The Naturals

YOU

You weren’t supposed to make mistakes. The plan was supposed to be perfect. And for a few hours, it was.

But you messed it up. You always mess everything up—and there His voice is again in your head, and you’re thirteen years old and cowering in the corner, wondering if it will be fists or his belt or a poker from the fire.

And the worst thing is, you’re alone. Surrounded by people or throwing your hands up to protect your face, it doesn’t matter. You’re always alone.

That’s why you can’t mess this up. That’s why it has to be perfect from here on out. That’s why you have to be perfect.

You can’t lose Cassie. You won’t.

You’ll love her, or you’ll kill her, but either way, she’s going to be yours.

The safe house looked like any other house. Dean went in first. He pulled his gun and held it expertly in front of his body as he cleared the foyer, the living room, the kitchen. I stayed close behind him. We’d made our way back to the foyer when the knob on the front door began to turn.

Dean stepped forward, pushing me further back. He held the gun out steadily. I waited, praying that it was Briggs and Locke on the other side of the door. The hinges creaked. The door slowly opened.

“Michael?”

Dean lowered his weapon. For a split second, I felt a burst of relief, warm and sure, radiating out from the center of my body. I expelled the breath caught in my throat. My heart started to beat again.

And then I saw the gun in Michael’s hand.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. Looking at him, at the gun, I felt like the stupid girl in the horror movie, the one who couldn’t see what was right in front of her face. The one who went to check on the radiator in the basement when there was a masked murderer on the loose.

Michael was here.

Michael had a gun.

The UNSUB had a source on the inside.

No.

“Why do you have a gun?” I asked dumbly. I couldn’t keep from taking a step toward Michael, even though I couldn’t quite read the look on his face.

In front of me, Dean raised his right arm, gun in hand. “Put it down, Townsend.”

Michael was going to put down the gun. That was what I told myself. He was going to put down the gun, and this was all going to be some kind of mistake. I’d seen Michael on the verge of violence. He’d told me himself that the potential for losing it was in him, but I knew Michael. He wasn’t dangerous. He wasn’t a killer. The boy I knew wasn’t just a mask worn by someone who knew how to manipulate emotions as well as he could read them.

This was Michael. He called me Colorado, and he read Jane Austen, and I could still feel his lips on mine. He was going to put down the gun.

But he didn’t. Instead, he lifted it up, training the weapon on Dean.

The two of them stared at each other. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck. I took a step forward, then another one. I couldn’t stay in the background.

Michael had a gun trained on Dean.

Dean had a gun trained on Michael.

“I’m warning you, Michael. Put it down.” Dean sounded calm. Absolutely, utterly calm in a way that made my stomach churn, because I knew suddenly that he could pull the trigger. He wouldn’t second-guess himself. He wouldn’t hesitate.

If he thought I was in danger, he would put a bullet in Michael’s head.

“You put it down,” Michael replied. “Cassie—”

I cut Michael off. I couldn’t listen to a word either of them had to say, not when we were a hair’s breadth away from disaster. “Put it down, Michael,” I said. “Please.”

Michael’s gaze wavered. For the first time, he looked from Dean to me, and I saw it the moment he realized that I wasn’t afraid of Dean. That I was afraid of him.

“You were gone. Dean was gone. One of Briggs’s guns was gone.” Michael took a ragged breath. The guarded expression fell from his face, bit by bit, until I was looking at the boy I’d kissed: confused and hurting, longing for me, terrified for me, breakable. “I would never hurt you, Cassie.”

Something came undone inside of me. This was Michael—the same Michael he’d always been.

Beside me, Dean repeated his command for Michael to lower the gun. Michael closed his eyes. He lowered his weapon, and the second he did, the sound of gunfire tore through the air.

One shot. Two shots.

My ears ringing, my gut twisting, bile rising in my throat, I tried to figure out which gun had gone off. Michael’s hand was by his side. His mouth opened in a tiny O, and I watched with horror as red blossomed across his pale blue shirt. He’d been hit. Twice. Once in the shoulder. Once in the leg. His eyes rolled back in his head. The gun dropped from his fingertips.

He fell.

I turned to see Dean with the gun still in his hand. He was aiming at me.

No. No no no no no no no.

And that was when I heard a voice behind me and realized that Dean wasn’t the one holding the gun that had gone off. He wasn’t aiming at me. He was aiming at the person standing behind me. The one who’d shot Michael.

He was aiming at Special Agent Lacey Locke.