The Naturals

YOU

You’ve chosen and chosen well. Maybe this one will be the one who stops you. Maybe she’ll be different. Maybe she’ll be enough.

The only thing that is certain is that she’s special.

You think it’s her eyes—not the color: an icy, see-through blue. Not the lashes, or the shape, or the way she doesn’t need eyeliner to give them the appearance of a cat’s.

No, it’s what’s behind those icy blues that brings the audience out in droves. You feel it, every time you look at her. The certainty. The knowing. That otherworldly glint she uses to convince people that she’s the real deal.

Maybe she is.

Maybe she really can see things. Maybe she knows things.

Maybe she’s everything she claims to be and more. But watching her, counting her breaths, you smile, because deep down, you know that she isn’t going to stop you.

You don’t really want her to stop you.

She’s fragile.

Perfect.

Marked.

And the one thing this so-called psychic won’t see coming is you.

CHAPTER 1

The hours were bad. The tips were worse, and the majority of my coworkers definitely left something to be desired, but c’est la vie, que sera sera, insert foreign language cliché of your choice here. It was a summer job, and that kept Nonna off my back. It also prevented my various aunts, uncles, and kitchen-sink cousins from feeling like they had to offer me temporary employment in their restaurant/butcher shop/legal practice/boutique. Given the size of my father’s very large, very extended (and very Italian) family, the possibilities were endless, but it was always a variation on the same theme.

My dad lived half a world away. My mother was missing, presumed dead. I was everyone’s problem and nobody’s.

Teenager, presumed troubled.

“Order up!”

With practiced ease, I grabbed a plate of pancakes (side of bacon) with my left hand and a two-handed breakfast burrito (jalapeños on the side) with my right. If the SATs didn’t go well in the fall, I had a real future ahead of me in the crappy diner industry.

“Pancakes with a side of bacon. Breakfast burrito, jalapeños on the side.” I slid the plates onto the table. “Anything else I can get for you gentlemen?”

Before either of them opened their mouths, I knew exactly what these two were going to say. The guy on the left was going to ask for extra butter. And the guy on the right? He was going to need another glass of water before he could even think about those jalapeños.

Ten-to-one odds, he didn’t even like them.

Guys who actually liked jalapeños didn’t order them on the side. Mr. Breakfast Burrito just didn’t want people to think he was a wuss—only the word he would have used wasn’t wuss.

Whoa there, Cassie, I told myself sternly. Let’s keep it PG.

As a general rule, I didn’t curse much, but I had a bad habit of picking up on other people’s quirks. Put me in a room with a bunch of English people, and I’d walk out with a British accent. It wasn’t intentional—I’d just spent a lot of time over the years getting inside other people’s heads.

Occupational hazard. Not mine. My mother’s.

“Could I get a few more of these butter packets?” the guy on the left asked.

I nodded—and waited.

“More water,” the guy on the right grunted. He puffed out his chest and ogled my boobs.

I forced a smile. “I’ll be right back with that water.” I managed to keep from adding pervert to the end of that sentence, but only just.

I was still holding out hope that a guy in his late twenties who pretended to like spicy food and made a point of staring at his teenage waitress’s chest like he was training for the Ogling Olympics might be equally showy when it came to leaving tips.

Then again, I thought as I went for refills, he might turn out to be the kind of guy who stiffs the little bitty waitress just to prove he can.

Absentmindedly, I turned the details of the situation over in my mind: the way that Mr. Breakfast Burrito was dressed; his likely occupation; the fact that his friend, who’d ordered the pancakes, was wearing a much more expensive watch.

He’ll fight to grab the check, then tip like crap.

I hoped I was wrong—but was fairly certain that I wasn’t.

Other kids spent their preschool years singing their way through the ABCs. I grew up learning a different alphabet. Behavior, personality, environment—my mother called them the BPEs, and they were the tricks of her trade. Thinking that way wasn’t the kind of thing you could just turn off—not even once you were old enough to understand that when your mother told people she was psychic, she was lying, and when she took their money, it was fraud.

Even now that she was gone, I couldn’t keep from figuring people out, any more than I could give up breathing, blinking, or counting down the days until I turned eighteen.

“Table for one?” A low, amused voice jostled me back into reality. The voice’s owner looked like the type of boy who would have been more at home in a country club than a diner. His skin was perfect, his hair artfully mussed. Even though he phrased his words like they were a question, they weren’t—not really.

“Sure,” I said, grabbing a menu. “Right this way.”

A closer observation told me that Country Club was about my age. A smirk played across his perfect features, and he walked with the swagger of high school nobility. Just looking at him made me feel like a serf.

“This okay?” I asked, leading him to a table near the window.

“This is fine,” he said, slipping into the chair. Casually, he surveyed the room with bulletproof confidence. “You get a lot of traffic in here on weekends?”

“Sure,” I replied. I was starting to wonder if I’d lost the ability to speak in complex sentences. From the look on the boy’s face, he probably was, too. “I’ll give you a minute to look over the menu.”

He didn’t respond, and I spent my minute bringing Pancakes and Breakfast Burrito their checks, plural. I figured that if I split it in half, I might end up with half a decent tip.

“I’ll be your cashier whenever you’re ready,” I said, fake smile firmly in place.

I turned back toward the kitchen and caught the boy by the window watching me. It wasn’t an I’m ready to order stare. I wasn’t sure what it was, actually—but every bone in my body told me it was something. The niggling sensation that there was a key detail that I was missing about this whole situation—about him—wouldn’t go away. Boys like that didn’t usually eat in places like this.

They didn’t stare at girls like me.

Self-conscious and wary, I crossed the room.

“Did you decide what you’d like?” I asked. There was no getting out of taking his order, so I let my hair fall in my face, obscuring his view of it.

“Three eggs,” he said, hazel eyes fixed on what he could see of mine. “Side of pancakes. Side of ham.”

I didn’t need to write the order down, but I suddenly found myself wishing for a pen, just so I’d have something to hold on to. “What kind of eggs?” I asked.

“You tell me.” The boy’s words caught me off guard.

“Excuse me?”

“Guess,” he said.

I stared at him through the wisps of hair still covering my face. “You want me to guess how you want your eggs cooked?”

He smiled. “Why not?”

And just like that, the gauntlet was thrown.

“Not scrambled,” I said, thinking out loud. Scrambled eggs were too average, too common, and this was a guy who liked to be a little bit different. Not too different, though, which ruled out poached—at least in a place like this. Sunny-side up would have been too messy for him; over hard wouldn’t be messy enough.

“Over easy.” I was as sure of the conclusion as I was of the color of his eyes. He smiled and closed his menu.

“Are you going to tell me if I was right?” I asked—not because I needed confirmation, but because I wanted to see how he would respond.

The boy shrugged. “Now, where would the fun be in that?”

I wanted to stay there, staring, until I figured him out, but I didn’t. I put his order in. I delivered his food. The lunch rush snuck up on me, and by the time I went back to check on him, the boy by the window was gone. He hadn’t even waited for his check—he’d just left twenty dollars on the table. I had just about decided that he could make me play guessing games to his heart’s content for a twelve-dollar tip when I noticed the bill wasn’t the only thing he’d left.

There was also a business card.

I picked it up. Stark white. Black letters. Evenly spaced. There was a seal in the upper left-hand corner, but relatively little text: a name, a job title, a phone number. Across the top of the card, there were four words, four little words that knocked the wind out of me as effectively as a jab to the chest.

I pocketed the card—and the tip. I went back to the kitchen. I caught my breath. And then I looked at it again.

Tanner Briggs. The name.

Special Agent. Job title.

Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Four words, but I stared at them so hard that my vision blurred and I could only make out three letters.

What in the world had I done to attract the attention of the FBI?

CHAPTER 2

After an eight-hour shift, my body was bone tired, but my mind was whirring. I wanted to shut myself in my room, collapse on my bed, and figure out what the Hello Kitty had happened that afternoon.

Unfortunately, it was Sunday.

“There she is! Cassie, we were just about to send the boys out looking for you.” My aunt Tasha was among the more reasonable of my father’s various siblings, so she didn’t wink and ask me if I’d found myself a boyfriend to occupy my time.

That was Uncle Rio’s job. “Our little heartbreaker, eh? You out there breaking hearts? Of course she is!”

I’d been a regular fixture at Sunday night dinners ever since Social Services had dropped me off on my father’s doorstep—metaphorically, thank God—when I was twelve. After five years, I still hadn’t ever heard Uncle Rio ask a question that he did not immediately proceed to answer himself.

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said. This was a well-established script, and that was my line. “Promise.”

“What are we talking about?” one of Uncle Rio’s sons asked, plopping himself down on the living room sofa, dangling his legs over the side.

“Cassie’s boyfriend,” Uncle Rio replied.

I rolled my eyes. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Cassie’s secret boyfriend,” Uncle Rio amended.

“I think you have me confused with Sofia and Kate,” I said. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have thrown any of my female cousins under the bus, but desperate times called for desperate measures. “They’re far more likely to have secret boyfriends than I am.”

“Bah,” Uncle Rio said. “Sofia’s boyfriends are never secret.”

And on it went—good-natured ribbing, family jokes. I played the part, letting their energy infect me, saying what they wanted me to say, smiling the smiles they wanted to see. It was warm and safe and happy—but it wasn’t me.

It never was.

As soon as I was sure I wouldn’t be missed, I ducked into the kitchen.

“Cassandra. Good.” My grandmother, elbow-deep in flour, her gray hair pulled into a loose bun at the nape of her neck, gave me a warm smile. “How was work?”

Despite her little-old-lady appearance, Nonna ruled the entire family like a general directing her troops. Right now, I was the one drifting out of formation.

“Work was work,” I said. “Not bad.”

“But not good, either?” She narrowed her eyes.

If I didn’t play this right, I’d have ten job offers within the hour. Family took care of family—even when “family” was perfectly capable of taking care of herself.

“Today was actually decent,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “Someone left me a twelve-dollar tip.”

And also, I added silently, a business card from the FBI.

“Good,” Nonna said. “That is good. You had a good day.”

“Yeah, Nonna,” I said, crossing the room to kiss her cheek, because I knew it would make her happy. “It was a good day.”

By the time everyone cleared out at nine, the card felt like lead in my pocket. I tried to help Nonna with the dishes, but she shooed me upstairs. In the quiet of my own room, I could feel the energy draining out of me, like air out of a slowly wilting balloon.

I sat down on my bed and then let myself fall backward. The old springs groaned with the impact, and I closed my eyes. My right hand found its way to my pocket, and I pulled out the card.

It was a joke. It had to be. That was why the pretty, country-club boy had felt off to me. That was why he’d taken an interest—to mock me.

But he didn’t really seem the type.

I opened my eyes and looked at the card. This time, I let myself read it out loud. “Special Agent Tanner Briggs. Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

A few hours in my pocket hadn’t changed the text on the card. FBI? Seriously? Who was this guy trying to kid? He’d looked sixteen, seventeen, max.

Not like a special agent.

Just special. I couldn’t push that thought down, and my eyes flitted reflexively toward the mirror on my wall. It was one of the great ironies of my life that I’d inherited all of my mother’s features, but none of the magic with which they’d come together on her face. She’d been beautiful. I was odd—odd-looking, oddly quiet, always the odd one out.

Even after five years, I still couldn’t think of my mother without thinking of the last time I’d seen her, shooing me out of her dressing room, a wide smile on her face. Then I thought about coming back to the dressing room. About the blood—on the floor, on the walls, on the mirror. I hadn’t been gone long. I’d opened the door—

“Snap out of it,” I told myself. I sat up and pushed my back up against the headboard, unable to quit thinking about the smell of blood and that moment of knowing it was my mother’s and praying it wasn’t.

What if that was what this was about? What if the card wasn’t a joke? What if the FBI was looking into my mother’s murder?

It’s been five years, I told myself. But the case was still open. My mother’s body had never been found. Based on the amount of blood, that was what the police had been looking for from the beginning.

A body.

I turned the business card over in my hands. On the back, there was a handwritten note.

Cassandra, it said, PLEASE CALL.

That was it. My name, and then the directive to call, in capital letters. No explanation. No nothing.

Below those words, someone else had scribbled a second set of instructions in small, sharp letters—barely readable. I traced my finger over the letters and thought about the boy from the diner.

Maybe he wasn’t the special agent.

So that makes him what? The messenger?

I didn’t have an answer, but the words scrawled across the bottom of the card stood out to me, every bit as much as Special Agent Tanner Briggs’s PLEASE CALL.

If I were you, I wouldn’t.

YOU

You’re good at waiting. Waiting for the right moment. Waiting for the right girl. You have her now, and still, you’re waiting. Waiting for her to wake up. Waiting for her to open those eyes and see you.

Waiting for her to scream.

And scream.

And scream.

And realize that no one can hear her but you.

You know how this will go, how she’ll be angry, then scared, then swear up and down that if you let her go, she won’t tell a soul. She’ll lie to you, and she’ll try to manipulate you, and you’ll have to show her—the way you’ve showed so many others—how that just won’t do.

But not yet. Right now, she’s still sleeping. Beautiful—but not as beautiful as she will be when you’re done.

CHAPTER 3

It took me two days, but I called the number. Of course I did, because even though there was a 99 percent chance this was some kind of hoax, there was a 1 percent chance that it wasn’t.

I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until someone picked up.

“This is Briggs.”

I couldn’t pinpoint what was more disarming—the fact that this “Agent Briggs” had apparently given me the number to his direct line or the way he answered the phone, like saying “hello” would have been a waste of breath.

“Hello?” As if he could read my mind, Special Agent Tanner Briggs spoke again. “Anyone there?”

“This is Cassandra Hobbes,” I said. “Cassie.”

“Cassie.” Something about the way Agent Briggs said my name made me think that he’d known before I’d said a single word that I didn’t go by my full name. “I’m glad you called.”

He waited for me to say something else, but I stayed silent. Everything you said or did was a data point you put out there in the world, and I didn’t want to give this man any more information than I had to—not until I knew what he wanted from me.

“I’m sure you must be wondering why I contacted you—why I had Michael contact you.”

Michael. So now the boy from the diner had a name.

“I have an offer I’d like you to consider.”

“An offer?” It amazed me that my voice stayed every bit as calm and even as his.

“I believe this is a conversation best had in person, Ms. Hobbes. Is there somewhere you would be comfortable meeting?”

He knew what he was doing—letting me pick the location, because if he’d specified one, I might not have gone. I probably should have refused to meet with him anyway, but I couldn’t, for the same reason that I’d had to pick up the phone and call.

Five years was a long time to go without a body. Without answers.

“Do you have an office?” I asked.

The slight pause on the other end of the phone told me that wasn’t what he’d expected me to say. I could have asked him to meet me at the diner or a coffee shop near the high school or anywhere that I would have had the home court advantage, but I’d been taught to believe that there was no home court advantage.

You could tell more about a stranger by seeing their house than you ever would by inviting them to yours.

Besides, if this guy wasn’t really an FBI agent, if he was some kind of pervert and this was some kind of game, I figured he’d probably have a heck of a time arranging a meeting at the local FBI office.

“I don’t actually work out of Denver,” he said finally. “But I’m sure I can set something up.”

Probably not a pervert, then.

He gave me an address. I gave him a time.

“And Cassandra?”

I wondered what Agent Briggs hoped to accomplish by using my full first name. “Yes?”

“This isn’t about your mother.”

I went to the meeting anyway. Of course I did. Special Agent Tanner Briggs knew enough about me to know that my mother’s case was the reason I’d followed the instructions on the card and called. I wanted to know how he’d come by that information, if he’d looked at her police file, if he would look at her file, provided I gave him whatever it was he wanted from me.

I wanted to know why Special Agent Tanner Briggs had made it his business to know about me, the same way a man shopping for a new computer might have memorized the specs of the model that had caught his eye.

“What floor?” The woman beside me in the elevator was in her early sixties. Her silvery blond hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail at the nape of her neck, and the suit she was wearing was perfectly tailored.

All business, just like Special Agent Tanner Briggs.

“Fifth floor,” I said. “Please.”

With nervous energy to burn, I snuck another glance at the woman and started piecing my way through her life story, as told by the way she was standing, her clothes, the faint accent in her speech, the clear coat of polish on her nails.

She was married.

No kids.

When she’d started in the FBI, it had been a boy’s club.

Behavior. Personality. Environment. I could practically hear my mother coaching me through this impromptu analysis.

“Fifth floor.” The woman’s words were brisk, and I added another entry to my mental column—impatient.

Obligingly, I stepped out of the elevator. The door closed behind me, and I appraised my surroundings. It looked so … normal. If it hadn’t been for the security checkpoint out front and the visitor’s badge pinned to my faded black sundress, I never would have pegged this for a place devoted to fighting federal crime.

“So, what? You were expecting a dog-and-pony show?”

I recognized the voice instantly. The boy from the diner. Michael. He sounded amused, and when I turned to face him, there was a familiar smirk dancing its way through his features, one that he probably could have suppressed if he’d had the least inclination to try.

“I wasn’t expecting anything,” I told him. “I have no expectations.”

He gave me a knowing look. “No expectations, no disappointments.”

I couldn’t tell if that was his appraisal of my current mental state or the motto by which he lived his own life. In fact, I was having trouble getting any handle on his personality at all. He’d traded his striped polo for a formfitting black T-shirt and his jeans for khaki slacks. He looked as out of place here as he had at the diner, like maybe that was the point.

“You know,” he said conversationally, “I knew you’d come.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Even though you told me not to?”

He shrugged. “My inner Boy Scout had to try.”

If this guy had an inner Boy Scout, I had an inner flamingo.

“So, are you here to take me to Special Agent Tanner Briggs?” I asked. The words came out curtly, but at least I didn’t sound fascinated, infatuated, or even the least bit drawn to the sound of his voice.

“Hmmmmm.” In response to my question, Michael made a noncommittal noise under his breath and inclined his head—as close to a yes as I was going to get. He led me around the bull pen and down a hallway. Neutral carpet, neutral walls, a neutral expression on his criminally handsome face.

“So what does Briggs have on you?” Michael asked. I could feel him watching me, looking for a surge of emotion—any emotion—to tell him if his question had hit a nerve.

It hadn’t.

“You want me to be nervous about this,” I told him, because that much was clear from his words. “And you told me not to come.”

He smiled, but there was a hard glint to it, an edge. “I guess you could say I’m contrary.”

I snorted. That was one word for it.

“Are you going to give me even a hint of what’s going on here?” I asked as we neared the end of the hall.

He shrugged. “That depends. Are you going to stop playing Who’s Got the Best Poker Face with me?”

That surprised a laugh out of me, and I realized that it had been a long time since I’d laughed because I couldn’t help it and not because someone else was laughing, too.

Michael’s smile lost its edge, and for a second, the expression utterly changed his face. If he’d been handsome before, he was beautiful now—but it didn’t last. As quickly as the lightness had come, it faded.

“I meant what I wrote on that card,” he said softly. He nodded to a closed office door to our right. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go in there.”

I knew then—the way I always knew things—that Michael had been in my shoes once and that he had opened the door. His warning was genuine, but I opened it, too.

“Ms. Hobbes. Please, come in.”

With one last glance at Michael, I stepped into the room.

“Au revoir,” the boy with the excellent poker face said, punctuating the words with an exaggerated flick of his fingers.

Special Agent Tanner Briggs cleared his throat. The door closed behind me. For better or worse, I was here to meet with an FBI agent. Alone.

“I’m glad you came, Cassie. Take a seat.”

Agent Briggs was younger than I’d expected based on his phone voice. The gears in my brain turned slowly, incorporating his age into what I knew. An older man who took pains to appear businesslike was guarded. A twenty-nine-year-old who did the same wanted to be taken seriously.

There was a difference.

Obediently, I took a seat. Agent Briggs stayed in his chair, but leaned forward. The desk between us was clean, but for a stack of papers and two pens, one of which was missing its cap.

He wasn’t naturally neat, then. For some reason, I found that comforting. He was ambitious, but not inflexible.

“Are you finished?” he asked me. His voice wasn’t curt. If anything, he sounded genuinely curious.

“Finished with what?” I asked him.

“Analyzing me,” he said. “I’ve only been in this office for two hours. I couldn’t even guess what it is that has caught your attention, but I figured something would. With Naturals, something almost always does.”

Naturals. He said the word like he was expecting me to repeat it with a question mark in my tone. I didn’t say anything. The less I gave him, the more he’d show me.

“You’re good at reading people, at taking little details and figuring out the big picture: who they are, what they want, how they operate.” He smiled. “What kind of eggs they like.”

“You invited me here because I’m good at guessing what kind of eggs people like?” I asked, unable to keep the incredulousness out of my voice.

He drummed his fingers over the desktop. “I asked you here because you have a natural aptitude for something that most people could spend a lifetime trying to learn.”

I wondered if when he said most people he was referring at least in part to himself.

He took my continued silence as some kind of argument. “Are you telling me that you don’t read people? That you can’t tell me right now whether I’d rather play basketball or golf?”

Basketball. But he’d want people to think the answer was golf.

“You could try to explain to me how you figure things out, how you figure people out, Cassie, but the difference between you and the rest of the world is that to explain how you just figured out that I’d rather get a bloody nose on the basketball court than tee off with the boss, you’d have to backtrack. You’d have to sort out what the clues were and how you’d made sense of them, because you just do it. You don’t even have to think about it, not the way that I would, not the way that my team would. You probably couldn’t stop yourself if you tried.”

I hadn’t ever talked about this, not even with Mom, who’d taught me the parts of it that could be taught. People were people, but for better or worse, most days, they were just puzzles to me. Easy puzzles, hard puzzles, crosswords, mind-benders, sudoku. There was always an answer, and I couldn’t stop myself from pushing until I found it.

“How do you know any of this?” I asked the man in front of me. “And even if it’s true, even if I do have really good instincts about people, what’s it to you?”

He leaned forward. “I know because I make it my business to know. Because I’m the one who convinced the FBI that they need to be looking for people like you.”

“What do you want with me?”

He eased back in his chair. “What do you think I want with you, Cassie?”

My mouth went dry. “I’m seventeen.”

“Natural aptitudes, like yours, peak in the teen years. Formal education, college, the wrong influences, could all interfere with the incredible raw potential you have now.” He folded his hands neatly in front of him. “I want to see to it that you have the right influences, that your gift is molded into something extraordinary, something that you can use to do an incredible amount of good in this world.”

Part of me wanted to laugh at him, to walk out of the room, to forget that any of this had ever happened, but the other part just kept thinking that for five years, I’d been living in limbo, like I was waiting for something without knowing what that something was.

“You can take as much time as you need to think about it, Cassie, but what I’m offering you is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Our program is one of a kind, and it has the potential to turn Naturals—people like you—into something truly extraordinary.”

“People like me,” I repeated, my mind going ninety miles an hour. “And Michael.”

The second part was a guess, but not much of one. In the two minutes we’d spent walking to this office, Michael had come closer to figuring out what was going on inside my head than anyone I’d ever met.

“And Michael.” As he spoke, Agent Briggs’s face became more animated. Gone was the hardened professional. This was personal. This program was something he believed in.

And he had something to prove.

“What would becoming a part of this program entail?” I asked, measuring his response. The enthusiasm on his face morphed into something far more intense. His eyes bored into mine.

“How would you feel about moving to Washington, DC?”

CHAPTER 4

How would I feel about moving to DC?

“I’m seventeen,” I reiterated. “A better question might be how my legal guardians would feel about it.”

“You wouldn’t be the first minor I’ve recruited, Cassie. There are work-arounds.”

Clearly, he had not met my Nonna.

“Five years ago, custody of Cassandra Hobbes was remitted to her biological father, one Vincent Battaglia, United States Air Force.” Agent Briggs paused. “Fourteen months after your appearance in his life, your father was transferred overseas. You chose to remain here, with your paternal grandmother.”

I didn’t ask how Agent Briggs had come by that information. He was FBI. He probably knew what color toothbrush I used.

“My point, Cassie, is that legally, your father still has custody, and I have every confidence that if you want this to happen, I can make it happen.” Briggs paused again. “As far as the outside world is concerned, we’re a gifted program. Very selective, with endorsements from some very important people. Your father is career military. He worries about the way you isolate yourself. That will make him easier to persuade than most.”

I started to open my mouth to ask how exactly he’d determined that my father worried, but Briggs held up a hand.

“I don’t walk into a situation like this blind, Cassie. Once you were flagged in the system as a potential recruit, I did my homework.”

“Flagged?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. “For what?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t the one who flagged you, and quite frankly, the details of your recruitment are moot unless you’re interested in my offer. Say the word if you’re not, and I’ll leave Denver tonight.”

I couldn’t do that—and Agent Briggs probably knew it before he asked.

He picked up the capless pen and scrawled some notes on the edge of one of his papers. “If you have questions, you can ask Michael. I have no doubt he’ll be painfully honest with you about his experience in the program so far.” Briggs rolled his eyes heavenward in a gesture of exasperation so universal that I almost forgot about the badge and the suit. “And if there are any questions that I could answer for you …”

He trailed off and waited. I took the bait and started pressing him for details. Fifteen minutes later, my mind was reeling. The program—that was how he referred to it, again and again—was small, still in its trial stages. Their agenda was twofold: first, to educate those of us selected to participate and hone our natural skills, and second, to use those skills to aid the FBI from behind the scenes. I was free to leave the program at any time. I would be required to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

“There’s one question you haven’t asked, Cassie.” Agent Briggs folded his hands in front of him again. “So I’ll answer it for you. I know about your personal history. About your mother’s case. And while I have no new information for you, I can say that after what you’ve been through, you have more reasons than most to want to do what we do.”

“And what is that?” I asked, my throat tightening at the mere mention of the m-word. “You said that you’ll provide training, and that in exchange I’ll be consulting for you. Consulting on what, exactly? Training for what?”

He paused, but whether he was assessing me or adding emphasis to his answer, I wasn’t sure.

“You’ll be helping on cold cases. Ones the Bureau hasn’t been able to close.”

I thought of my mother—the blood on the mirror and the sirens and the way I used to sleep with a phone, hoping so desperately that it would ring. I had to force myself to keep breathing normally, to keep from closing my eyes and picturing my mom’s impish, smiling face.

“What kind of cold cases?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat. My lips felt suddenly dry; my eyes felt wet.

Agent Briggs had the decency to ignore the emotion now evident on my face. “The exact assignments vary, depending on your specialty. Michael’s a Natural at reading emotions, so he spends a great deal of time going over testimony and interrogation tapes. With his background, I suspect he’ll ultimately be a good fit for our white-collar crime division, but a person with his skill set can be useful in any kind of investigation. One of the other recruits in the program is a walking encyclopedia who sees patterns and probabilities everywhere she looks. We started her out on crime scene analysis.”

“And me?” I asked.

He was silent for a moment, measuring. I glanced at the papers on his desk and wondered if any of them were about me.

“You’re a Natural profiler,” he said finally. “You can look at a pattern of behavior and figure out the personality of the perpetrator, or guess how a given individual is likely to behave in the future. That tends to come in handy when we have a series of interrelated crimes, but no definite suspect.”

I read in between the lines of that statement, but wanted to be sure. “Interrelated crimes?”

“Serial crimes,” he said, choosing a different word and letting it hang in the air around us. “Abductions. Arson. Sexual assault.” He paused, and I knew what the next word out of his mouth was going to be before he said it. “Murder.”

The truth he’d been dancing around for the past hour was suddenly incredibly clear. He and his team, this program—they didn’t just want to teach me how to hone my skills. They wanted to use them to catch killers.

Serial killers.

YOU

You look at the body and feel a rush of anger. Rage. It’s supposed to be sublime. You’re supposed to decide. You’re supposed to feel the life go out of her. She isn’t supposed to rush you.

She shouldn’t be dead yet, but she is.

She should be perfect now, but she’s not.

She didn’t scream enough, and then she screamed too much, and she called you names. Names that He used to call you. And you got angry.

It was over too fast, too soon, and it wasn’t your fault, damn it. It was hers. She’s the one who made you angry. She’s the one who ruined it.

You’re better than this. You’re supposed to be looking at her body and feeling the power, the rush. She’s supposed to be a work of art.

But she’s not.

You drive the knife into her stomach again and again, blinded to anything else. She’s not perfect. She’s not beautiful. She’s nothing.

You’re nothing.

But you won’t stay nothing for long.

CHAPTER 5

I gave Agent Briggs the go-ahead to talk to my father. My father called me. Less than a week after I told my dad this was what I wanted, I got word that Briggs had obtained the necessary permissions. My paperwork had gone through. That night, I quit my job at the diner. I took a shower, changed into my pajamas, and prepared for World War III.

I was going to do this. I’d known that from almost the moment that Agent Briggs had started speaking. I cared about my grandmother. I did. And I knew how hard she and the rest of the family had tried to make me feel loved, no matter how I’d come to them or how much of my mother there was in me. But I’d never really belonged here. A part of me had never really left that fateful theater: the lights, the crowd, the blood. Maybe I never would, but Agent Briggs was offering me a chance to do something about it.

I might never solve my own mother’s murder, but this program would turn me into the kind of person who could catch killers, who could make sure that another little girl, in another life, with another mother, would never have to see what I had seen.

It was morbid and horrifying and the very last life the family would have imagined for me—and I wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything.

I combed my fingers through my hair. Wet, it looked dark enough to pass for brown instead of auburn. The steam from the shower had brought some color into my cheeks. I looked like the type of girl who could belong here, with this family.

With wet hair, I didn’t look so much like my mother.

“Chicken.” I leveled the insult at my own reflection and then pushed back from the mirror. I could stay here until my hair dried—in fact, I could stay here until my hair went gray—and that wouldn’t make the conversation I was about to have any easier.

Downstairs, Nonna was curled up in a recliner in the living room, reading glasses perched on her nose and a large-print romance novel open in her lap. She looked up the second I stepped in the room, her eagle eyes sharp.

“You are ready for bed early,” she said, no small amount of suspicion in her voice. Nonna had successfully raised eight children. If I’d been the type to make trouble, there would have been none that I could have stirred up that she hadn’t already seen.

“I quit my job today,” I said, and the sparkle in her eyes told me those had been the wrong words to lead with. “I don’t need you to get me a new one,” I added hastily.

Nonna made a dismissive sound under her breath. “Of course not. You are independent. You do not need anything from your old Nonna. You do not care if she worries.”

Well, this was going well.

“I don’t want you to worry,” I said, “but something’s come up. An opportunity.”

I’d already made the executive decision that Nonna didn’t need to know what I’d be doing—or why. I stuck to the cover story that Agent Briggs had given me. “There’s a school,” I said. “A special program. The director came to see me last week.”

Nonna harrumphed.

“He talked to Dad.”

“The director of this program talked to your father,” Nonna repeated. “And what did my son say to this man who could not be bothered to introduce himself to me?”

I explained as much as I could. I gave her a pamphlet that Agent Briggs had given me—one that didn’t mention words like profiling or serial killers or FBI.

“It’s a small program,” I said. “At a kind of group home.”

“And your father, he said you could go?” Nonna narrowed her eyes at the smiling kids on the front of the pamphlet, like they were personally responsible for leading her precious granddaughter astray.

“He already signed the papers, Nonna.” I looked down at my hands, which had woven themselves together at my waist. “I’m going to go.”

There was silence. Then a sharp intake of breath. And then an explosion.

I didn’t speak Italian, but based on the emphatic gestures and the way she was spitting out the words, I was able to make an educated guess at a translation.

Nonna’s granddaughter was moving cross-country to enroll in a government-sponsored gifted program over her dead and rotting corpse.

Nobody stages an intervention like my father’s family stages an intervention. The Bat-Signal had nothing on the Battaglia-Signal, and less than twenty-four hours after Nonna sent out the distress call, the family had gathered in force. There was yelling and screaming and crying—and food. Lots of food. I was threatened and cajoled, browbeaten and clasped to multiple bosoms. But for the first time since I’d met this half of my family tree, I couldn’t just temper my reactions to theirs. I couldn’t give them what they wanted. I couldn’t pretend.

The noise built to a crescendo, and I drew into myself and waited for it to pass. Eventually, they’d notice that I wasn’t saying anything.

“Cassie, sweetheart, aren’t you happy here?” one of my aunts asked finally. The rest of the table fell silent.

“I’m …” I couldn’t say any more than that. I saw the realization pass over their faces. “It’s not that I’m not happy,” I interjected quickly. “It’s just …”

For once, they heard what I wasn’t saying. From the moment they’d learned of my existence, I’d been family to them. They hadn’t realized that in my own eyes, I’d always been—and maybe always would be—an outsider.

“I need to do this,” I said, my voice as quiet as theirs had been loud. “For my mom.”

That was closer to the truth than I’d ever meant to tell them.

“You think your mother would have wanted you to do this?” Nonna asked. “To leave the family that loves you, that will take care of you, to go off to the other side of the country, alone, to do God knows what?”

It was meant as a rhetorical question, but I answered it: vehemently, decisively.

“Yes.” I paused, expecting an argument, but I didn’t get one. “I know you don’t like it, and I hope you don’t hate me for it, but I have to do this.” I stood up. “I leave in three days. I’d really like to come back for Christmas, but if you don’t want me here, I’d understand.”

Nonna crossed the room in a second, surprisingly spry for someone her age. She poked a vicious finger into my chest. “You come home for Christmas,” she said in a manner that made it quite clear she considered it an order. “You even think about not coming home?” She narrowed her eyes and drew her poking finger across her neck in a menacing fashion. “Capisce?”

A smile tugged at the edge of my lips, and tears burned in my eyes. “Capisce.”

CHAPTER 6

Three days later, I left for the program. Michael was the one who came to pick me up. He parked out at the curb and waited.

“I do not like this,” Nonna told me for maybe the thousandth time.

“I know.” I brushed a kiss against her temple, and she cupped my head in her hands.

“You be good,” she said fiercely. “You be careful. Your father,” she added, as an afterthought. “I am going to kill him.”

I glanced back over my shoulder and saw Michael standing with his back to a gleaming black Porsche. From a distance, I couldn’t make out the expression on his face, but I had a suspicion that he wasn’t having any trouble interpreting my feelings.

“I’ll be careful,” I told Nonna, turning my back on the boy with the discerning eye. “Promise.”

“Eh,” she said finally. “How much trouble can you get into? There are only a few students in the entire school.”

A few students who were being trained to analyze crime scenes, pore over witness testimony, and track serial killers. What trouble could we possibly get into?

Without another word, I hauled my bag out to the car. Nonna followed and, when Michael opened the trunk but made no move to help me with my bag, she shot him a disapproving look.

“You are just going to stand there?” she asked.

With an almost imperceptible smirk, Michael took the bag from my hand and hoisted it effortlessly into the trunk. Then he leaned close, into my personal space, and whispered, “And here I’d pegged you as the kind of girl who’d want to do the heavy lifting herself.”

Nonna eyed me. She eyed Michael. She eyed what little space there was between the two of us. And then she made a harrumphing sound.

“Anything happens to her,” she told Michael, “this family—we know how to dispose of a body.”

Instead of giving in to the mortification and burying my head in my hands, I said good-bye to Nonna and climbed into the car. Michael followed suit.

“Sorry about that,” I said.

Michael arched one eyebrow. “About the death threat, or the imaginary chastity belt she’s fitting you with as we speak?”

“Shut up.”

“Oh, come on, Cassie. I think it’s nice. You have a family that cares.”

Maybe he thought that was nice, and maybe he didn’t. “I don’t want to talk about my family.”

Michael grinned, completely undeterred. “I know.”

I thought back to what Agent Briggs had told me about Michael’s gift.

“You read emotions,” I said.

“Facial expressions, posture, gestures, the works,” he said. “You nibble on the inside of your lip when you’re nervous. And you get this little wrinkle at the corner of your right eye when you’re trying not to stare.”

He said all of this without ever taking his eyes off the road. My gaze flitted to the speedometer, and I realized how fast we were going.

“Do you want to get pulled over?” I squeaked.

He shrugged. “You’re the profiler,” he said. “You tell me.” He eased off the accelerator ever so slightly. “That’s what profilers do, isn’t it? You look at the way a person is dressed, or the way a person talks, every little detail, and you put that person in a box. You figure out what kind of individual you’re dealing with, and you convince yourself that you know exactly what everyone else wants.”

Okay, so he’d had an experience—and not a good one—with a profiler in the past. I took that to mean that the difficulty I’d been having getting a read on him was no accident. He liked keeping me guessing.

“You wear a different style of clothing every time I see you,” I said. “You stand differently. You talk differently. You never say anything about yourself.”

“Maybe I like being tall, dark, and mysterious,” Michael replied, taking a turn so quickly that I had to remind myself to breathe.

“You’re not that tall,” I gritted out. He laughed.

“You’re annoyed with me,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows. “But also intrigued.”

“Would you stop that?” I’d never realized how irritating it was to be the one under the microscope.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Michael said. “I’ll stop trying to read your emotions if you stop trying to profile me.”

I had so many questions—about the way he’d grown up, about his ability, about why he’d warned me to stay away—but unless I wanted him making an intense study of my emotions, I’d have to get my answers the normal way.

“Fine,” I said. “Deal.”

He smiled. “Excellent. Now, as a show of good faith, since I’ve already spent a good chunk of time getting inside your head, I’ll give you three questions to try to get inside mine.”

The puzzle solver in me wanted to ask what kind of clothes he wore when there was no one around to see him, how many siblings he had, and which one of his parents had turned him into the kind of guy who was a little angry at the world.

But I didn’t.

Anyone comfortable driving this fast wasn’t going to shy away from a few little white lies. If I asked him what I wanted to know, all I would get was more mixed messages—so I asked him the only question I was fairly certain he’d answer honestly.

“What’s with the Porsche?”

Michael took his eyes off the road just long enough to flick his gaze over to me, and I knew that I’d surprised him.

“The Porsche?” he repeated.

I nodded. “I’m pretty sure it’s not standard FBI issue.”

The edges of his lips curved upward, and for once, there was no dark undercurrent to the expression. “The Porsche was a present,” he told me. “From my life before. Getting to keep it was one of the conditions I gave Briggs for joining up.”

“Why wouldn’t he have let you keep it?” I asked, realizing belatedly that I’d just burned question number two.

“Tax fraud,” Michael replied. “Not mine. My father’s.”

From the tightness in his voice, I got the feeling that keeping the Porsche probably hadn’t been the only condition of Michael’s participation in the program. Whether he’d asked for the government to overlook his father’s crimes or his father had bartered away his son in exchange for immunity, I wasn’t sure.

I didn’t ask.

Instead, I stuck to safer ground. “What’s it like? The program?”

“I’ve only been there for a few months,” Michael said. “Briggs sprung me to come get you. Good behavior, I guess.”

Somehow, I doubted that.

Michael seemed to sense that I wasn’t buying it. “And also possibly because Briggs needed someone to read your emotions and figure out whether or not you’re a secret bottle of rage who shouldn’t be granted access to confidential files.”

“Did I pass?” I asked, a teasing note making its way into my voice.

“Uh-uh-uh,” Michael replied. “That’s four questions.”

With no warning, he jerked the steering wheel to the left, pulled a U-turn, and then took a fast right. A few seconds later, the two of us slammed into a parking space at what appeared to be some kind of airport hangar.

“What,” I said, my eyes widening as I took in the sleek hunk of metal in front of us, “is that?”

“That?” Michael repeated. “That’s the jet.”

“Let me guess,” I said, only half joking. “You made getting to keep your private jet a condition of your acceptance into the program?”

Michael snorted. “Sadly, it belongs to the FBI. When Briggs isn’t out roping the young and impressionable into doing his dirty work for him, he belongs to a specialized team that works with law enforcement across the country. The jet cuts down on travel time. For us, it’s just a perk.”

“Cassie,” Agent Briggs greeted me the second I stepped out of the car. Just my name, nothing else.

Michael hit a button, and the trunk popped open. I went to retrieve my bag, and Michael shot Briggs a very good imitation of Nonna’s scowl. “You just going to stand there?” he asked the FBI agent.

Briggs helped me with my bag, and Michael caught my eye. “Amused,” he whispered. “And also some residual embarrassment.”

It took me a second to realize that Michael wasn’t interpreting Briggs’s facial expression. He was interpreting mine.

I’ll stop trying to read your emotions if you stop trying to profile me.

Liar.

Without another word, Michael turned and sauntered to the jet. By the time I climbed aboard, he was already lounging in the back row of seats. He looked up, his posture inviting, his eyes telling me to stay away.

Tearing my gaze from his, I took a seat in the row in front of him, facing the cockpit. We’d see how good he was at reading my emotions based on nothing more than the back of my head.

“Tell you what,” Michael whispered, his voice loud enough to reach my ears, but not Briggs’s. “If you promise not to give me the silent treatment, I’ll give you a fourth question, free of charge.”

As the plane took off and the city grew small behind us, I turned around in my chair.

“You’re leaving the Porsche in Denver?” I asked.

He leaned forward, close enough that his forehead was almost touching mine.

“The devil’s in the details, Cassie. I never said that Porsche was my only car.”

YOU

It’s been days since the last time, days of reliving your failure, over and over again. Each minute has been torture, and now you’re on a schedule. You don’t have the luxury of hunting for the perfect girl. The right girl. There’s nothing special about the one you’ve chosen, except for the color of her hair.

It reminds you of someone else’s hair, and that’s enough. For now.

You kill her in a motel room. No one sees you enter. No one will see you leave. You put duct tape over her mouth. You have to imagine the sound of her screams, but the look in her eyes is worth it.

It’s fast, but not too fast.

It’s yours.

You’re in charge. You decide. You slide the knife into the flesh under her cheekbone. You carve the heavy makeup—and the skin—off of her face.

There. That’s better.

You feel better. More in control. And you know that even though you don’t have time for pictures, you’ll never forget the way the blood looks as it stains her hair.

Some days, you think, it feels like you have been doing this forever. But no matter how many there are, no matter how proficient you’ve become at showing them what you are, what they are, there is a part of you that knows.

It will never be quite right.

It will never be perfect.

There will never be another one like the first.