Those words were familiar enough to send a chill down my spine. My mother’s dressing room. My hand fumbling for the light switch. My fingertips touching something sticky, something wet and warm and—
“You suspected this group was involved?” I could barely hear myself ask the question over the deafening beating of my own heart.
One edge of Redding’s mouth quirked upward. “Every empire needs its queen.”
There was more to it than that. There had to be.
“Years later,” Dean’s father added, “I was moved to take on an apprentice of my own.”
He’d taken on three, but I knew which one he was referencing. “Webber.” The man had kidnapped me, loosed me in a forest, and hunted me. Like I was an animal. Like I was prey.
“Webber brought me information. About Dean. About Briggs. About you—and about Special Agent Lacey Locke.”
Locke, my original FBI mentor, had started life as Lacey Hobbes, my mother’s younger sister. She’d ended life a serial killer, re-creating my mother’s murder over and over again.
Not a murder, I reminded myself. The whole time Locke had been killing women in my mom’s image, my mother had been alive.
“You found out the details of my mother’s case.” I focused, as much as I could, on the here and now, on Redding. “You saw a connection.”
“Whispers. Rumors. Urban legends.” Redding fell back on what he’d said before. “Masters and apprentices, rituals and rules, and at the center of it all, a woman.” His eyes gleamed. “A very specific kind of woman.”
My lips and tongue and throat were dry—so dry, I almost couldn’t force out the words. “What kind?”
“The kind of woman who could be formed into something magnificent.” Redding closed his eyes, his voice humming with pleasure. “Something new.”
YOU
You take the knife. Step by step, you make your way to the stone table, testing the balance of the blade in your hand.
The wheel is turning. The offering turns with it, chained to the stone, body and soul.
“All must be tested.” You say the words as you drag the flat of the knife across the offering’s neck. “All must be found worthy.”
Power thrums through your veins. This is your decision. Your choice. One twist of your wrist and blood will flow. The wheel will stop.
But without order, there is chaos.
Without order, there is pain.
“What do you need?” You lean down as you whisper the ancient words. The knife in your hand angles into the base of the offering’s neck. You could kill him, but it would cost you. Seven days and seven pains. The wheel never stops turning for long.
“What do I need?” The offering repeats the question, smiling as blood streams down his naked chest. “I need nine.”
“Well, that was cheerful.” Lia jumped off the table she’d been sitting on.
Agent Vance had just delivered me to the observation area. Sterling and Briggs still had their twin gazes fixed on the room I’d vacated a few moments earlier. On the other side of the two-way mirror, guards pulled Daniel Redding to his feet. Briggs—competitive and ambitious and, in his own way, idealistic—would never view Redding as anything other than a monster, a threat. Sterling was more restrained, the type who kept her emotions on lockdown by following preset rules, including one that said that men like Daniel Redding didn’t get to chip away at her control.
“I swear,” Lia continued with a wave of her hand, “serial killers are so predictable. It’s always all ‘I want to watch you suffer’ and ‘let me quote Shakespeare while I imagine dancing on your corpse.’”
The fact that Lia was being so dismissive told me that the conversation she’d just witnessed had gotten to her almost as much as it had gotten to me.
“Was he lying?” I asked. No matter how hard I’d pressed, Redding had insisted he didn’t know the name of the inmate whose ex’s “death” had resembled my mother’s, but I knew better than to take a master of manipulation at his word.
“Redding might know more than he’s saying,” Lia told me, “but he’s not lying—or at least he’s not lying about Ye Olde Consortium of Serial-Killing Psychopaths. He did stretch the truth a little about wanting to watch said psychopaths have their way with you.”
“Of course Redding doesn’t want to watch.” I tried to match Lia’s flippant tone in an attempt to make this—any of it—matter less. “He’s Daniel Redding. He wants to kill me himself.”
Lia arched one eyebrow. “You do seem to have that effect on people.”
I snorted. Considering not one but two different serial killers had targeted me since I’d joined the Naturals program, I couldn’t exactly argue the point.
“We’ll track down the case Redding was talking about.” Briggs finally turned to face Lia and me. “It might take some time, but if there’s an inmate who matches Redding’s description, we’ll find him.”
Agent Sterling laid a hand on my shoulder. “You did what you needed to do in there, Cassie. Dean would understand that.”
Of course he would. That didn’t make it better. It made it worse.
“As for what Redding said about your mother—”
“Are we done here?” Lia asked abruptly, cutting off Agent Sterling.
I knew better than to aim a grateful look in Lia’s direction, but I appreciated the interference all the same. I didn’t want to discuss the insinuations Redding had made about my mother. I didn’t want to wonder if there was even a grain of truth to them, no matter how small.
My mentor got the message. As she led the way out, Agent Sterling didn’t try to broach the subject again.
Lia wove one arm casually through mine. “For the record,” she said, her voice uncharacteristically gentle, “if you ever”—want to talk, my brain filled in, need to vent—“ever,” she repeated softly, her voice ringing with sincerity, “make me listen to you recount The Erotic Hand-Holding Adventures of Cassie and Dean again, I will exact vengeance, and that vengeance will be epic.”
Next to deception detection, Lia’s biggest specialty was providing distractions—some of which came with collateral damage.