The Naturals

YOU

You’ve waited for this moment. Waited for her to look at you and see. Even now, confusion is warring with disbelief on her face. She doesn’t understand why you shot Michael. She doesn’t understand who you are or what she is to you.

But Dean does. You see the exact moment that everything falls into place for the boy you trained. The lessons you taught them, the little hints you dropped along the way. The way you are with Cassie, grooming her in your own image. The resemblance between the two of you.

Your hair is red, too.

Dean aims his gun at you, but you’re not frightened. You’ve seen inside this boy’s head. You know exactly what to say, exactly how to play him. You’re the one who told him to bring the gun. You’re the one who made sure that no one knew that he and Cassie were leaving the house. You’re the one who brought them here.

It’s all part of the plan—and Dean is just one more body, one more thing standing between you and your heart’s desire.

Cassie. Lorelai’s daughter.

You told her not to do anything stupid. She and Dean were supposed to come alone.

You’re going to have to punish her for that.

Agent Locke was holding a gun. She’d shot Michael—she’d shot him—and now he was on the ground, blood pooling around his body, his insides leaking out. This was a mistake—it had to be a mistake. She’d seen that he was holding a weapon and she’d reacted. She was an FBI agent, and she wanted to protect me. That was her job.

“Cassie.” Dean’s voice was low and full of warning. The set of his features made him look like a predator, a soldier, a machine. “Stay back.”

“No,” Agent Locke said, moving forward, smiling as brightly as ever. “Don’t stay back. Don’t listen to him, Cassie.”

Dean tracked her movement with the gun. His finger bore down on the trigger.

“Are you a killer, Dean?” Agent Locke asked, her eyes wide and earnest. “We always wondered. Director Sterling was hesitant to fund the program, because he knows where you came from. What you came from. Is it really fair of us to teach you everything there is to know about killers? To force you to live in a house where their pictures line the walls and everything you see and do is geared toward that one thing? Given your background, how long could it possibly be until you snap?”

Agent Locke was closer to him now. “It’s what you think about. It’s your greatest fear. How long,” Agent Locke drawled, “until you’re just … like … Daddy?”

Arms steady, eyes hard, Dean pulled the trigger, but he was too late. She was on him. She knocked the gun to the side, and when it went off, the bullet flew astray, so close to my face that I could feel the heat of it against my skin. Dean turned his head to look at me, to make sure that I was okay. It cost him a fraction of a second, but even that was too much.

Agent Locke hit him with the butt of her gun, and he went down, his body limp, his crumpled form lying three feet away from Michael’s.

“Finally,” Agent Locke said, turning around to face me, “it’s just us girls.”

I took a step forward, toward Michael, toward Dean, but Agent Locke waved her gun at me. “Nuh-uh-uh,” she said, making a tsking sound under her breath. “You stay right there. We’re going to have to have a little talk about following orders. I told you not to do anything stupid. Letting Michael trail you here was stupid. It was sloppy.”

One second she was standing there, looking exactly like the woman I knew, full of life, a force of nature who was very good at getting her own way, and the next she was on top of me. I saw a blur of silver and heard the impact of her gun with my cheekbone.

Pain exploded in my face a second later. I was on the floor. I could taste blood in my mouth.

“Stand up.” Her voice was brisk, but there was an edge to it I’d never heard before. “Stand up.”

I clambered to my feet. She took her left hand and placed her fingers under my chin. She angled my face upward. There was blood on my lips. I could feel my eye swelling shut, and even the slight movement of my head sent stars into my eyes.

“I told you not to do anything stupid. I told you I’d make you regret it if you did.” Her fingernails dug into the skin under my chin, and I thought about the victims’ photos, the way she’d peeled the skin from their faces.

The knife.

“Don’t do anything else that I’ll be forced to make you regret,” she said coldly. “You’ll only be hurting yourself.”

I looked into her eyes, and I wondered how I could have missed this, how I could have spent all day, every day with her for weeks without realizing that there was something wrong with her.

“Why?” I should have kept my mouth shut. I should have been looking for a way out, but there wasn’t one, and I needed to know.

Locke ignored my question and glanced at Michael. “It’s a pity,” she said. “I’d hoped to spare him. He has a very valuable gift, and he certainly took a shine to you. They all did.”

With no warning whatsoever, she hit me again. This time, she caught me before I fell.

“You’re just like your mother,” she said. And then she tightened her grip on my arm, forcing me to stand straight. “Don’t be weak. You’re better than that. We’re better than that, and I won’t have you sniveling on the floor like some common whore. Do you understand me?”

I understood that the words she was saying were things that someone had probably once said to her. I understood that if I asked her how she knew my mother, she’d hit me again and again.

I understood that I might not get back up.

“I expect an answer when I talk to you, Cassie. You weren’t raised in a barn.”

“I understand,” I said, filing away her choice of words, the almost maternal undertone to her words. I’d assumed that the UNSUB was male. I’d assumed that when the UNSUB killed females, there might be some kind of underlying sexual motivation. But Agent Locke was the one who’d taught me that when you changed one assumption, you changed everything.

You’ll always be wrong about something. You’ll always miss something. What if the UNSUB is older than you thought? What if he is a she?

She’d practically told me that she was the UNSUB, and it had gone right over my head, because I’d trusted her, because if the UNSUB’s motivation wasn’t sexual, if he wasn’t killing his wife or his mother or a girl who turned him down, over and over again, if he was a she …

“Okay, kiddo, let’s get this show on the road.” Locke sounded so much like herself, so normal, that it was hard to remember she was holding a gun. “I’ve got a present for you. I’m going to go get it. If you move while I’m gone, if you so much as blink, I’ll put a bullet in your knee, beat you within an inch of your life, and put a matching bullet in lover boy’s head.”

She gestured toward Dean. He was unconscious, but alive. And Michael …

I couldn’t even look at Michael’s body, lying prone on the floor.

“I won’t move.”

She was only gone for seconds. I took a single step toward Michael’s abandoned gun and froze, because I knew our captor was telling the truth. She’d kill Dean. She’d hurt me.

Even a moment’s hesitation was too long, and an instant later, Locke was back—and she wasn’t alone.

“Please don’t hurt me. Please. My dad has money. He’ll give you whatever you want, just please don’t—”

It took me a moment to recognize Genevieve Ridgerton. There were ugly cuts on her neck and shoulders. Her face was swollen beyond recognition, and there was blood crusted on her scalp. The skin around her mouth was pink, like someone had just ripped off a strip of tape. She made a mewling sound, halfway between a gargle of water and a moan.

“I told you once,” Agent Locke said to me, knife in hand and a wide smile growing on her face, “that I was only ever a Natural at one thing.”

I struggled to remember the exchange, one of the first things she’d ever said to me, a mischievous gleam in her eyes. I’d assumed she was referring to sex—but the helpless, hopeless expression in Genevieve’s eyes left very little doubt what Locke’s so-called gift was.

Torture.

Mutilation.

Death.

She considered herself a Natural killer, and she was waiting for me to say something. Waiting for me to compliment her work.

You knew my mother. You hit me, you hurt me, you told me it was my fault. You were almost certainly abused as a child. You called me kiddo. I’m not like your other victims. You sent me presents. You groomed me.

“The first day we met,” I said, hoping the expression on my face looked earnest enough, innocent enough to please her, “when you said you were a Natural at only one thing, you also said that you couldn’t tell me about it until I was twenty-one.”

Locke looked genuinely pleased that I remembered. “That was before I knew you,” she said. “Before I realized how very like me you were. I knew you were Lorelai’s daughter. Of course I knew—I was the one who flagged you in the system. I spoon-fed you to Briggs. I brought you here, because you were Lorelai’s, but once I started working with you …” Her eyes were alight with a strange glow, like a blushing bride’s or a pregnant lady’s, brimming with happiness from the inside out. “You were mine, Cassie. You belonged with me. I thought I could wait until you were older, until you were ready, but you’re ready now.”

She pushed Genevieve roughly down to her knees. The girl collapsed, her body shaking, the taste of her terror potent in the air. Locke saw me looking at Genevieve, and she smiled.

“I got her for you.”

Gun still in her right hand, Locke held her knife out to me with her left, hilt first. The look in her eyes was hopeful, vulnerable, hungry.

You want something from me.

Locke didn’t want to kill me—or maybe she did, but she wanted this more. She wanted me to take the knife. She wanted me to slit Genevieve’s throat. She wanted me to be her protégé in more ways than one.

“Take the knife.”

I took the knife. I eyed the gun, still in her hands, trained on my forehead.

“Is that really necessary?” I asked, trying to act as though the thought of turning this knife against the sobbing girl on the floor didn’t make me want to throw up. “If I’m going to do this, I want it to be mine.”

I was speaking her language, telling her what she wanted to hear: that I was like her, that we were the same, that I understood that this was about anger and control and having the power to decide who lived and who died. Slowly, Locke lowered the gun, but she didn’t put it down. I measured the distance between us, wondering if I could sink the knife into her before she could get a shot off at me.

She was stronger than I was. She was better trained. She was a killer.

Stalling for time, I knelt next to Genevieve. I bent down, bringing my lips to her ear, letting the expression on my face take on a hint of the madness I saw in Locke’s. Then, my voice so low that only Genevieve could hear me, I whispered to the girl, “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to get you out of here.”

Genevieve looked up, her body still crumpled into a ball on the floor. She reached out and grabbed me by the front of my shirt.

“Kill me,” she pleaded, the words escaping cracked and bleeding lips. “You kill me, before she does.”

I knelt there, frozen, and Locke lost it. She morphed from a teacher observing her star pupil into an angry, animal creature. She pounced on Genevieve, turning the girl on her back, pinning her to the floor, her hands encircling her neck.

“You don’t touch Cassie,” she said, her voice rising to a yell, her face so close to Genevieve’s that the younger girl had nowhere to go. “You. Don’t. Get. To. Decide.”

My brain whirred. I had to get her off Genevieve. I had to stop her. I had to—

One second Locke was on Genevieve, and the next she ripped the knife out of my hand.

“You can’t do it,” she spat at me. “You can’t do anything right.”

Genevieve opened her mouth. Locke plunged the knife into her side. I’d promised to protect Genevieve, and now …

Now, there was blood.