I felt like she’d slammed the heel of her hand into my throat. But even as I weathered the blow, I knew Lia had said those words for a reason. You’re not cruel. Not like that.
“Sloane slipped two pairs of chopsticks into her sleeve last night at the end of the meal.” Lia’s statement confirmed my gut instinct. “Not disposable ones. The nice ones they had on the table.”
In addition to being our resident statistician, Sloane was also our resident klepto. The last time I’d seen her take something, she’d been stressed out about a confrontation with the FBI. For Sloane, sticky fingers were a sign that her brain was short-circuiting with emotions she couldn’t control.
“Let’s call that Exhibit A,” Lia suggested. “Exhibit B would be Michael. Do you have any idea what kind of absolute mind-warp going home is for him?”
I thought of the conversation I’d overheard between Lia and Michael the day before. “Yes,” I said, turning back to face Lia again. “I do.”
There was a beat of silence as she processed the truth she heard in those words.
“You think you do,” Lia said softly. “But you couldn’t.”
“I heard you guys talking yesterday,” I admitted.
I expected Lia to have a knee-jerk reaction to those words, but she didn’t. “Once upon a time,” she said, her voice even as she turned to stare out at the Strip, “someone used to give me gifts for being a good girl, the way Michael gets ‘gifts’ from his father. You might think you understand what’s going on in Michael’s head right now, but you don’t. You can’t profile this, Cassie. You can’t puzzle it out.”
When she turned back to face me, the expression on her face was flippant. “What I’m saying here is that Michael is about one downward spiral–induced bad decision away from eloping with a showgirl, and Sloane has been acting weird—even for Sloane—since we got here. We are officially at issue capacity, Cassie. So I’m sorry, but you don’t get to be effed up right now.” She tapped the tip of my nose with her finger. “It’s not your turn.”
If Lia had done to Michael what she’d just done to me, he would have lashed back at her. If she’d done it to Sloane, Sloane would have been crushed—but I wasn’t. Sooner or later, my grief would catch up to me. But Lia had given me a reason to fight it for that much longer. She wasn’t wrong about Michael. She wasn’t wrong about Sloane. Someone had to hold them together. Someone had to hold us together.
And I needed that person to be me.
My gut said Lia knew that. You could have been nicer about it, I thought—but if she had been, she wouldn’t be Lia.
I stayed out on the balcony for another ten minutes after Lia sauntered off. When I finally made my way back inside, Michael, Lia, and Dean were gathered around the kitchen table—and so was Agent Briggs. He was dressed in plain-clothes, which told me the FBI was making an effort at keeping these visits on the down low. The fact that Briggs’s version of plain clothes still made him look like a cop was perfectly reflective of his personality: hyperfocused, ambitious.
Briggs played to win.
“There’s been another murder.” Briggs had apparently been waiting for my arrival to make that announcement. None of the four of us made an attempt at looking surprised. “That makes the Apex, the Wonderland, the Desert Rose, and the Majesty, all in a matter of four days. We may be looking at someone who has a grudge against the casinos or the people who profit from them.”
Dean looked toward a file Briggs held in his hand. “The latest victim?”
Briggs tossed the folder down onto the kitchen table. I flipped it open. Glassy blue eyes stared back at me, impossibly large in a heart-shaped face.
“Is that…” Michael started to say.
“Camille Holt,” I finished, unable to pull my eyes away.
You like being underestimated, Camille, I thought dully, bringing my hand to touch the edge of the picture. You’re fascinated by the way the mind works, the way it breaks, the way people survive things no one should be able to survive.
Her skin was tinged a ghastly gray; the whites of her wide-set eyes were marked by blots of red—capillaries that had burst as she’d struggled against her assailant.
You struggled. You fought. She was lying on her back on a white marble floor, strawberry blond hair spread out in a halo around her head—but I knew in my gut that she’d fought, viciously, with an almost feral strength her assailant wouldn’t have been expecting.
“Asphyxiation,” Dean commented. “She was strangled.”
“Murder weapon?” I asked. There was a difference between strangling someone with a wire and strangling them with a rope.
Briggs took out a snapshot of an evidence bag. Inside was a necklace—the thick metal chain Camille had worn looped twice around her neck the night before.
In my mind, I could see her, sitting at the bar, one leg dangling off the stool. I could see her turning toward us and walking toward the exit.
I could see Aaron Shaw watching her go.
“You’ll want to talk to the casino owner’s son.” Michael’s thoughts were perfectly in line with my own. “Aaron Shaw. His interest in Ms. Holt wasn’t professional.”
“What did you see?” Briggs asked.
Michael shrugged. “Attraction. Affection. A sharp edge of tension.”
What kind of tension? I didn’t get the chance to follow up before Sloane popped into the kitchen and went to pour herself some coffee. Briggs eyed her warily. Sloane’s tendency toward high-speed babbling when caffeinated was a thing of legend.