“I want to see the scene.” I turned back to my father. “The place where they found the body, I want to see it.”
My father was the one who’d signed off on my enrolling in Agent Briggs’s gifted program, but he had no idea what kind of “education” I was receiving. He didn’t know what the program really was. He didn’t know what I could do. Killers and victims, UNSUBs and bodies—this was my language. Mine. And what had happened to my mother?
That was mine, too.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Cassie.”
It’s not your decision. I thought the words, but didn’t say them out loud. There was no point in arguing with him. If I wanted access—to the site, to pictures, to whatever scraps of evidence there might be—Vincent Battaglia wasn’t the person to ask.
“Cassie?” My father stood and took a hesitant step toward me. “If you want to talk about this—”
I turned around and shook my head. “I’m fine,” I said, cutting off his offer. I pushed down the lump rising in my throat. “I just want to go back to school.”
“School” was overstating things. The Naturals program consisted of a grand total of five students, and our lessons had what you would call practical applications. We weren’t just pupils. We were resources to be used.
An elite team.
Each of the five of us had a skill, an aptitude honed to perfection by the lives we’d lived growing up.
None of us had normal childhoods. Those were the words I kept thinking, over and over again, four days later as I stood at the end of my grandmother’s drive, waiting for my ride to arrive. If we had, we wouldn’t be Naturals.
Instead of thinking of the way I’d grown up, going from town to town with a mother who conned people into thinking she was psychic, I thought about the others—about Dean’s psychopath of a father and the way Michael had learned to read emotions as a means of survival. About Sloane and Lia and the things I suspected about their childhoods.
Thinking about my fellow Naturals came with a particular brand of homesickness. I wanted them here—all of them, any of them—so badly that I almost couldn’t breathe.
“Dance it off.” I could hear my mother’s voice in my memory. I could see her, wrapped in a royal blue scarf, her red hair damp from cold and snow as she flipped the car radio on and turned it up.
That had been our ritual. Every time we moved—from one town to the next, from one mark to the next, from one show to the next—she turned on the music, and we danced in our seats until we forgot about everything and everyone we’d left behind.
My mother wasn’t a person who’d believed in missing anything for long.
“You’re looking deep in thought.” A low, no-nonsense voice brought me back to the present.
I pushed back against the memories—and the deluge of emotions that wanted to come with them. “Hey, Judd.”
The man the FBI had hired to look after us studied me for a moment, then picked up my bag and swung it into the trunk. “You going to say good-bye?” he asked, nodding toward the porch.
I turned back to see Nonna standing there. She loved me. Fiercely. Determinedly. From the moment you met me. The least I owed her was a good-bye.
“Cassandra?” Nonna’s tone was brisk as I approached. “You forget something?”
For years, I’d believed that I was broken, that my ability to love—fiercely, determinedly, freely—had died with my mother.
The past few months had taught me I was wrong.
I wrapped my arms around my grandmother, and she latched hers around me and held on for dear life.
“I should go,” I said after a moment.
She tapped my cheek with a little more oomph than necessary. “You call if you need anything,” she ordered. “Anything.”
I nodded.
She paused. “I am sorry,” she said carefully. “About your mother.”
Nonna had never met my mother. She didn’t know the first thing about her. I’d never told my father’s family about my mom’s laugh, or the games she’d used to teach me to read people, or the way we’d said no matter what instead of I love you, because she didn’t just love me—she loved me forever and ever, no matter what.
“Thanks,” I told my grandmother. My voice came out slightly hoarse. I tamped down on the grief rising up inside me. Sooner or later, it would catch up to me.
I had always been better at compartmentalizing than ridding myself of unwanted emotions altogether.
As I turned away from Nonna’s prying eyes and walked back to Judd and the car, I couldn’t banish the memory of my mom’s voice.
Dance it off.
Judd drove in silence. He left it to me to break it, if and when I was ready to do so.
“The police found a body.” It took me ten minutes to push those words past the edge of my lips. “They think it’s my mother’s.”
“I heard,” Judd said simply. “Briggs got a call.”
Special Agent Tanner Briggs was one of the Naturals program’s two FBI supervisors. He’d been the one to recruit me, and he’d used my mother’s case to do it.
Of course he’d gotten a call.
“I want to see the body,” I told Judd, staring out at the road in front of us. Later, I could process. Later, I could grieve. Answers, facts, that was what I needed now. “Pictures of the crime scene,” I continued, “anything Briggs can get from the locals, I want to see it.”