle should have been more bothersome than it was, but there’d been so
much going on the past few days, I’d barely even noticed it.

“No,” I said. “I mean, yes, I’d love for you to take it off, but that’s not why I’m up. It’s about the girl, the one that Christopher Simms was meeting
at the coffee shop. The one he was planning to abduct.”

I didn’t specify what else Christopher had been planning on doing to that girl, but I knew Agent Sterling well enough by now to know that her mind would go there, the same as mine.

“What about her?” Sterling’s voice was slightly hoarse. I wondered how many nights she’d spent like this one, unable to sleep.

“Who was she?” I asked. “Why was she meeting Christopher?”

“She worked at the coffee shop,” Sterling replied. “She’d been conversing with someone on an online dating site. He used a fake name and only accessed the account from
public computers, but it stands to reason that it was Christopher, taking things to the next level with victim selection. His mother was dead. He’d killed Emerson—that could have given
him a taste for college-aged girls.”

Strangers on a train,
I thought. “Christopher had an alibi for his mother’s murder. Clark had one for Emerson’s.” I swallowed. My mouth had gone so dry, I had to
work to push out the next words. “Maybe that was it. Maybe now that Clark’s dead, Christopher was on his own—but Redding knew that someone was going to die soon, besides Clark. It
was
planned
. And if it was part of the plan…”

I sat down next to Agent Sterling, willing her to understand what I was saying, even though I wasn’t sure I was making any kind of objective sense.

“What if Christopher wasn’t the one communicating with this girl online? What if
he
didn’t choose her?”

Clark chose Emerson.

Christopher chose his mother.

They both had ironclad alibis for the murders of the women they had chosen. What if they weren’t the only ones?

“You think there’s a third.” Sterling put the possibility into words. That made it real. I braced the heels of my hands against the edge of the bed, steadying myself.

“Did Christopher confess to Emerson’s murder?” I asked. “Is there
any
physical evidence tying him to the scene? Any circumstantial evidence? Anything, other than
the fact that he was planning to kill another girl?”

Agent Sterling’s phone rang. The sound was garish, jarring in contrast with my quiet questions. Phone calls at two in the morning never brought good news.

“Sterling.” Her posture changed when she answered the phone. This wasn’t the woman with tousled hair, sitting on the edge of her bed. This was the agent. “What do you
mean, ‘he’s dead’?” Short pause. “I know the literal meaning of the word, Dad. What happened? When did you get the call?”