The Naturals
: Part 3 – 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 replace 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 replace the message, and that someone else would decode it. He’d known that we would replace 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.