The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (9 page)

“I rebuilt the scene so Cassie could look at it,” Sloane said helpfully. “She said that Dean needed space, so we’re giving him space.”

“You call this
giving him space
?” Agent Sterling asked, flicking a hand toward the car. “I could kill the kid who leaked that video. Seeing that—it was the very
last thing Dean needed. But you know what the second-to-last thing he needs is? Someone re-creating that scene
in his basement
. Did you learn nothing this summer?”

That question was aimed directly at me. Agent Sterling’s tone wasn’t angry or accusatory. It was incredulous.

“When the director discovered what Briggs was doing with Dean, using him to solve cases, it almost got Briggs fired. It
should
have gotten him fired. But somehow, my father and
Briggs reached a compromise. The Bureau would provide Dean with a home, a guardian, and training, and Dean would help them with cold cases.
Not
active cases. Your lives were never supposed
to be on the line.” Agent Sterling paused, the look in her eye caught somewhere between anger and betrayal. “I looked the other way. Until this summer.”

This summer—when we’d been authorized to work on an active case, because the killer had zeroed in on me.

Sloane jumped to my defense. “The killer contacted Cassie, not the other way around.”

Sterling’s expression softened when she looked at Sloane. “This isn’t about what happened this summer. This is about the fact that no one has authorized you to work on
this
case. I need your word the two of you will leave it alone. No modeling it, no profiling it, no hacking.”

“No hacking,” Sloane agreed. She held out her hand to shake on it, and before Agent Sterling could comment on her selective hearing, she added, “If the entire population of the
town of Quantico shook hands with one another, there would be a total of 157,080 possible handshake combinations.”

Agent Sterling smiled slightly as she took Sloane’s proffered hand. “No hacking
and
no more simulations.”

Sloane took her hand back. The dark circles under her eyes made her look younger somehow, fragile—or maybe brittle. “I have to run simulations. It’s what I do.”

As a profiler, Agent Sterling should have been able to hear what Sloane wasn’t saying—that building this model was the only thing she
could
do for Dean. It was also her way of
working through her own emotions. It was
what she did
.

“Not on this case,” Agent Sterling repeated. She turned from Sloane to me. “No exceptions. No excuses. This program only works if the rules are followed and enforced.”
Agent Sterling had clearly cast herself in the role of enforcer. “You work on cold cases, and you do so only with the approval of myself and Agent Briggs. If you can’t follow these
simple instructions,
you’re
not just a liability. This whole program is.” Agent Sterling met my eyes, and there was no question in my mind that she’d meant me to hear those
words as a threat. “Am I clear?”

The only thing clearer was the fact that my earlier impressions of the woman had been right on target. This wasn’t just a job to her. This was personal.

“S
he more or less threatened to shut down the entire program.”

Michael leaned back in his chair. “She’s a profiler. She knows exactly what threats to issue to keep people in line. She’s got your number, Colorado. You’re a team
player, so she didn’t just threaten you. She threatened the rest of us, too.”

Michael and I were in the living room. Sloane, Lia, and Dean had passed their practice GEDs the day before with flying colors. Neither Michael nor I had actually taken one, but somehow, answer
sheets had been turned in with our names on them. Apparently, Lia had been feeling generous—but not generous enough to ensure that we passed, too. As a result, Michael and I were under strict
orders to study.

I was better at following orders than Michael was.

“If you were the one issuing threats,” he said, a wicked grin working its way onto his face, “how would you threaten me?”

I looked up from my work. I was going over the test Lia had filled out for me, correcting the wrong answers. “You want me to threaten you?”

“I want to know how you
would
threaten me,” Michael corrected. “Obviously, threatening the program wouldn’t be the way to go. I don’t exactly have the warm
fuzzies for the FBI.”

I tapped the edge of my pencil against the practice test. Michael’s challenge was a welcome distraction. “I’d start with your Porsche,” I said.

“If I’m a bad boy, you’ll take away my keys?” Michael wiggled his eyebrows in a way that was both suggestive and ridiculous.

“No,” I replied without even thinking about it. “If you’re a bad boy, I’ll give your car to Dean.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then Michael put a hand over his heart, like he’d been shot—a gesture that would have been funnier before he’d taken an actual bullet
to the chest.

“You’re the one who asked,” I said. Michael should have known by now not to throw down the gauntlet unless he wanted me picking it up.

“The depravity of you, Cassie Hobbes.” He was clearly impressed.

I shrugged. “You and Dean have some kind of pseudo-sworn-enemy, pseudo-sibling-rivalry thing going on. You’d rather I set your car on fire than give it to Dean. It’s the
perfect threat.”

Michael didn’t contradict my logic. Instead, he shook his head and smiled. “Anyone ever tell you that you have a sadistic streak?”

I felt the breath whoosh out of my lungs. He couldn’t have known the effect those words would have on me. I turned back to the practice test, allowing my hair to fall into my face, but it
was too late. Michael had already seen the split second of
horror—loathing—fear—disgust
on my face.

“Cassie—”

“I’m fine.”

Locke had been a sadist. Part of the pleasure she’d gotten out of killing had been imagining what her victims were going through. I had no desire to hurt anyone. Ever. But being a Natural
profiler meant that I instinctively knew other people’s weaknesses. Knowing what people wanted and knowing what they feared were two sides of the same coin.

Michael wasn’t really calling me sadistic. I knew that, and he knew that I’d never intentionally hurt anyone. But sometimes, knowing that you
could
do something was almost as
bad as having actually done it.

“Hey.” Michael tilted his head upside down to get a good look at my face. “I was kidding. No Sad Cassie face, okay?”

“This isn’t my sad face,” I told him. There was a point in time when he would have pushed the hair out of my face and let his hand linger on my jaw. Not anymore.

The unspoken rules said it had to be my choice. I could feel him, watching me, waiting for me to say something. He stayed there, staring at me upside down, his face just a few inches away from
mine.

His mouth just a few inches away from mine.

“I know a Sad Cassie face when I see one,” he said. “Even upside down.”

I brushed my hair over my shoulders and leaned back. Trying to hide what I was feeling from Michael was impossible. I shouldn’t have even tried.

“You and Lia back on speaking terms?” he asked me.

I was grateful for the subject change. “Lia and I are…whatever Lia and I normally are. I don’t think she’s plotting my immediate demise.”

Michael nodded sagely. “So she’s not going to go for your throat the moment she figures out you broke the holy commandment of
Thou shalt give Dean his space
?”

I’d thought my visit to Dean last night had gone unnoticed. Apparently, I’d thought wrong.

“I wanted to see how he was doing.” I felt like I had to explain, even though Michael hadn’t asked for an explanation. “I didn’t want him to be alone.”

Reading emotions made Michael an expert at concealing them, so when I saw a flicker of
something
in his eyes, I knew that he’d chosen not to hide it from me. He liked that I was the
kind of person who cared about the people in this house. He just wished that the person I’d spent last night caring about wasn’t Dean.

“And how goes Sir Broods-A-Lot’s familial angst?” Michael did a good imitation of someone who didn’t really care about the answer to that question. He might have even
been able to fool another emotion reader—but my ability wasn’t just about posture or facial expressions or what a person was feeling at any given moment.

Behavior. Personality. Environment.

Michael was snarking to hide the fact that he
did
care about the answer to that question.

“If you want to know how Dean’s holding up, you can just ask.”

Michael shrugged noncommittally. He wasn’t going to admit that Lia, Sloane, and I weren’t the only ones worried about Dean. A noncommittal shrug was as close to an expression of
concern as I was going to get.

“He’s not okay,” I said. “He won’t be okay until Briggs and Sterling close this case. If they’d just tell him what’s going on, it might help, but
that’s not going to happen. Sterling won’t let it.”

Michael shot me a sideways glance. “You really don’t like Agent Sterling.”

I didn’t think that statement merited a reply.

“Cassie, you don’t dislike anyone. The only time I’ve ever seen you get persnickety with someone was when Briggs assigned agents to dog your every move. But you disliked Agent
Sterling from the moment she showed up.”

I had no intention of replying to that statement, either, but Michael didn’t
need
verbal replies. He was perfectly capable of carrying on conversations completely on his own,
reading my responses in my body language and the tiniest hints of expressions on my face.

“She doesn’t like this program,” I said, just to get him to stop reading me so intently. “She doesn’t like us. And she really doesn’t like me.”

“She doesn’t dislike you as much as you think she does.” Michael’s voice was quiet. I found myself leaning toward him, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear
more. “Agent Sterling isn’t fond of me, because I’m not fond of rules. She’s afraid to spend more than a few seconds looking at Dean, but she’s not scared
of
him. She actually likes Lia, even though Lia’s not any fonder of rules than I am. And Sloane reminds her of someone.”

The difference between Michael’s gift and mine was as obvious as it had been playing poker. He saw so much that Sterling was trying to hide. But
why
she was hiding it—that was
a question for me.

“How’s the studying coming along?”

I glanced up at Judd, who stood in the doorway. He was a Marine, not a den mother. The question sounded completely foreign coming out of his mouth.

“Haven’t started,” Michael replied flippantly at the exact same time that I said, “Almost done.”

Judd arched an eyebrow at Michael, but didn’t push the issue. “You mind giving us a moment?” he asked instead.

Michael cocked his head slightly to one side, taking in the expression on Judd’s face. “Do I have a choice?”

Judd almost smiled. “That would be a no.”

As Michael made his way out of the room, Judd crossed it and lowered himself onto the sofa next to me. He watched Michael go. Something about the way he tracked Michael’s progress made me
think he was forcing himself to take in the way Michael favored his injured leg.

“You know why this program is restricted to cold cases?” Judd asked me once Michael was gone.

“Because Dean was twelve when this program was started?” I suggested. “And because Director Sterling wants to minimize the chances of anyone finding out the program
exists?” Those were the easy answers. Judd’s silence pushed me into giving the hard one. “Because on active cases,” I said softly, “people get hurt.”

“On active cases, people cross lines.” Judd took his time with the words. “Everything is urgent, everything is life-and-death.” He rubbed his thumb across the pads of his
fingers. “In the heat of battle, you do what needs to be done. You make sacrifices.”

Judd was military. He didn’t use the word
battle
lightly.

“You’re not talking about
us
crossing the lines,” I said, sorting through what I was hearing—and what I
knew
. “You’re talking about the
FBI.”

“Could be I am,” Judd allowed.

I tried to parse my way through Judd’s logic. Reading interviews, going through witness statements, looking at crime scene photos—those were all things we already did. What did it
matter if the files were a year old versus a day? Theoretically, the risks were the same—minimal. But with active cases, the stakes were higher.

This UNSUB that Locke and Briggs were hunting, he was out there
now
. He might be planning his next kill
now
. It was easy enough to keep us out of the field on cold cases. But with
lives on the line, if bringing us along could make a difference…

“It’s a slippery slope.” Judd rubbed the back of his hand over his jaw. “I trust Briggs. Mostly.”

“You trust Agent Sterling,” I said. He didn’t contradict me. “What about the director?”