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“Are they more handsome than Dean? Less broody? More favorable to incorporating colors into their wardrobe?”
“our new liaison is Celine.”
a person cannot, by definition, defuse a bomb unless it’s operational to begin with.”
“I’m not going to tell the two of you to get a room,” Michael announced, “because that is geographically impossible. So instead, I will suggest, quite delicately, that the two of you get a metaphorical room.”
“I don’t think Townsend would like it if I said the worst part of my week is not being there to wake you up from the dreams, Cassie.”
“the worst part of your week was clearly losing a bet and being forced to carry a man-purse to training activities for forty-eight hours.” He paused dramatically. “Some of our classmates call him Agent Man-Purse now.” “You’re the only one who calls me Agent Man-Purse.” “So far.”
“Twelve?”
Agent Sterling, his wife, hadn’t been part of the team during the Mackenzie McBride case—and she was thirty-six weeks pregnant. With twins.
“Aren’t you a little young to be FBI?” The officer who managed to look Celine in the eye and say those words would probably soon regret it.
“I age well.” Celine had an impressive deadpan. “What can I say? I moisturize.” She gave him a second to process that, then issued an order. “Move.” The officers moved before they’d even realized they’d done it. “I don’t moisturize,” Lia told one of them as we passed. “I made a deal with the devil to maintain my youth. You don’t want to know what the devil asked for in return.”
“I saw the body.” Mackenzie repeated what she’d said earlier. “I saw the way Kelley landed. The way her bones broke. She didn’t jump.”
Why do grown men say such stupid things?
Celine smiles sweetly. “Why would I be interested in boys,” she asks the table innocently, “when there are girls?”
He took everything away from you. He locked you up. He hurt you. You danced.
“The first two victims jumped.” Sloane paused. “The third didn’t.”
Mackenzie McBride was a Natural.
“You won’t ever be normal, Mackenzie, but you’ll be okay.” “Personally,” Lia commented, “I find normal overrated.”
No matter what he’d told the police, no matter how objective and rational his tone, he’d doubted his daughter. He’d believed she’d jumped.
You didn’t cut your wrists, your legs, or even your stomach. You sliced below your panty line. She’d literally hidden her pain, preserving the image.
“Kelley was very social,” her father said immediately. “Everyone loved her.” Another tap on my leg, another lie. Even in grief, Isaac Peterson knew quite well that his daughter had not been universally beloved.
“I appreciate a good Batman reference as much as the next person, but clearly, if I were a character in that particular fictional universe, I would be Batman, not Robin.”
“I’m implying that you wanted them to kill themselves,” I said, buying precious seconds. “But you overplayed your hand with Kelley.”
“You with the righteously indignant, yet distinctly guilty expression on your face! Hands in the air!”
“Or,” he says, his voice low, “you could expel me, and I could refrain from telling you anything unfortunate at all.”
But in Quentin Nichols’s line of work, he had to know what to say, how to manipulate a target, how to defuse a dangerous situation… Or how to blow it up.
“He pushed Kelley.” I said the one thing guaranteed to draw the UNSUB’s attention my way—the one thing sure to break through to Mackenzie. “She wouldn’t jump, so he pushed her.”
Nichols was gone.
Without warning, Dean’s mouth descended over mine. I rose up to meet him, my hands on either side of his face, my legs wrapping themselves around his body. I wasn’t normal. Neither was he.
“We all need you,” Dean told her. Sloane was our light in the darkness.
I leaned back against Dean, and Lia leaned against me before we all chorused in unison, “Aye.”
