Bad Blood

In the background of the feed, Thatcher Townsend made two more drinks: one for Elise and one for himself. It occurred to me for the first time to wonder where Michael’s mother was. It also occurred to me to wonder why Remy and Elise had chosen to give this interview in the Townsends’ house.

“What’s your father feeling?” I asked Michael, hating myself for asking, but knowing we had to treat this like any other case.

Michael scanned his father’s face as Thatcher held, but didn’t drink, his bourbon on the rocks. Within seconds, Michael was texting Agent Briggs.

“You want to know what I see when I look at my father, Colorado?” he asked, his voice utterly devoid of emotion, like whatever he’d read on Thatcher Townsend’s face had numbed something inside him, deadened it like a dentist would before removing a dying tooth. “Beneath that somber expression, he’s furious. Affronted. Personally insulted.”

Insulted by what? I wondered. By the fact that someone took Celine? By the FBI’s presence in his home?

“And every time someone says CeCe’s name, he feels exactly what he’s always felt, every time he’s looked at Celine Delacroix since she was fourteen years old.” Michael’s words set my gut to twisting, deep inside me. “Hunger.”

YOU

You know the Seven, almost as well as they know you. Their strengths. Their weaknesses. The Masters thirst for power. They drape you in diamonds—one for each victim. Each sacrifice. Each choice.

Diamonds and scars, scars and diamonds. The men who’ve turned you into this pretty, deadly thing go out into the world. They live their lives. They prosper.

They kill.

For you.

Hunger wasn’t an emotion. It was a need. A deep-seated, biological, primitive need. I didn’t want to even think about what might make a grown man look at a teenage girl that way, why Thatcher Townsend might be personally insulted that someone had dared to abduct the daughter of a family friend.

“Gloves.” Agent Sterling held a pair out to each of us. She and Agent Briggs hadn’t responded to Michael’s text. Instead, Agent Starmans had eventually been the one to tell us that we’d been cleared to visit the crime scene.

You chose to come home over spring break. As I put on the gloves, I tried to slip back into Celine’s perspective. You had to at least suspect your parents wouldn’t be here. I stood at the threshold to Celine’s studio. Crime-scene tape had it blocked off. From the looks of it, the studio had been a cabana or single-room guesthouse at some point. It was detached from the main house, overlooking the pool.

Even from the doorway, the smell of kerosene was overwhelming.

“Signs of forced entry.” Sloane came to stand beside me, scanning the door. “Light scratches around the lock. There’s a ninety-six percent probability that further analysis would reveal dents on the pins inside the lock.”

“Translation?” Lia asked. Beside her, Michael closed his eyes, an elongated blink that made me wish that I were half as good at reading his emotions as he was at reading mine.

“The lock was engaged. Someone picked it.” Sloane ducked under the crime-scene tape, her blue eyes taking everything in as she methodically scanned the room.

You locked the door. I stood in the doorway a moment longer, trying to picture Celine inside. You came out here to paint, and you locked the door. I wondered if that had been force of habit—or if she’d had a reason to turn the lock. Taking my time, I entered the studio, careful to avoid the evidence markers on the floor.

Shattered glass. A broken easel. My mind superimposed the images from the crime scene photos onto the markers on the floor. A second table was overturned near the far wall. A curtain had been pulled down, torn. There were drops of blood on the floor, a hand-shaped smear on the inside of the door frame.

You fought.

No, I thought, my heart thrumming in my chest. Using the word you kept me at a distance. That wasn’t what I wanted. That wasn’t what Celine needed.

I fought. I pictured myself standing in the middle of the studio, painting. Without meaning to, my body assumed the position we’d seen Celine in right before the security footage had cut out. My right arm was elevated, a pretend brush held in my hand. My torso twisted slightly to one side. My chin rose, my eyes on a phantom painting.

“The door was locked,” I said. “Maybe I heard someone outside. Maybe I heard the light sound of scratching. Maybe the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up.”

Or maybe I was so consumed by painting that I didn’t hear a thing. Maybe I didn’t see the doorknob turn. Maybe I didn’t hear it open.

“I was quiet.” Dean stood at the door, staring at me. My first instinct had been to get inside Celine’s head. His first instinct was always to profile the UNSUB. “There will be a time for noise, a time for screams. But first I have to get what I came for.”

I saw the logic in what Dean was saying: the UNSUB had come here for Celine. She hadn’t been a random target. A killer choosing his victims randomly wouldn’t have chosen a girl protected by a state-of-the-art security system. Only someone who’d been watching her would have known she was here alone.

“You thought you could slip in and take me,” I said, my eyes on Dean. “You thought that if you were quiet enough and quick enough, you could subdue me before I’d put up much of a fight.”

You thought wrong.

Dean ducked under the tape and crossed the room. Standing behind me, he placed a hand over my mouth and pulled my body back against his. The motion was careful, slow, but I let myself feel it the way Celine would have. On instinct—and moving just as slowly as Dean had—I bent forward, thrusting my elbows back into his stomach. The brush, I thought, in my hand. I moved as if to stab him in the leg, and at the same time, I bit the hand that held me. Lightly. Gently.

Celine would have bit her captor hard.

Dean pulled back, and I escaped his grasp.

“I’m screaming by this point,” I said. “As loud as I can. I rush for the door, but—”

Dean came up behind me again. As he mocked grabbing me, I went for the edge of the closest table. If I hold on tight enough, you can’t—

“Not that way,” Sloane said suddenly, breaking into my thoughts. “Based on the pattern of the debris we saw in the crime scene photos, the contents of the table would have been knocked off the table from this side.” She came around to the far side of the table and mimicked the motion it would have taken, sweeping her arms over the table lengthwise.