There was a difference between presumed dead and dead, a difference between coming back to a dressing room that was drenched in my mother’s blood and being told that after five long years, there was a body.
When I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, I had prayed every night that someone would find my mother, that the police would be proven wrong, that somehow, despite the evidence, despite the amount of blood she’d lost, she’d turn up. Alive.
Eventually, I had stopped hoping and started praying that the authorities would find my mother’s body. I had imagined being called in to identify the remains. I’d imagined saying good-bye. I had imagined burying her.
I hadn’t imagined this.
“They’re sure it’s her?” I asked, my voice small, but steady.
My father and I were sitting on opposite sides of a porch swing, just the two of us, the closest thing to privacy Nonna’s house could afford.
“The location’s right.” He didn’t look at me as he replied, staring out into the night. “So is the timing. They’re trying to match dental records, but you two moved around so much….” He seemed to realize, then, that he was telling me something I already knew.
My mother’s dental records would be hard to come by.
“They found this.” My father held out a thin silver chain. A small red stone hung on the end.
My throat closed up.
Hers.
I swallowed, pushing the thought down, like I could unthink it by sheer force of will. My father tried to hand me the necklace. I shook my head.
Hers.
I’d known my mother was almost certainly dead. I’d known that. I’d believed it. But now, looking at the necklace she’d worn that night, I couldn’t breathe.
“That’s evidence.” I forced the words out. “The police shouldn’t have given it to you. It’s evidence.”
What were they thinking? I’d only been working with the FBI for six months. Almost all of that time had been spent behind the scenes, and even I knew you didn’t break chain of evidence just so a halfway-orphaned girl could have something that had belonged to her mother.
“There weren’t any prints on it,” my father assured me. “Or trace evidence.”
“Tell them to keep it,” I ground out, standing up and walking to the edge of the porch. “They may need it. For identification.”
It had been five years. If they were looking for dental records, there probably wasn’t anything left for me to identify. Nothing but bones.
“Cassie—”
I tuned out. I didn’t want to listen to a man who’d barely known my mother telling me that the police had no leads, that they thought it was all right to compromise evidence, because none of them expected this case to be solved.
After five years, we had a body. That was a lead. Notches in the bones. The way she was buried. The place her killer had laid her to rest. There had to be something. Some hint of what had happened.
He came after you with a knife. I slipped into my mother’s perspective, trying to work out what had happened that day, as I had so many times before. He surprised you. You fought.
“I want to see the scene.” I turned back to my father. “The place where they found the body, I want to see it.”
My father was the one who’d signed off on my enrolling in Agent Briggs’s gifted program, but he had no idea what kind of “education” I was receiving. He didn’t know what the program really was. He didn’t know
what I could do. Killers and victims, UNSUBs and bodies—this was my language. Mine. And what had happened to my mother?
That was mine, too.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Cassie.”
It’s not your decision. I thought the words, but didn’t say them out loud. There was no point in arguing with him. If I wanted access—to the site, to pictures, to whatever scraps of evidence there might be—Vincent Battaglia wasn’t the person to ask.
“Cassie?” My father stood and took a hesitant step toward me. “If you want to talk about this—”
I turned around and shook my head. “I’m fine,” I said, cutting off his offer. I pushed down the lump rising in my throat. “I just want to go back to school.”
“School” was overstating things. The Naturals program consisted of a grand total of five students, and our lessons had what you would call practical applications. We weren’t just pupils. We were resources to be used.
An elite team.
Each of the five of us had a skill, an aptitude honed to perfection by the lives we’d lived growing up.
None of us had normal childhoods. Those were the words I kept thinking, over and over again, four days later as I stood at the end of my grandmother’s drive, waiting for my ride to arrive. If we had, we wouldn’t be Naturals.
Instead of thinking of the way I’d grown up, going from town to town with a mother who conned people into thinking she was psychic, I thought about the others—about Dean’s psychopath of a father and the way Michael had learned to read emotions as a means of survival. About Sloane and Lia and the things I suspected about their childhoods.
Thinking about my fellow Naturals came with a particular brand of homesickness. I wanted them here—all of them, any of them—so badly that I almost couldn’t breathe.
“Dance it off.” I could hear my mother’s voice in my memory. I could see her, wrapped in a royal blue scarf, her red hair damp from cold and snow as she flipped the car radio on and turned it up.
That had been our ritual. Every time we moved—from one town to the next, from one mark to the next, from one show to the next—she turned on the music, and we danced in our seats until we forgot about everything and everyone we’d left behind.
My mother wasn’t a person who’d believed in missing anything for long.
“You’re looking deep in thought.” A low, no-nonsense voice brought me back to the present.
I pushed back against the memories—and the deluge of emotions that wanted to come with them. “Hey, Judd.”
The man the FBI had hired to look after us studied me for a moment, then picked up my bag and swung it into the trunk. “You going to say good- bye?” he asked, nodding toward the porch.
I turned back to see Nonna standing there. She loved me. Fiercely.
Determinedly. From the moment you met me. The least I owed her was a good-bye.
“Cassandra?” Nonna’s tone was brisk as I approached. “You forget something?”
For years, I’d believed that I was broken, that my ability to love— fiercely, determinedly, freely—had died with my mother.
The past few months had taught me I was wrong.
I wrapped my arms around my grandmother, and she latched hers around me and held on for dear life.
“I should go,” I said after a moment.
She tapped my cheek with a little more oomph than necessary. “You call if you need anything,” she ordered. “Anything.”
I nodded.
She paused. “I am sorry,” she said carefully. “About your mother.”
Nonna had never met my mother. She didn’t know the first thing about her. I’d never told my father’s family about my mom’s laugh, or the games she’d used to teach me to read people, or the way we’d said no matter what instead of I love you, because she didn’t just love me—she loved me forever and ever, no matter what.
“Thanks,” I told my grandmother. My voice came out slightly hoarse. I tamped down on the grief rising up inside me. Sooner or later, it would catch up to me.
I had always been better at compartmentalizing than ridding myself of unwanted emotions altogether.
As I turned away from Nonna’s prying eyes and walked back to Judd and the car, I couldn’t banish the memory of my mom’s voice.
Dance it off.
