I lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, unable to shake the fear that if I closed my eyes, there would be nothing to keep the ghosts at bay. When
I slept, it all ran together: what had happened to my mother when I was twelve; the women Agent Locke had killed last summer; the gleam in Locke’s eyes as she’d held the knife out to me. The blood.
Turning over onto my side, I reached toward my nightstand. “Cassie?” Sloane said from her bed.
“I’m fine,” I told her. “Go back to sleep.”
My fingers closed around the object I’d been looking for: a tube of Rose Red lipstick, my mother’s favorite shade. It had been a gift from Locke to me, part of the sick game she’d played, doling out clues, grooming me in her own image. You wanted me to know how close you were. I slipped into Locke’s head, profiling her, the way I had on so many other nights just like this one. You wanted me to find you. The next part was always the hardest.
You wanted me to be like you.
She’d offered me the knife. She’d told me to kill the girl. And on some level, she’d believed that I would say yes.
Locke’s real name had been Lacey Hobbes. She was the younger sister of Lorelai Hobbes—fake psychic, presumed murder victim. My mother. I turned the lipstick over in my hand, staring at it in the dark. No matter how
many times I tried to throw it away, I couldn’t. It was a masochistic reminder: of the people I’d trusted, the people I’d lost.
Eventually, I forced my fingers to set it back down. I couldn’t keep doing this to myself.
I couldn’t stop.
Think about something else. Anything else. I thought about Agent Sterling. Locke’s replacement. She wore her clothes like armor. They were expensive, freshly pressed. She’d had a coat of clear polish on her nails. Not a French manicure, not a color—clear. Why wear polish at all if it was transparent? Did she enjoy the ritual of applying it, putting a thin layer between her nails and the rest of the world? There was subtext there: protection, distance, strength.
You don’t allow yourself weaknesses, I thought, addressing her, the way I’d been taught to address anyone I was profiling. Why? I went back over the clues she’d given me about her past. She was the youngest person to graduate from the FBI Academy—and proud of that fact. Once upon a time, she’d probably had a competitive streak. Five years ago, she’d left the FBI. Why?
Instead of an answer, my brain latched on to the fact that sometime before she’d left, she’d met Dean. He couldn’t have been more than twelve when you met him. That set off an alarm in my head. The only way an FBI agent would have interacted with Dean that long ago was if she was part of the team that took down his father.
Agent Briggs had led that team. Shortly thereafter, he’d started using Dean—the son of a notorious serial killer—to get inside the head of other killers. Eventually, the FBI had discovered what Briggs was doing and, instead of firing him, they’d made it official. Dean had been moved into an old house in the town outside of Marine Corps Base Quantico. Briggs had hired a man named Judd to act as Dean’s guardian. Over time, Briggs had
begun recruiting other teenagers with savant-like skills. First Lia, with her uncanny ability to lie and to spot lies when they exited the mouths of others. Then Sloane and Michael, and finally me.
You used to work with Agent Briggs, I thought, picturing Veronica Sterling in my mind. You were on his team. Maybe you were even his partner. When I’d joined the program, Agent Locke had been Briggs’s partner. Maybe she’d been Agent Sterling’s replacement, before the situation was reversed.
You don’t like being replaceable, and you don’t like being replaced.
You’re not just here as a favor to your father, I told Agent Sterling silently. You know Briggs. You didn’t like Locke. And once upon a time, you cared about Dean. This is personal.
“Did you know that the average life span of the hairy-nosed wombat is ten to twelve years?” Apparently, Sloane had decided that when I said I was fine, I was lying. The more coffee my roommate ingested, the lower her threshold for keeping random statistics to herself—especially if she thought someone needed a distraction.
“The longest-living wombat in captivity lived thirty-four years,” Sloane continued, propping herself up on her elbows to look at me. Given that we shared a bedroom, I probably should have objected more strenuously to cup of coffee number two. Tonight, though, I found Sloane’s high-speed statistical babbling to be strangely soothing. Profiling Sterling hadn’t kept me from thinking about Locke.
Maybe this would.
“Tell me more about wombats,” I said.
With the look of a small child awaking to a miracle on Christmas morning, Sloane beamed at me and complied.
YOU
You were nervous the first time you saw her, standing beside the big oak tree, long hair shining to halfway down her back. You asked what her name was. You memorized everything about her.
But none of that matters now. Not her name. Not the tree. Not your nerves.
You’ve come too far. You’ve waited too long.
“She’ll fight you if you let her,” a voice whispers from somewhere in your mind.
“I won’t let her,” you whisper back. Your throat is dry. You’re ready.
You’ve been ready. “I’ll tie her up.” “Bind her,” the voice whispers.
Bind her. Brand her. Cut her. Hang her.
That’s the way this has to be done. That’s what awaits this girl. She shouldn’t have parked so far away from the man’s building. She shouldn’t have slept with him in the first place.
Shouldn’t. Shouldn’t. Shouldn’t.
You’re waiting for her in the car when she climbs in. You’re prepared.
She has a test today, but so do you.
She shuts the car door. Her eyes flit toward the rearview mirror, and for a split second, they meet yours.
She sees you.
You lunge forward. Her mouth opens to scream, but you slam the damp cloth over her mouth, her nose. “She’ll fight you if you let her,” you say, whispering the words like sweet nothings in her ear.
Her body goes slack. You pull her into the backseat and reach for the ties.
Bind them. Brand them. Cut them. Hang them.
It has begun.
