The Naturals
Page 38

YOU
You weren’t supposed to make mistakes. The plan was supposed to be perfect. And for a few hours, it was.
But you messed it up. You always mess everything up—and there His voice is again in your head, and you’re thirteen years old and cowering in the corner, wondering if it will be fists or his belt or a poker from the fire.
And the worst thing is, you’re alone. Surrounded by people or throwing your hands up to protect your face, it doesn’t matter. You’re always alone.
That’s why you can’t mess this up. That’s why it has to be perfect from here on out. That’s why you have to be perfect.
You can’t lose Cassie. You won’t.
You’ll love her, or you’ll kill her, but either way, she’s going to be yours.
CHAPTER 35
The safe house looked like any other house. Dean went in first. He pulled his gun and held it expertly in front of his body as he cleared the foyer, the living room, the kitchen. I stayed close behind him. We’d made our way back to the foyer when the knob on the front door began to turn.
Dean stepped forward, pushing me further back. He held the gun out steadily. I waited, praying that it was Briggs and Locke on the other side of the door. The hinges creaked. The door slowly opened.
“Michael?”
Dean lowered his weapon. For a split second, I felt a burst of relief, warm and sure, radiating out from the center of my body. I expelled the breath caught in my throat. My heart started to beat again.
And then I saw the gun in Michael’s hand.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. Looking at him, at the gun, I felt like the stupid girl in the horror movie, the one who couldn’t see what was right in front of her face. The one who went to check on the radiator in the basement when there was a masked murderer on the loose.
Michael was here.
Michael had a gun.
The UNSUB had a source on the inside.
No.
“Why do you have a gun?” I asked dumbly. I couldn’t keep from taking a step toward Michael, even though I couldn’t quite read the look on his face.
In front of me, Dean raised his right arm, gun in hand. “Put it down, Townsend.”
Michael was going to put down the gun. That was what I told myself. He was going to put down the gun, and this was all going to be some kind of mistake. I’d seen Michael on the verge of violence. He’d told me himself that the potential for losing it was in him, but I knew Michael. He wasn’t dangerous. He wasn’t a killer. The boy I knew wasn’t just a mask worn by someone who knew how to manipulate emotions as well as he could read them.
This was Michael. He called me Colorado, and he read Jane Austen, and I could still feel his lips on mine. He was going to put down the gun.
But he didn’t. Instead, he lifted it up, training the weapon on Dean.
The two of them stared at each other. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck. I took a step forward, then another one. I couldn’t stay in the background.
Michael had a gun trained on Dean.
Dean had a gun trained on Michael.
“I’m warning you, Michael. Put it down.” Dean sounded calm. Absolutely, utterly calm in a way that made my stomach churn, because I knew suddenly that he could pull the trigger. He wouldn’t second-guess himself. He wouldn’t hesitate.
If he thought I was in danger, he would put a bullet in Michael’s head.
“You put it down,” Michael replied. “Cassie—”
I cut Michael off. I couldn’t listen to a word either of them had to say, not when we were a hair’s breadth away from disaster. “Put it down, Michael,” I said. “Please.”
Michael’s gaze wavered. For the first time, he looked from Dean to me, and I saw it the moment he realized that I wasn’t afraid of Dean. That I was afraid of him.
“You were gone. Dean was gone. One of Briggs’s guns was gone.” Michael took a ragged breath. The guarded expression fell from his face, bit by bit, until I was looking at the boy I’d kissed: confused and hurting, longing for me, terrified for me, breakable. “I would never hurt you, Cassie.”
Something came undone inside of me. This was Michael—the same Michael he’d always been.
Beside me, Dean repeated his command for Michael to lower the gun. Michael closed his eyes. He lowered his weapon, and the second he did, the sound of gunfire tore through the air.
One shot. Two shots.
My ears ringing, my gut twisting, bile rising in my throat, I tried to figure out which gun had gone off. Michael’s hand was by his side. His mouth opened in a tiny O, and I watched with horror as red blossomed across his pale blue shirt. He’d been hit. Twice. Once in the shoulder. Once in the leg. His eyes rolled back in his head. The gun dropped from his fingertips.
He fell.
I turned to see Dean with the gun still in his hand. He was aiming at me.
No. No no no no no no no.
And that was when I heard a voice behind me and realized that Dean wasn’t the one holding the gun that had gone off. He wasn’t aiming at me. He was aiming at the person standing behind me. The one who’d shot Michael.
He was aiming at Special Agent Lacey Locke.
PART FOUR: SEEING
YOU
You’ve waited for this moment. Waited for her to look at you and see. Even now, confusion is warring with disbelief on her face. She doesn’t understand why you shot Michael. She doesn’t understand who you are or what she is to you.
But Dean does. You see the exact moment that everything falls into place for the boy you trained. The lessons you taught them, the little hints you dropped along the way. The way you are with Cassie, grooming her in your own image. The resemblance between the two of you.
Your hair is red, too.
Dean aims his gun at you, but you’re not frightened. You’ve seen inside this boy’s head. You know exactly what to say, exactly how to play him. You’re the one who told him to bring the gun. You’re the one who made sure that no one knew that he and Cassie were leaving the house. You’re the one who brought them here.
It’s all part of the plan—and Dean is just one more body, one more thing standing between you and your heart’s desire.
Cassie. Lorelai’s daughter.
You told her not to do anything stupid. She and Dean were supposed to come alone.
You’re going to have to punish her for that.
CHAPTER 36
Agent Locke was holding a gun. She’d shot Michael—she’d shot him—and now he was on the ground, blood pooling around his body, his insides leaking out. This was a mistake—it had to be a mistake. She’d seen that he was holding a weapon and she’d reacted. She was an FBI agent, and she wanted to protect me. That was her job.
“Cassie.” Dean’s voice was low and full of warning. The set of his features made him look like a predator, a soldier, a machine. “Stay back.”
“No,” Agent Locke said, moving forward, smiling as brightly as ever. “Don’t stay back. Don’t listen to him, Cassie.”
Dean tracked her movement with the gun. His finger bore down on the trigger.
“Are you a killer, Dean?” Agent Locke asked, her eyes wide and earnest. “We always wondered. Director Sterling was hesitant to fund the program, because he knows where you came from. What you came from. Is it really fair of us to teach you everything there is to know about killers? To force you to live in a house where their pictures line the walls and everything you see and do is geared toward that one thing? Given your background, how long could it possibly be until you snap?”
Agent Locke was closer to him now. “It’s what you think about. It’s your greatest fear. How long,” Agent Locke drawled, “until you’re just … like … Daddy?”
Arms steady, eyes hard, Dean pulled the trigger, but he was too late. She was on him. She knocked the gun to the side, and when it went off, the bullet flew astray, so close to my face that I could feel the heat of it against my skin. Dean turned his head to look at me, to make sure that I was okay. It cost him a fraction of a second, but even that was too much.
Agent Locke hit him with the butt of her gun, and he went down, his body limp, his crumpled form lying three feet away from Michael’s.