The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct (6 page)

“Dean?” I said. He didn’t respond.

“Dean.” Lia reached her foot out and shoved him with her heel. “Earth to Redding.”

Dean looked up. Blond hair hung in his face. Brown eyes stared through us. He said something, but the words were garbled in his throat, caught halfway between a grunt and a whisper.

“What did you say?” Sloane asked.

“Bind them,” Dean said, his voice still rough, but louder this time. “Brand them. Cut them. Hang them.” He shut his eyes, and his hands curled into fists.

“Hey.” Lia was beside him in a second. “Hey, Dean.” She didn’t touch him, but she stayed by his side. The look on her face was fiercely protective—and
terrified.

Do something,
I thought.

Taking my cue from Lia, I crouched by Dean’s other side. I reached a hand out to touch the back of his neck. He’d done the same for me, more than once, when I’d first started
learning to climb into the minds of killers.

The second my hand made contact, he flinched. His arm shot out, and my wrist was suddenly caught in a painfully tight grip. Michael jumped to his feet, his eyes flashing. With a jerk of my head,
I told him to stay put. I could take care of myself.

“Hey,” I said, repeating Lia’s words. “Hey, Dean.”

Dean blinked rapidly, three or four times. I tried to concentrate on the details of his face and not the death grip he had on my wrist. His eyelashes weren’t black. They were brown,
lighter than his eyes. Those eyes stared at me now, round and dark. He let go of my wrist.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“She’s fine,” Lia answered for me, her eyes narrowed to slits, daring me to disagree with her.

Dean ignored Lia and fixed his eyes on me. “Cassie?”

“I’m fine,” I said. I was. I could feel the place where his hand had been a moment before, but it didn’t hurt anymore. My heart was pounding. I refused to let my hands
shake. “Are you okay?”

I expected Dean to shut me down, to refuse to answer, to walk away. When he responded, I saw it for what it was—penance. He’d force himself to say more than he was comfortable saying
to punish himself for losing control.

To make it up to me.

“I’ve been better.” Dean could have stopped there, but he didn’t. Each syllable was hard-won, and my gut twisted as I realized just how much it was costing him to form
these words. “The professor they’re looking for, the one who teaches the Monsters or Men class? I’d bet a lot of money that the reason he’s a person of interest is that one
of the killers he lectures about in his class is my father.” Dean swallowed and stared holes into the carpet. “The reason Briggs and Sterling were called in is that they were the
original agents on my father’s case.”

I remembered what it had felt like to walk through a crime scene, knowing it had been patterned after my mother’s murder. Dean had been there with me. He’d been there
for
me.

“Bind them. Brand them. Cut them. Hang them,” I said softly. “That was how your father killed his victims.” I didn’t phrase it as a question, because I knew. Just
by looking at Dean, I knew.

“Yes,” Dean said, before lifting his eyes to look at the still-muted TV. “And I’m almost certain that’s what was done to this girl.”

YOU

The president’s lawn was a nice touch. You could have dumped her anywhere. You didn’t have to risk being seen.

“No one saw me.” You murmur the words with a self-satisfied hum. “But they saw her.”

They saw the lines you carved into her body. They saw the noose you slipped around her neck. Just thinking about it, about the way her eyes bulged as the life drained out of her, fragile
little arms tensing against the restraints, pale skin dyed with dainty rivulets of red…

Your lips curve into a smile. The moment has passed, but the game—the game is long. Next time, you won’t be so eager. Next time, you’ll have nothing to prove. Next time,
you’ll take it slow.

D
ean left the room right after dropping the bombshell about his father’s MO. The rest of us sat there in silence, the minutes ticking by,
each more saturated than the last with all the things we
weren’t
saying.

There was no point in trying to take a practice GED. The only thing I could think about was the girl in the video, her body dangling off the front of the car, black noose fitted tightly around
her lifeless neck. Dean hadn’t said what it was about the video that had convinced him that the UNSUB was mimicking his father’s crimes.

The fact that her arms and her legs were bound?

The way she was hung from the car?

Logically, those could have been coincidences. But Dean had sounded so sure, and he had believed me at a time when I’d had a theory that sounded just as crazy. Crazier, even.

“You’re thinking about last summer.” Michael was the one who broke the silence as he directed those words to me. “Your whole body is hunched with the effort of holding it
in.”

“Don’t you think it’s weird?” I said, my eyes darting from Michael to the others. “Six weeks ago, Locke was reenacting my mother’s murder, and now
someone’s out there playing copycat to Dean’s dad?”

“News flash, Cassie.” Lia stood up, her eyes flashing. “Not everything is about
you
.” I was taken aback by the venom in her voice. Lia and I might not have been
friends—exactly—but she didn’t usually see me as the enemy, either.

“Lia—”

“This. Is. Not. About. You.”
She turned on her heels and stalked toward the door. Halfway there, she stopped and turned back, her eyes boring through mine. “You think
you know what this is doing to Dean? You think you
relate
? You don’t have any idea what he’s going through.
None.
”

“You’re not angry at Cassie, Lia,” Michael cut in. “You’re angry at the situation and the fact that Dean’s off somewhere, dealing with this
alone
.”

“Screw you, Michael,” Lia spat back. She let the words hang in the air, her fury a palpable thing, and then she left. A few seconds later, I heard the front door open and slam shut.
Sloane, Michael, and I stared at one another in stunned silence.

“It’s possible I was mistaken,” Michael said finally. “Maybe she’s not
just
angry at the situation.”

Michael could diagnose the precise mix of emotions a person was feeling. He could pinpoint the difference between annoyance and simmering fury and fight-or-flight rage. But the whys of
emotions…That fell somewhere in between his skill and mine. The things that mattered to people, the things that hurt them, the things that made them the people they were—that was all
me.

“Lia’s known Dean longer than any of us,” I said, mentally going through the details of the situation and the personalities involved. “No matter how many people come into
this house, to Lia, they’ll always be a unit of two. But Dean…”

“Unit of one,” Michael finished for me. “He’s Mr. Lone Wolf.”

When things got bad, Dean’s impulse was to put up walls, to push other people away. But I’d never seen him shut Lia out before. She was his
family
. And this time, he’d
left her on the outside—with us.

“Dean likes Cassie,” Sloane announced, completely oblivious to the fact that perhaps now was not the time for a conversation about any fondness Dean might feel for me. Michael, ever
a master of masking his own emotions, didn’t show any discernable reaction as she continued. “Lia knows Dean likes Cassie. I don’t think she minds. Mostly, I think she just thinks
it’s funny. But right now…it’s not funny.”

Sloane’s grasp of human psychology was tenuous at best, but at the same time, I could see the kernel of truth in what she was saying. Lia had zero romantic interest in Dean. That
didn’t mean she liked that when he’d dealt us in on the situation, he’d been answering
my
questions. I’d been the one to break through to him. Lia wasn’t okay
with that.
She
was supposed to be the person he leaned on, not me. Then I’d gone and compounded my sins by highlighting the similarities—such as they were—between
Dean’s situation and what I’d gone through with Locke.

“I wasn’t trying to say that I know exactly how he feels.” I felt like I had to justify myself, even though Sloane and Michael probably weren’t expecting me to. “I
just meant that it seems like this truly horrific twist of fate that we were all brought here to solve
cold
cases, and yet Briggs’s active cases keep tying back to us.” I glanced
from Michael to Sloane. “Seriously, what are the chances?”

Sloane pressed her lips together.

“You want to tell us what the chances are, don’t you?” Michael asked her.

“It’s not that simple.” Sloane shook her head, then pushed white-blond hair out of her face with the heel of her palm. “You’re not dealing with separate variables.
Dean is a part of the program because he understands killers, and Dean understands killers because his father is a killer.” Sloane gestured with her hands out in front of her, like she was
trying to grab hold of something that wasn’t there. “It’s all connected. Our families. The things that have happened to us. The things we can do.”

I glanced over at Michael. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Being a Natural isn’t just about being born with an incredible aptitude for something. You have to hone it. Your whole
life
has to hone it.” Sloane’s voice got
softer. “Did you know they’ve done studies about people like Lia? I’ve read them. All of them.”

I understood, the way I always did, without even having to think about it, that Sloane reading articles about lie detection was her way of trying to connect with Lia. The rest of us inherently
understood people. Sloane was better with objects. With numbers. With
facts
.

“For adults, an enhanced ability to detect lies mostly seems dependent on a combination of innate ability and explicit training. But with kids, it’s different.” She swallowed
hard. “There’s a specific subset who excel at spotting lies.”

“And what subset is that?” I asked.

Sloane’s fingertips worried at the edge of her sleeve. “The subset that have been exposed to highs and lows. Changing environments. Abuse.” Sloane paused, and when she started
talking again, the words came out faster. “There’s an interaction effect—statistically, the best deception detectors are the kids who aren’t submissive, the ones who grow up
in abusive environments, but somehow fight to maintain some sense of control.”

When Briggs talked about what it meant to be a Natural, he tended to use words like
potential
or
gift
. But Sloane was saying that raw talent alone wasn’t enough. We
hadn’t been born Naturals. Something about Lia’s childhood had turned her into the kind of person who could lie effortlessly, the kind who
knew
when someone else was lying to
her.

Something had made Michael zero in on emotions.

My mother had taught me to read people so I could help her con them out of money. We were constantly on the move, sometimes a new city every week. I hadn’t had a home. Or friends. Getting
inside people’s heads, understanding them, even if they didn’t know I was alive—growing up, that was the closest to friendship I’d been able to come.

“None of us had normal childhoods,” Sloane said quietly. “If we had, we wouldn’t be Naturals.”

“And on that note, I take my leave.” Michael stood up. He kept his voice casual, but I knew he didn’t like talking about his home life. He’d told me once that his father
had an explosive temper. I tried not to think about the reasons a little boy might need to become an expert at reading other people’s emotions, growing up with a father like that.

Michael paused next to Sloane on his way out. “Hey,” he said softly. She peered up at him. “I’m not mad at you,” he told her. “You didn’t do anything
wrong.”

Sloane smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I’ve got a lot of data to suggest I do or say the wrong thing at least eighty-six-point-five percent of the time.”

“Spoken like someone who wants to get tossed in the pool,” Michael countered. Sloane managed a genuine smile this time, and with one last glance back at me, Michael was gone.

“Do you think Dean went out to the garage?” Sloane asked after the two of us had been alone for several minutes. “When he’s upset, he usually goes out to the
garage.”

Dean wasn’t just
upset
. I didn’t know the exact details of what he’d been through growing up, but the one time I’d asked Dean if he’d known what his father
was doing to those women, Dean’s response had been
not at first
.

“Dean needs space,” I told Sloane, laying it out for her in case she couldn’t see it for herself. “Some people like having their friends around when things get tough, and
some people need to be alone. When Dean’s ready to talk, he’ll talk.”

Even as I said the words, I knew I wouldn’t be able to just sit here, doing nothing. Waiting. I needed to do
something
—I just didn’t know what.

“Is he going to be okay?” Sloane asked me, her voice barely audible.