Killer Instinct (The Naturals 2)

“Lia—”

“This. Is. Not. About. You.” She turned on her heels and stalked toward the door. Halfway there, she stopped and turned back, her eyes boring through mine. “You think you know what this is doing to Dean? You think you relate? You don’t have any idea what he’s going through. None.”

“You’re not angry at Cassie, Lia,” Michael cut in. “You’re angry at the situation and the fact that Dean’s off somewhere, dealing with this alone.”

“Screw you, Michael,” Lia spat back. She let the words hang in the air, her fury a palpable thing, and then she left. A few seconds later, I heard the front door open and slam shut. Sloane, Michael, and I stared at one another in stunned silence.

“It’s possible I was mistaken,” Michael said finally. “Maybe she’s not just angry at the situation.”

Michael could diagnose the precise mix of emotions a person was feeling. He could pinpoint the difference between annoyance and simmering fury and fight-or-flight rage. But the whys of emotions…That fell somewhere in between his skill and mine. The things that mattered to people, the things that hurt them, the things that made them the people they were—that was all me.

“Lia’s known Dean longer than any of us,” I said, mentally going through the details of the situation and the personalities involved. “No matter how many people come into this house, to Lia, they’ll always be a unit of two. But Dean…”

“Unit of one,” Michael finished for me. “He’s Mr. Lone Wolf.”

When things got bad, Dean’s impulse was to put up walls, to push other people away. But I’d never seen him shut Lia out before. She was his family. And this time, he’d left her on the outside—with us.

“Dean likes Cassie,” Sloane announced, completely oblivious to the fact that perhaps now was not the time for a conversation about any fondness Dean might feel for me. Michael, ever a master of masking his own emotions, didn’t show any discernable reaction as she continued. “Lia knows Dean likes Cassie. I don’t think she minds. Mostly, I think she just thinks it’s funny. But right now…it’s not funny.”

Sloane’s grasp of human psychology was tenuous at best, but at the same time, I could see the kernel of truth in what she was saying. Lia had zero romantic interest in Dean. That didn’t mean she liked that when he’d dealt us in on the situation, he’d been answering my questions. I’d been the one to break through to him. Lia wasn’t okay with that. She was supposed to be the person he leaned on, not me. Then I’d gone and compounded my sins by highlighting the similarities—such as they were—between Dean’s situation and what I’d gone through with Locke.

“I wasn’t trying to say that I know exactly how he feels.” I felt like I had to justify myself, even though Sloane and Michael probably weren’t expecting me to. “I just meant that it seems like this truly horrific twist of fate that we were all brought here to solve cold cases, and yet Briggs’s active cases keep tying back to us.” I glanced from Michael to Sloane. “Seriously, what are the chances?”

Sloane pressed her lips together.

“You want to tell us what the chances are, don’t you?” Michael asked her.

“It’s not that simple.” Sloane shook her head, then pushed white-blond hair out of her face with the heel of her palm. “You’re not dealing with separate variables. Dean is a part of the program because he understands killers, and Dean understands killers because his father is a killer.” Sloane gestured with her hands out in front of her, like she was trying to grab hold of something that wasn’t there. “It’s all connected. Our families. The things that have happened to us. The things we can do.”

I glanced over at Michael. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Being a Natural isn’t just about being born with an incredible aptitude for something. You have to hone it. Your whole life has to hone it.” Sloane’s voice got softer. “Did you know they’ve done studies about people like Lia? I’ve read them. All of them.”

I understood, the way I always did, without even having to think about it, that Sloane reading articles about lie detection was her way of trying to connect with Lia. The rest of us inherently understood people. Sloane was better with objects. With numbers. With facts.

“For adults, an enhanced ability to detect lies mostly seems dependent on a combination of innate ability and explicit training. But with kids, it’s different.” She swallowed hard. “There’s a specific subset who excel at spotting lies.”

“And what subset is that?” I asked.

Sloane’s fingertips worried at the edge of her sleeve. “The subset that have been exposed to highs and lows. Changing environments. Abuse.” Sloane paused, and when she started talking again, the words came out faster. “There’s an interaction effect—statistically, the best deception detectors are the kids who aren’t submissive, the ones who grow up in abusive environments, but somehow fight to maintain some sense of control.”

When Briggs talked about what it meant to be a Natural, he tended to use words like potential or gift. But Sloane was saying that raw talent alone wasn’t enough. We hadn’t been born Naturals. Something about Lia’s childhood had turned her into the kind of person who could lie effortlessly, the kind who knew when someone else was lying to her.

Something had made Michael zero in on emotions.

My mother had taught me to read people so I could help her con them out of money. We were constantly on the move, sometimes a new city every week. I hadn’t had a home. Or friends. Getting inside people’s heads, understanding them, even if they didn’t know I was alive—growing up, that was the closest to friendship I’d been able to come.

“None of us had normal childhoods,” Sloane said quietly. “If we had, we wouldn’t be Naturals.”

“And on that note, I take my leave.” Michael stood up. He kept his voice casual, but I knew he didn’t like talking about his home life. He’d told me once that his father had an explosive temper. I tried not to think about the reasons a little boy might need to become an expert at reading other people’s emotions, growing up with a father like that.

Michael paused next to Sloane on his way out. “Hey,” he said softly. She peered up at him. “I’m not mad at you,” he told her. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”