The FBI agent at the door drew his sidearm the moment Redding lunged toward me. I stared at the killer’s face, inches from mine.
You want me to flinch. Violence was about power, about control—who had it and who didn’t.
“I’m fine,” I told my FBI escort. Agent Vance had worked with Agent Briggs off and on since I’d joined the Naturals program. He’d been tapped to stand guard because both Briggs and his partner, Agent Sterling, had decided to stay on the other side of the two-way mirror. They had a history with Daniel Redding, and right now, we wanted all of the psychopath’s attention focused on me.
“He can’t hurt me,” I told Agent Vance, saying those words as much for my target’s benefit as the agent’s. “He’s just being melodramatic.”
Minimizing language, designed to keep Redding engaged in this game of verbal chess. I’d gotten him to admit that, at the very least, he knew of this group’s existence. Now I needed to find out what he’d heard and who he’d heard it from.
I needed to stay focused.
“No reason to get testy.” Redding settled back in his seat and made a show of holding his cuffed hands up in a mea culpa for Vance, who holstered his sidearm. “I am simply being candid.” The edges of Redding’s lips twisted as his attention returned to me. “There are things that can break a person. And once broken, a person—such as your mother—can be formed into something new.” Redding tilted his head to the side, his eyes heavy lidded, as if he were caught in the midst of a particularly vivid daydream. “Something magnificent.”
“Who are they?” I asked, refusing to take the bait. “Where did you hear about them?”
There was a long pause.
“Say that I did know something.” Redding’s face stilled. His voice was neither soft nor loud as he continued. “What would you give me in return?”
Redding was highly intelligent, calculating, sadistic. And he had only two obsessions. What you did to your victims. And Dean.
My fingers curved into fists on the table. I knew what I had to do, and I knew, without question, that I was going to do it. No matter how sick it made me. No matter how much I didn’t want to say the words.
“Dean reaches for me more now than he used to.” I looked down at my hands. They were shaking. I forced myself to turn my left hand over and brought the fingers on my right hand to meet it. “His fingers entwine with mine, and his thumb…” I swallowed hard, my thumb making its way to my palm. “His thumb draws tiny circles on the palm of my hand. Sometimes he traces his fingers along the outside of mine. Sometimes…” My voice caught in my throat. “Sometimes I run my fingers along his scars.”
“I gave him those scars.” The look on Redding’s face told me that he was savoring my words, would savor them for a very long time.
A ball of nausea rose in my throat. Keep going, Cassie. You have to. “Dean dreams about you.” The words felt like razor-edged sandpaper in
my mouth, but I forced myself to continue. “There are times when he wakes up from a nightmare and can’t see what’s right there in front of him because the only thing that he can see is you.”
Telling Dean’s father these things wasn’t just making a deal with the devil. This was selling my soul. It was dangerously close to selling Dean’s.
“You won’t tell my son what you had to do to get me to talk.” Redding drummed his fingers along the tabletop, one after another. “But every time he reaches for your hand, every time you touch his scars, you’ll remember this conversation. I’ll be there. Even if the boy doesn’t know it, you will.”
“Tell me what you know,” I said, the words ripping their way out of my throat.
“Very well.” Satisfaction played along the edges of Redding’s lips. “The group you’re hunting looks for a specific type of killer. Someone who longs to be a part of something. A joiner.”
This was the monster, giving me my due.
“I’m not much of a joiner myself,” Redding continued. “But I am a listener. Over the years, I’ve heard rumors. Whispers. Urban legends. Masters and apprentices, ritual and rules.” He tilted his head slightly to one side, watching my reaction, as if he could see the workings of my brain and found them enticing. “I know that each Master chooses his own replacement. I don’t know how many of them there are. I don’t know who they are or where they’re located.”
I leaned forward. “But you did know that they took my mother. You knew she wasn’t dead.”
“I’m a man who sees patterns.” Redding enjoyed talking about what kind of man he was, demonstrating his superiority to me, to the FBI, to Briggs and Sterling, whom he must have suspected were hiding behind the glass. “Shortly after I was incarcerated, I became aware of another inmate. He’d
been convicted of murdering his ex, but insisted she was still alive. There was never a body, you see. Just a copious amount of blood—too much, the prosecutors argued, for the victim to have lived.”
Those words were familiar enough to send a chill down my spine. My mother’s dressing room. My hand fumbling for the light switch. My fingertips touching something sticky, something wet and warm and—
“You suspected this group was involved?” I could barely hear myself ask the question over the deafening beating of my own heart.
One edge of Redding’s mouth quirked upward. “Every empire needs its queen.”
There was more to it than that. There had to be.
“Years later,” Dean’s father added, “I was moved to take on an apprentice of my own.”
He’d taken on three, but I knew which one he was referencing. “Webber.” The man had kidnapped me, loosed me in a forest, and hunted me. Like I was an animal. Like I was prey.
“Webber brought me information. About Dean. About Briggs. About you
—and about Special Agent Lacey Locke.”
Locke, my original FBI mentor, had started life as Lacey Hobbes, my mother’s younger sister. She’d ended life a serial killer, re-creating my mother’s murder over and over again.
Not a murder, I reminded myself. The whole time Locke had been killing women in my mom’s image, my mother had been alive.
“You found out the details of my mother’s case.” I focused, as much as I could, on the here and now, on Redding. “You saw a connection.”
“Whispers. Rumors. Urban legends.” Redding fell back on what he’d said before. “Masters and apprentices, rituals and rules, and at the center of it all, a woman.” His eyes gleamed. “A very specific kind of woman.”
My lips and tongue and throat were dry—so dry, I almost couldn’t force out the words. “What kind?”
“The kind of woman who could be formed into something magnificent.” Redding closed his eyes, his voice humming with pleasure. “Something new.”
YOU
You take the knife. Step by step, you make your way to the stone table, testing the balance of the blade in your hand.
The wheel is turning. The offering turns with it, chained to the stone, body and soul.
“All must be tested.” You say the words as you drag the flat of the knife across the offering’s neck. “All must be found worthy.”
Power thrums through your veins. This is your decision. Your choice. One twist of your wrist and blood will flow. The wheel will stop.
But without order, there is chaos. Without order, there is pain.
“What do you need?” You lean down as you whisper the ancient words. The knife in your hand angles into the base of the offering’s neck. You could kill him, but it would cost you. Seven days and seven pains. The wheel never stops turning for long.
“What do I need?” The offering repeats the question, smiling as blood streams down his naked chest. “I need nine.”
