The Naturals (2 Book Series)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  “Somebody’s a bad sport,” Lia said, waggling a finger at me. I stuck my tongue out at her.

  Somebody only had two Oreos left.

  “I’m in,” I sighed, pushing them into the pot. There was no point in delaying the inevitable. If I’d been playing with strangers, I would have had the advantage. I could have looked at a person’s clothes and posture and known instantly how much of a risk taker they were and whether they’d bluff quietly or put on a show. Unfortunately, I wasn’t playing with strangers, and the ability to get a read on other people’s personalities wasn’t nearly as useful in a group of people you already knew.

  “What about you, Redding? Are you in or are you out?” Michael issued the words as a challenge.

  So maybe Lia misread him, I thought, turning that idea over in my head. Maybe he’s not bluffing. I doubted Michael would have challenged Dean unless he was certain he was going to win.

  “I’m in,” Dean said. “All in.” He pushed five cookies into the pot and raised an eyebrow at Michael, mimicking the other boy’s facial expression almost exactly.

  Michael matched Dean’s bet. Lia matched Michael’s. My turn.

  “I’m out of cookies,” I said.

  “I’d be open to discussing a modest interest rate,” Sloane told me before returning her attention to divesting an Oreo of its frosting.

  “I have an idea,” Lia said in an overly innocent tone that I recognized immediately as trouble. “We could always take things to the next level.” She unknotted the white kerchief around her neck and tossed it to me. Her fingers played with the bottom of her tank top, raising it up just enough to make it crystal clear what the “next level” was.

  “It is my understanding that the rules of strip poker specify that only the loser is required to disrobe,” Sloane interjected. “No one has lost yet, ergo—”

  “Call it a show of solidarity,” Lia said, inching her shirt up farther. “Cassie’s almost out of chips. I’m just trying to even the playing field.”

  “Lia.” Dean was not amused.

  “Come on, Dean,” Lia said, her bottom lip jutting out in an exaggerated pout. “Loosen up. We’re all friends here.” With those words, Lia pulled off her tank top. She was wearing a bikini top underneath. Clearly, she’d dressed for the occasion.

  “Ante up,” she told me.

  I wasn’t wearing a bathing suit under my top, so there was no way it was coming off. Slowly, I took off my belt.

  “Sloane?” Lia turned to her next. Sloane stared at Lia, a blush spreading over her cheeks.

  “I’m not undressing until we establish a conversion rate,” she informed us tartly, gesturing toward her mountain of chips.

  “Sloane,” Michael said.

  “Yes?”

  “How would you feel about a second cup of coffee?”

  Forty-five seconds later, Sloane was in the kitchen, and neither of the boys was wearing a shirt. Dean’s stomach was tanned, a shade or two darker than Michael’s. Michael’s skin was like marble, but for the bullet scar, pink and puckered where his shoulder met his chest. Dean had a scar, too—older, thinner, like someone had drawn the tip of a knife slowly down his torso in a jagged line from the base of his collarbone to his navel.

  “I call,” Lia said.

  One by one, we flipped over our cards.

  Three of a kind.

  Flush.

  Full house, queens and eights. The last was from Michael.

  I knew it, I thought. He wasn’t bluffing.

  “Your turn,” Lia told me.

  I flipped my own cards over, and my brain cataloged the result. “Full house,” I said, grinning. “Kings and twos. Guess that means I win, huh?”

  “How did you…?” Michael sputtered.

  “Are you telling me the pity party was an act?” Lia sounded impressed despite herself.

  “It wasn’t an act,” I told her. “I fully expected to lose. I just hadn’t actually looked at my final cards yet.”

  I’d figured that if I didn’t know what my hand held, there was no way for Michael or Lia to figure it out, either.

  Dean was the first one to start laughing.

  “Hail Cassie,” Michael said. “Queen of loopholes.”

  Lia huffed.

  “Does this mean I get to keep your shirts?” I asked, reaching for my belt and snagging an Oreo while I was at it.

  “I think it would be best if everyone maintained possession of their own shirts. And put them on. Now.”

  I froze. The voice that issued that command was female and crisp. For a split second, I was taken back to my first weeks in the program, to our supervisor, my mentor. Special Agent Lacey Locke. She’d trained me. I’d idolized her. I’d trusted her.

  “Who are you?” I forced myself back to the present. I couldn’t let myself think about Agent Locke—once I went down that rabbit hole, it would be hard to fight my way out. Instead, I focused on the person barking out orders. She was tall and thin, but nothing about her seemed slight. Her dark brown hair was pulled into a tight French knot at the nape of her neck, and she held her head with her chin thrust slightly forward. Her eyes were gray, a shade lighter than her suit. Her clothes were expensive; she wore them like they weren’t.

  There was a gun holstered to her side.

  Gun. This time, I couldn’t cut the memories off at the knees. Locke. The gun. It was all coming back. The knife.

  Dean laid a hand on my shoulder. “Cassie.” I felt the warmth of his hand through my shirt. I heard him say my name. “It’s okay. I know her.”

  One shot. Two. Michael goes down. Locke—she’s holding a gun—

  I concentrated on breathing and fought back the memories. I wasn’t the one who’d gotten shot. This wasn’t my trauma. I was the reason Michael had been there in the first place.

  I was the one that, in her own twisted way, the monster had loved.

  “Who are you?” I asked again, clawing my way back to the here and now, my voice crisp and pointed. “And what are you doing in our house?”

  The woman in gray raked her eyes over my face, leaving me with the uncomfortable feeling that she knew exactly what was going on in my head, exactly where I’d been a moment before.

  “My name is Special Agent Veronica Sterling,” she said finally. “And as of right now, I live here.”

  “Well, she’s not lying.” Lia broke the silence. “She’s really a special agent, her name really is Veronica Sterling, and for some reason, she’s operating under the misguided belief that she resides under our roof.”

  “Lia, I presume?” Agent Sterling said. “The one who specializes in lies.”

  “Telling them, spotting them—it’s all the same.” Lia executed a graceful little shrug, but her eyes were hard.

  “And yet,” Agent Sterling continued, ignoring both the shrug and the intensity of Lia’s gaze, “you interacted on a daily basis with an FBI agent who was moonlighting as a serial killer. She was one of your supervisors, a constant presence in this house for years, and no alarm bells went off.” Agent Sterling’s tone was clinical—just stating the facts.

  Locke had fooled us all.

  “And you,” Agent Sterling said, her eyes lighting on mine, “must be Cassandra Hobbes. I hadn’t pegged you for the type to play strip poker. And no, you don’t get credit for being the only person in this room besides me who’s still wearing a shirt.”

  Agent Sterling pointedly turned her attention from me to the pile of clothes on the coffee table. She folded her arms over her chest and waited. Dean reached for his shirt and tossed Lia’s to her. Michael didn’t appear overly bothered by the crossed arms, nor did he seem at all compelled to get dressed. Agent Sterling stared down the length of her nose at him, her gaze settling on the bullet scar on his chest.

  “I take it you’re Michael,” she said. “The emotion reader with the attitude problem who’s continually doing stupid things for girls.”

  “That’s hardly a fair assessment,” Michael replied. “I d
o plenty of stupid things that aren’t for girls, too.”

  Special Agent Veronica Sterling didn’t show even the slightest inclination to smile. Turning back to the rest of us, she finished her introduction. “This program has a vacancy for a supervisor. I’m here to fill it.”

  “True,” Lia said, drawing out the word, “but not the whole story.” When Agent Sterling didn’t rise to the bait, Lia continued. “It’s been six weeks since Locke went off the deep end. We were starting to wonder if the FBI would ever send a replacement.” She raked her eyes over Agent Sterling. “Where did they find you, central casting? One young female agent swapped in for another?”

  Trust Lia to cut through the niceties.

  “Let’s just say I’m uniquely qualified for the position,” Agent Sterling replied. Her no-nonsense tone reminded me of something. Of someone. For the first time, her last name sank in, and I realized where I’d heard it before.

  “Agent Sterling,” I said. “As in Director Sterling?”

  I’d only met the FBI director once. He’d gotten involved when the serial killer Locke and Briggs were hunting had kidnapped a senator’s daughter. At the time, none of us had known that the UNSUB—or Unknown Subject—was Locke.

  “Director Sterling is my father.” Agent Sterling’s voice was neutral—too neutral, and I wondered what daddy issues she had. “He sent me here to do damage control.”

  Director Sterling had chosen his own daughter as Locke’s replacement. She’d arrived when Agent Briggs was out of town on a case. I doubted the timing was accidental.

  “Briggs told me you left the FBI,” Dean said quietly, addressing the words to Agent Sterling. “I heard you transferred to Homeland Security.”

  “I did.”

  I tried to pinpoint the expression on Agent Sterling’s face, the tone of her voice. She and Dean knew each other—that much was clear, both from Dean’s earlier statement and from the way her face softened, almost imperceptibly, when she looked at him.

  A maternal streak? I wondered. That didn’t fit with the way she was dressed, her super-erect posture, the way she talked about the rest of us rather than to us. My first impression of Agent Sterling was that she was hypercontrolled, professional, and kept other people at a distance. She either didn’t like teenagers, or she disliked us specifically.

  But the way she’d looked at Dean, even if it was only for a second…

  You weren’t always this way, I thought, slipping into her head. Tying your hair back in French knots, keeping your every statement clinical and detached. Something happened to send you into hyperprofessional mode.

  “Is there something you’d care to share with the class, Cassandra?”

  Whatever sliver of softness had crept into Agent Sterling’s expression disappeared now. She’d caught me profiling her and called me out. That told me two things. First, based on the way she’d chosen to do so, I sensed a hint of sarcasm buried beneath her humorless exterior. At some point in her life, she would have said those words with a grin instead of a grimace.

  And second…

  “You’re a profiler,” I said out loud. She’d caught me profiling her, and I couldn’t keep from thinking, It takes one to know one.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “They sent you here to replace Agent Locke.” Saying those words—seeing her as a replacement—hurt more than it should have.

  “And?” Agent Sterling’s voice was high and clear, but her eyes were hard. This was a challenge, as clear as the earlier subtext between Michael and Dean.

  “Profilers put people in boxes,” I said, meeting Agent Sterling’s eyes and refusing to look away first. “We take in an assortment of random details, and we use those details to construct the big picture, to figure out what kind of person we’re dealing with. It’s there in the way you talk: Michael’s ‘the emotion reader with the attitude problem,’ you didn’t ‘peg me’ for being the type to play strip poker.”

  I paused, and when she didn’t reply, I continued, “You read our files, and you profiled us before you ever stepped foot in this house, which means you know exactly how much it kills us that we didn’t see Agent Locke for what she was, and you either wanted to see how we’d deal with you mentioning it, or you just wanted to pick at the wound for kicks.” I paused and raked my eyes over her body, taking in all the tiny details—her fingernail polish, her posture, her shoes. “You seem like more of a masochist than a sadist, so I’m guessing you just wanted to see how we’d respond.”

  The room fell into an uncomfortable silence, and Agent Sterling wielded that silence like a weapon. “I don’t need you to lecture me on what it means to be a profiler,” she said finally, her voice soft, her words measured. “I have a bachelor’s in criminology. I was the youngest person ever to graduate from the FBI Academy. I clocked more field time during my stint at the FBI than you will see in your entire life, and I’ve spent the past five years with Homeland Security, working on domestic terrorism cases. While I am residing in this house, you will address me as Agent Sterling or ma’am, and you will not refer to yourself as a profiler, because at the end of the day, you’re just a kid.”

  There it was again in her voice, the hint of something else beneath her frosty exterior. But like a person staring at an object trapped under several feet of ice, I couldn’t make out what that something was.

  “There is no ‘we’ here, Cassandra. There’s you, and there’s me, and there’s the evaluation I’m writing of this program. So I suggest that you all clean this mess up, go to bed, and get a good night’s sleep.” She tossed Michael his shirt. “You’re going to need it.”

  I lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, unable to shake the fear that if I closed my eyes, there would be nothing to keep the ghosts at bay. When I slept, it all ran together: what had happened to my mother when I was twelve; the women Agent Locke had killed last summer; the gleam in Locke’s eyes as she’d held the knife out to me. The blood.

  Turning over onto my side, I reached toward my nightstand.

  “Cassie?” Sloane said from her bed.

  “I’m fine,” I told her. “Go back to sleep.”

  My fingers closed around the object I’d been looking for: a tube of Rose Red lipstick, my mother’s favorite shade. It had been a gift from Locke to me, part of the sick game she’d played, doling out clues, grooming me in her own image. You wanted me to know how close you were. I slipped into Locke’s head, profiling her, the way I had on so many other nights just like this one. You wanted me to find you. The next part was always the hardest. You wanted me to be like you.

  She’d offered me the knife. She’d told me to kill the girl. And on some level, she’d believed that I would say yes.

  Locke’s real name had been Lacey Hobbes. She was the younger sister of Lorelai Hobbes—fake psychic, presumed murder victim. My mother. I turned the lipstick over in my hand, staring at it in the dark. No matter how many times I tried to throw it away, I couldn’t. It was a masochistic reminder: of the people I’d trusted, the people I’d lost.

  Eventually, I forced my fingers to set it back down. I couldn’t keep doing this to myself.

  I couldn’t stop.

  Think about something else. Anything else. I thought about Agent Sterling. Locke’s replacement. She wore her clothes like armor. They were expensive, freshly pressed. She’d had a coat of clear polish on her nails. Not a French manicure, not a color—clear. Why wear polish at all if it was transparent? Did she enjoy the ritual of applying it, putting a thin layer between her nails and the rest of the world? There was subtext there: protection, distance, strength.

  You don’t allow yourself weaknesses, I thought, addressing her, the way I’d been taught to address anyone I was profiling. Why? I went back over the clues she’d given me about her past. She was the youngest person to graduate from the FBI Academy—and proud of that fact. Once upon a time, she’d probably had a competitive streak. Five years ago, she’d left the FBI. Why?

  Instead o
f an answer, my brain latched on to the fact that sometime before she’d left, she’d met Dean. He couldn’t have been more than twelve when you met him. That set off an alarm in my head. The only way an FBI agent would have interacted with Dean that long ago was if she was part of the team that took down his father.

  Agent Briggs had led that team. Shortly thereafter, he’d started using Dean—the son of a notorious serial killer—to get inside the head of other killers. Eventually, the FBI had discovered what Briggs was doing and, instead of firing him, they’d made it official. Dean had been moved into an old house in the town outside of Marine Corps Base Quantico. Briggs had hired a man named Judd to act as Dean’s guardian. Over time, Briggs had begun recruiting other teenagers with savant-like skills. First Lia, with her uncanny ability to lie and to spot lies when they exited the mouths of others. Then Sloane and Michael, and finally me.

  You used to work with Agent Briggs, I thought, picturing Veronica Sterling in my mind. You were on his team. Maybe you were even his partner. When I’d joined the program, Agent Locke had been Briggs’s partner. Maybe she’d been Agent Sterling’s replacement, before the situation was reversed.

  You don’t like being replaceable, and you don’t like being replaced. You’re not just here as a favor to your father, I told Agent Sterling silently. You know Briggs. You didn’t like Locke. And once upon a time, you cared about Dean. This is personal.

  “Did you know that the average life span of the hairy-nosed wombat is ten to twelve years?” Apparently, Sloane had decided that when I said I was fine, I was lying. The more coffee my roommate ingested, the lower her threshold for keeping random statistics to herself—especially if she thought someone needed a distraction.

  “The longest-living wombat in captivity lived thirty-four years,” Sloane continued, propping herself up on her elbows to look at me. Given that we shared a bedroom, I probably should have objected more strenuously to cup of coffee number two. Tonight, though, I found Sloane’s high-speed statistical babbling to be strangely soothing. Profiling Sterling hadn’t kept me from thinking about Locke.