“Well, that was cheerful.” Lia jumped off the table she’d been sitting on. Agent Vance had just delivered me to the observation area. Sterling and
Briggs still had their twin gazes fixed on the room I’d vacated a few moments earlier. On the other side of the two-way mirror, guards pulled Daniel Redding to his feet. Briggs—competitive and ambitious and, in his own way, idealistic—would never view Redding as anything other than a monster, a threat. Sterling was more restrained, the type who kept her emotions on lockdown by following preset rules, including one that said that men like Daniel Redding didn’t get to chip away at her control.
“I swear,” Lia continued with a wave of her hand, “serial killers are so predictable. It’s always all ‘I want to watch you suffer’ and ‘let me quote Shakespeare while I imagine dancing on your corpse.’”
The fact that Lia was being so dismissive told me that the conversation she’d just witnessed had gotten to her almost as much as it had gotten to me.
“Was he lying?” I asked. No matter how hard I’d pressed, Redding had insisted he didn’t know the name of the inmate whose ex’s “death” had resembled my mother’s, but I knew better than to take a master of manipulation at his word.
“Redding might know more than he’s saying,” Lia told me, “but he’s not lying—or at least he’s not lying about Ye Olde Consortium of Serial-Killing Psychopaths. He did stretch the truth a little about wanting to watch said psychopaths have their way with you.”
“Of course Redding doesn’t want to watch.” I tried to match Lia’s flippant tone in an attempt to make this—any of it—matter less. “He’s Daniel Redding. He wants to kill me himself.”
Lia arched one eyebrow. “You do seem to have that effect on people.”
I snorted. Considering not one but two different serial killers had targeted me since I’d joined the Naturals program, I couldn’t exactly argue the point.
“We’ll track down the case Redding was talking about.” Briggs finally turned to face Lia and me. “It might take some time, but if there’s an inmate who matches Redding’s description, we’ll find him.”
Agent Sterling laid a hand on my shoulder. “You did what you needed to
do in there, Cassie. Dean would understand that.”
Of course he would. That didn’t make it better. It made it worse. “As for what Redding said about your mother—”
“Are we done here?” Lia asked abruptly, cutting off Agent Sterling.
I knew better than to aim a grateful look in Lia’s direction, but I appreciated the interference all the same. I didn’t want to discuss the insinuations Redding had made about my mother. I didn’t want to wonder if there was even a grain of truth to them, no matter how small.
My mentor got the message. As she led the way out, Agent Sterling didn’t try to broach the subject again.
Lia wove one arm casually through mine. “For the record,” she said, her voice uncharacteristically gentle, “if you ever”—want to talk, my brain filled in, need to vent—“ever,” she repeated softly, her voice ringing with sincerity, “make me listen to you recount The Erotic Hand-Holding Adventures of Cassie and Dean again, I will exact vengeance, and that vengeance will be epic.”
Next to deception detection, Lia’s biggest specialty was providing distractions—some of which came with collateral damage.
“What kind of vengeance?” I asked, halfway grateful for the diversion, but also fairly certain that this was one time that she wasn’t bluffing.
Lia smirked and let go of my arm. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
