“How long?” I asked Michael, my eyes locked on his wrist.
He knew exactly what I was asking. “It showed up this morning, itching
like hell.”
More than thirty-six hours after we’d left Vegas.
“Toxicodendrons.” Sloane pulled her legs back to her chest, her hands worrying at the knees of her jeans. “Plants in the toxicodendron genus produce urushiol. It’s a sticky oil, a powerful allergen. If Michael’s been exposed before, the delay of onset for the rash the second time would be between twenty-four and forty-eight hours.”
“Pretty sure I’d know if I’d been exposed before,” Michael pointed out. “Poison ivy and poison oak are toxicodendrons.”
Michael did a one-eighty and nodded sagely. “I have been exposed before.”
Lia’s grip on his arm tightened painfully. “You think this is funny?” She loosened her hold and pushed away from him. “You’re scheduled to die tomorrow. Hilarious.”
“Lia—” Michael started to say.
“I don’t care,” Lia told him. “I don’t care that you probably got that coming after me. I don’t care that you wore long sleeves to hide it from the rest of us. I don’t care if you have some sick death wish—”
“I didn’t ask for this,” Michael cut in.
“So you’re not planning to sneak off to Vegas tomorrow by yourself to try to lure this UNSUB out?” Lia folded her arms and tilted her head to one side, waiting.
Michael didn’t respond.
Tomorrow. January twelfth. The Grand Ballroom. The knife.
“That’s what I thought,” Lia said. Without another word, she turned and walked out of the room.
“So,” Michael commented, “that went over well.”
“You aren’t going back there to play bait.” Dean got up and went to stand toe to toe with Michael. “You aren’t leaving this house.”
“I’m touched, Redding,” Michael said, bringing a hand to his heart. “You care.”
“You aren’t leaving this house,” Dean repeated. There was a quiet intensity in his voice.
Michael leaned forward, his face in Dean’s. “I don’t take orders from you.”
There was a beat, during which neither one of them backed down.
“I get it. You don’t like running away.” Dean’s voice was quiet, his eyes never leaving Michael’s. “You don’t run. You don’t hide. You don’t cower. You don’t beg.”
Because none of those things ever work. Dean didn’t say that. He didn’t have to.
“Get out of my head.” Michael’s expression matched the one he’d worn before he’d plowed his fist into that father’s face at the pool.
“Dean,” I said. “Give us a minute.”
With one last hard look at Michael, Dean did as I asked, leaving in the direction Lia had gone minutes before and taking Sloane with him.
Silence sat heavily between Michael and me. “You should have told us,” I said quietly.
Michael studied my expression, and I didn’t even try to keep him from seeing what I felt. I’m angry, and I’m terrified. I can’t do this. I can’t sit around and wait for them to identify your body, too.
“You know me, Colorado,” he said, his voice soft. “I’ve never been very good at should.”
“Try harder,” I told him fiercely.
“Look what trying gets you.” Michael might not have meant to say those words, but he meant them. He was talking about me. And Dean. He’d spent the past few months pretending he’d never been interested in me.
He’d flipped his emotions off, like I’d never mattered to him at all.
Look what trying gets you.
“You don’t get to do that,” I said, feeling like he’d kicked me in the teeth. “You don’t get to make me the reason you do or don’t do anything. I’m not a reason, Michael. I’m not something you try for.” I took a step forward. “I’m your friend.”
“You used to look at me and feel something,” Michael said. “I know you did.”
Michael was marked for death. A serial killer from Judd’s past was stalking us all. But we were doing this—right here, right now.
“I never had friends,” I said. “Growing up, it was just me and my mom.
There was never anyone else. She never let there be anyone else.”
For the first time since I’d gotten the call from my father, I felt something about my mother’s death. Anger—and not just at the person who killed her. She’d gone away, and even if that hadn’t been her choice, she was the reason there was no one else—no friends, no family, nothing until social services tracked down my dad.
“When I joined the program,” I told Michael, “I didn’t know how to really be with people. I couldn’t…” The words wouldn’t come. “I kept everyone at a distance, and there you were, smashing through every wall. I felt something,” I told Michael. “You made me feel something, and I am grateful for that. Because you were the first, Michael.”
There was a long silence.
“The first friend,” Michael said finally, “that you ever had.”
“That may not mean much to you.” It hurt me to admit that. “To you, I might not be worth anything, if I’m with Dean. But it means something to me.”
The silence that followed was twice as long as the first.
“I don’t like running away.” Michael brought his eyes from the floor to mine. “I don’t run, I don’t hide, I don’t cower, I don’t beg, Cassie, because running and hiding and begging—it doesn’t work. It never works.”
Michael was repeating the words Dean had said to him. He was admitting it out loud. To me.
I looked down at the angry red numbers on his arm. 7761.
January twelfth. The Grand Ballroom. The knife.
“It’s not running,” I told Michael, “if we catch him first.”
