All In: (The Naturals #3) (24 page)

Unable to get further than that, I took a step back and viewed this from the other side of the equation. I knew very little about Nightshade, but I knew a few things about Judd’s daughter.
Months ago, Agent Sterling had told me a story. We’d been held captive at the time, and she’d told me that as a kid, her best friend, Scarlett, was continually coming up with
ridiculously dire scenarios and brainstorming how to get out of them.
You’ve been buried alive in a glass coffin with a sleeping cobra on your chest,
she would say.
What do you
do?

On another occasion, Judd had indicated that a school-aged Scarlett had once convinced a young Veronica Sterling to accompany her on a “scientific expedition” that involved some
minor (or possibly not-so-minor) cliff-scaling.

You were fearless and funny and too stubborn to be talked out of anything once your mind was set,
I thought, reading between the lines of what I knew. Scarlett had grown up to work in
the FBI labs.
Were you working the Nightshade case?
I asked her silently.
Is that why you were in the lab that night?
I thought of Sloane getting a puzzle on the brain and
refusing to let go until the numbers made sense.
Was that what you were like?

Without reading the file, there was no way for me to know.
Did you see your killer, Scarlett? Did he watch you die?
The questions kept coming, one after another.
Was it fast, or was
it slow? Did you call for help? Did you think about cobras and glass coffins? About Sterling and Briggs and Judd?

A knock at the door pulled me from my thoughts. I shivered. Like a kid saying Bloody Mary into a mirror, part of me felt like I might have pulled the dark thing toward me, just by thinking his
name.

Dean stood and walked toward the door, Michael and Lia on his heels. Dean stared through the peephole. “What do you want?” Whoever was on the other side, Dean wasn’t feeling
friendly.

“I have something for you.”

The voice was muffled slightly by the door, but I recognized it anyway.

“Aaron?” Sloane came to stand beside Dean. For a split second, her face lit up. I saw the exact moment she remembered that her half brother might not be all that different from the
father they shared.

“Sloane.” Aaron spoke to her now, instead of Dean. “I know what you do for the FBI. My father told me.”

I didn’t trust Sloane’s father—and that made it very hard to trust Aaron.

“I don’t like it,” Aaron continued. “This isn’t the kind of life I want for you. This isn’t the conversation I want us to be having. But I need to get
something to the FBI.”

Dean’s eyes darted to Lia. She nodded. Aaron was telling the truth.

“Then give it to the police,” Dean barked back, still not inclined to open the door.

“My father owns the police.” Aaron pitched his voice lower. I struggled to hear him. “And he wants Beau Donovan in jail.”

At the mention of Beau’s name, I took a step forward. What Aaron was saying fit with what Agent Briggs had said about the powers that be wanting a neat resolution to their little serial
killer problem.

“Please,” Aaron said. “The longer I stand in the hallway, the better the chances someone catches me on a security feed, and then we’ll have bigger problems than the fact
that you don’t trust me.”

Dean walked into the kitchen. He opened one drawer, then another. A moment later, he went back to the front door.

Carrying a butcher’s knife.

D
ean opened the door. Aaron stepped in, eyed Dean’s knife, and let the door shut behind him.

“I appreciate that someone’s watching out for Sloane,” Aaron told Dean. “But I also feel compelled to point out that a knife like that wouldn’t do much good if the
person on the other side of this door had a gun.”

All that glitters is not gold,
I thought, taking in the warning embedded in Aaron’s words.
You’re used to the people around you being armed. The world you grew up in is
a dangerous, glittering place.

Dean gave Sloane’s brother a dead-eyed stare. “You might be surprised.”

Aaron must have seen something there that sent a chill down his spine. “I’m not armed,” he assured Dean, “and I’m not here to hurt anyone. You can trust
me.”

“Not an incredibly trusting fellow, Dean,” Michael said lightly. “Must come from being raised by a psychotic serial killer with a fondness for knives.” He gave Aaron a
steely smile. “Do come in.”

Aaron’s eyes sought out Lia. “You’re the one who can detect lies?” he asked.

“Who?” Lia said. “Me?”

“I’m not armed,” Aaron said again, staring her straight in the eye. “And I’m not here to hurt anyone.”

Without another word, he took a seat in the living room. Dean sat opposite him. I stayed standing.

“As you are doubtlessly aware,” Aaron started, “Beau Donovan and I got into an altercation last night.”

The debacle backstage at Tory’s show seemed like a lifetime ago—and given what we’d learned since then, almost painfully insignificant.

“You brought another girl to Tory’s show.” Sloane didn’t look at Aaron as she spoke. She stared at the window behind him—at her map and her calculations and the
Fibonacci spiral. “Beau considers Tory his sister. I suspect a nontrivial percentage of his demographic would have reacted similarly, under such circumstances.” Then, as if that
weren’t clear enough, Sloane elaborated. “According to my calculations, there was a ninety-seven-point-six percent chance you deserved to be punched in the nose.”

Aaron’s lips tilted upward slightly. “I heard you were good with numbers.”

I couldn’t detect even a hint of criticism in Aaron’s tone. From Michael’s expression, I didn’t think he caught any, either. My mind went to Sloane saying that she wanted
Aaron to like her.

I studied Aaron.
You do like her. You want to know her.

“How about we focus on this mythical
thing
you need us to give to the FBI?” Lia came and sat on the arm of Dean’s chair. She didn’t like strangers, and she
didn’t trust them—especially not with Sloane.

Aaron reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a clear case. Inside, there was a DVD. “Security footage,” he said. “Taken from a pawn shop across the street from where
Victor McKinney was attacked.”

Lia’s silence seemed to confirm that the DVD was what Aaron had said it was.

“Victor was our head of security,” Aaron continued. “From his perspective—and my father’s—Beau Donovan was a security risk.”

Beau had attacked Aaron. He hadn’t done any damage, but to a man like Grayson Shaw, I doubted that mattered. If Sloane’s father viewed Sloane as little more than an inconvenient
possession, his legitimate son would be viewed not just as property, but as an extension of himself.

I’d seen that dynamic before—with Dean’s father.

“If you’ll play the footage, you’ll see that Victor was the one who followed Beau, not the other way around. Victor was the one who slammed Beau against a wall. And
Victor,” Aaron made himself finish, “is the one who pulled a gun and put it to the side of Beau’s head.”

Dean absorbed that information in a heartbeat. “Your head of security never had any intention of pulling the trigger.”

Aaron leaned forward. “Beau didn’t know that.”

Sloane’s father liked issuing orders and ultimatums. It was a small hop to threats. Beau wasn’t a person who would take well to being threatened. He had a temper. The moment the gun
came out, he would have fought back.

“He grabbed a loose brick,” Aaron said.

Blunt-force trauma.

“Self-defense,” I said out loud. If Victor McKinney had drawn a gun on Beau, it was a clear case of self-defense. And if Aaron had seen the connection between Beau’s arrest and
what the Majesty’s head of security had been sent to do, Grayson Shaw almost certainly had as well.

“How could your father let Beau take the fall for the first four murders?” I asked. “Doesn’t he care that there’s a serial killer still out there?”

“My guess?” Aaron replied. “My father thinks he and the FBI have scared the original killer away. He’s not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. As it stands, Beau
Donovan will never lay hands on me again, and no one is questioning why the Majesty’s head of security went after Beau.”

“Why bring this to us?” Lia asked. “Daddy Dearest isn’t going to be very happy with you.”

“He rarely is.” Aaron stood, shrugging off the words like they meant nothing—which, of course, told me they meant more than he would ever admit.

You’re the golden boy. The first-born son. The heir.

I stared at him for a moment, my mind assembling the pieces of the puzzle.
You don’t go against your father without a reason.
“Tory,” I said. “You did this for
Tory.”

Aaron didn’t reply, but Michael translated his expression. “Yeah,” he said, sounding gut-punched at the depth of emotion he saw on Aaron’s face. “He did.”

I read between the lines of Michael’s words, my gaze locked on Aaron’s.
You love her.
The realization took hold in the pit of my stomach.

Aaron’s phone buzzed. He looked down, saved from confirming that he’d risked his father’s wrath to save Beau because Beau was Tory’s brother.

“Do we want to know what that text says?” Sloane asked.

Aaron looked up, meeting his sister’s gaze. “That would depend on how you feel about the man Beau put in a coma waking up.”

A
aron left. It didn’t take long to confirm what he’d told us. Victor McKinney—the Majesty’s head of
security and our latest victim—was awake. Briggs and Sterling were on their way to the hospital to interview him, armed with Aaron’s accusations. We played the video, which was exactly
what Aaron had said it was, and forwarded the footage to Sterling and Briggs. When they did talk to the Majesty’s head of security, they’d have some very pointed questions for him.

Half an hour later, my phone rang. I almost answered out of reflex, expecting it to be Sterling or Briggs, but at the last second, I saw the caller ID.

My father.

Just like that, I was twelve years old again, walking down the hallway toward my mother’s dressing room door.
Don’t open it. Don’t go there.

I knew what he was calling to say.

I knew that once that door was open, nothing could ever be the same.

I declined the call.

“That’s not a happy Cassie face,” Michael prodded me.

“Drink your whiskey,” I told him.

Sloane raised her hand, like a student waiting to be called on in class. “I think I would like some whiskey now,” she said.

“First,” Michael told her seriously, “I need to verify that you have no plans to feed this whiskey to a moose.”

“He’s kidding,” Dean said, before Sloane could tell us the exact likelihood of stumbling over a moose in a Las Vegas casino. “And nobody’s drinking any more
whiskey.”

Dean walked over to the counter and picked up the notepad I’d been making notes on earlier. He stared at the three remaining names.

The professor. Thomas Wesley. Sloane’s father.

I approached Dean and looked over his shoulder at the list.
Focus on this, Cassie. These names, this case.

Not the phone call. Not an answer I already knew.

“Eleven years ago,” I said, addressing the UNSUB out loud and forcing everything else from my mind, “you slit the throats of nine people in a four-month period ranging from
August to January.”

“Five years ago,” Dean responded, “I did it again. Poison, this time.”

The changing method had always been one of the more perplexing aspects of the Vegas murders. Most killers had a single preferred method of killing—or, if not a method or weapon of choice,
at least an
emotional
kill type. Poison meant killing without physical contact—not dissimilar from orchestrating an accident in which a young woman drowns. Slitting someone’s
throat, on the other hand, was closer to putting an arrow through an old man’s chest. Neither was as painful as, say, burning alive.

“The last time we had an UNSUB who fluctuated this much from kill to kill,” I said slowly, thinking back to the case we’d worked involving Dean’s father, “we were
dealing with multiple UNSUBs.”