The man Michael attacked punched back. Michael went down. He didn’t stay down.
I leapt forward, but Lia was in front of me in a heartbeat. “Dean’s got this.”
I tried to step around her.
“Back off, Cassie,” Lia told me, her voice low, her face less than an inch from mine. “The last thing either of them needs is you caught in the middle of a brawl.” She wove an arm through mine. To outward appearances, we looked like the best of friends, but her grip was iron-tight. “Besides,” she added grimly, “someone has to do damage control.”
That was when I realized that the audio feed had cut away again. The balcony where Sterling, Briggs, and Thomas Wesley had been standing moments before was empty.
Dean had to physically restrain Michael, pulling our fellow Natural back roughly against his own body. Security was called. Michael barely managed to avoid an arrest.
To say that our supervisors weren’t pleased that we’d taken an unauthorized field trip would have been an understatement. To say that they
were even less pleased with Michael’s brush with the law would have been the understatement of the century.
Judd met us in the lobby of the Majesty. I could tell from the way he was standing, his feet spread slightly wider than usual, his arms crossed over his chest, that he’d gotten a call from Sterling and Briggs.
Beside me, Michael winced. Not because of his swollen lip or the cut over his quickly blackening eye, but because he could tell, from the slight hints of strain in Judd’s face, exactly how much trouble we were in.
When we reached him, Judd turned without a word and started stalking toward the elevator. We followed on his heels. He didn’t say a word until the elevator doors had closed.
“You’re lucky that doesn’t need stitches,” Judd told Michael. I gathered from his tone that we were all somewhat less than lucky to be stuck on an elevator with a marine sniper who knew how to kill a grown man using nothing but his little finger.
“The audio feeds went out while Briggs and Sterling were questioning Thomas Wesley,” Lia said. “We were just trying to stay in range.”
I opened my mouth to confirm what Lia had said, but Judd stopped me. “Don’t,” he told me. “We’re in Vegas. You’re teenagers stuck in a hotel suite. If I were a betting man, I’d give myself excellent odds on guessing how this went down.”
“If you were a betting man,” Michael said lazily, “you’d be downstairs at the casino.”
Judd reached out and pulled the emergency stop button. The elevator jerked to a halt. He turned and leveled a very calm stare at Michael, never saying a word.
Seconds ticked by, verging on a minute.
“Sorry.” Michael addressed the apology more to the ceiling tiles than to Judd. “Sometimes, I just can’t help myself.”
I wondered if Michael was apologizing for the disrespect or for what he’d done at the pool.
“What do you think is going to happen,” Judd said softly, “when the man you hit and his family go home tonight?”
The question sucked all of the oxygen out of the air. Judd pushed the stop button back in and the elevator jolted back into motion. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Michael, because there was nothing—nothing— Judd could have said to devastate him more.
Eventually, the elevator doors opened. Judd and I were the last ones off.
I couldn’t help giving him a look as I stepped into the hall.
“May eighth,” Judd said quietly. “Six years, this May.” He gave me just enough time to process that date—process what it had to refer to—before he continued. “If I have to be a real bastard to keep from burying another kid, well then, Cassie, I can be a real bastard.”
The muscles in my throat tightened. Judd walked past me, past the others, and got to the door to our suite first. He opened it, then froze.
My heart pounding in my ears, I hurried to catch up. What would it take to catch a battle-hardened marine completely off guard? In the second or two before I saw for myself, my mind put forth the worst possible answer.
Sloane.
I made it to the entryway. Lia, Michael, and Dean were standing there, just as frozen in place as Judd. The first thing I saw was red.
Red dots. Red streaks. Red on the windows.
Sloane turned to beam at us. “Hi, guys!”
It took me a moment to process the fact that she was there, and she was fine. It was several seconds more before I realized that the red on the windows was a drawing.
“What the hell, Sloane?” Lia recovered her voice first.
“I needed a bigger surface to write on.” Sloane popped the cap on and off the marker in her hand. “It’ll come off,” she told us. “Assuming I grabbed the dry-erase marker and not a permanent Sharpie.”
Still processing what I was seeing, I walked toward the diagram Sloane had sketched onto the panoramic window’s surface.
“There’s a seventy-four percent chance it will come off,” Sloane said, amending her prior statement. “On the bright side,” she said, turning to survey her work, “I know where the killer is going to strike next.”
