All In (The Naturals, #3)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

She wanted me safe, and she wanted me happy. She wanted me here.

“I am,” I told my grandmother. “Happy.” That wasn’t a lie. For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged somewhere. With my fellow Naturals, I never had to pretend to be someone I wasn’t. I couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted to. In a house full of people who saw things the rest of the world missed, it was impossible to hide.

“Cassie,” my father said softly. “It’s about your mother.”

here was a difference between presumed dead and dead, a difference between coming back to a dressing room that was drenched in my mother’s blood and being told that after five long years, there was a body.

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.

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.

Our resident numbers expert bent her head back so she was staring up at Briggs. “There’s a high probability you’re going to tell me to get off the table,” she said. Briggs almost smiled. “Get off the table.”

“Too young to party, just old enough to participate in federal investigations of serial murder.” Lia let out an elaborate sigh. “Story of my life.”

Sloane’s teeth were bared in what was, quite possibly, the largest, fakest smile I’d ever seen. She froze like a deer in headlights. “I’m not practicing smiling,” she said quickly. “Sometimes people’s faces just do this.” That statement was met with silence from every single person on the plane.

Home isn’t a place, Cassie. The memory crept up on me. Home is the people who love you most, the people who will always love you, forever and ever, no matter what.

Some children had security blankets. I was fairly certain Sloane had grown up with a security number.

“I wanted him to like me,” she admitted, like that was some terrible thing. “Aaron?” I asked. Instead of answering, Sloane walked over to a shelf full of blown-glass objects and began sorting them, largest to smallest, and for objects of similar size, by color. Red. Orange. Yellow. She moved with the efficiency of a speed-chess player. Green. Blue. “Sloane?” I said. “He’s my brother,” she blurted out. Then, on the off chance that I might not have understood her meaning, she forced herself to stop sorting, turned, and elaborated. “Half brother. Male sibling. We have a coefficient of relatedness of point-two-five.” “Aaron Shaw is your half brother?” I tried to make that compute. What were the chances? No wonder Sloane had behaved so strangely around him. As for Aaron, he’ d noticed Sloane. He’d smiled at her, talked to her, but she could have been anyone. She could have been a stranger on the street. “Aaron Elliott Shaw,” Sloane said. “He’s 1,433 days older than I am.” Sloane looked back at the glass objects, perfectly arrayed in front of the mirror. “In my entire life, I’ve seen him exactly eleven times.” She swallowed. “This is only the second time he’s seen me.” “He doesn’t know?” I asked. Sloane shook her head. “No. He doesn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” I heard Lia say. “Don’t be,” Michael told her. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“Mr. Shaw.” The hostess’s voice broke into my thoughts. I glanced toward the front of the restaurant, expecting to see Aaron. Instead, I saw a man who looked the way Aaron would in thirty years. His thick blond hair was tinged silver. His lips were set in a permanent half smile. He wore a three-piece suit as comfortably as other people wore a T-shirt and jeans. Aaron’s father. My stomach twisted, because if this was Aaron’s father, he was Sloane’s father, too. Beside him, there was a woman with light brown hair coifed at the nape of her neck. She was holding a little girl, no older than three or four. The child was Korean, with beautiful dark hair and eyes that took in everything. Their daughter, I realized. Aaron’s little sister. As the hostess led the trio to a table near ours, I wondered if Sloane knew her father had adopted a child. I knew the exact moment Sloane saw them. She went very still. Underneath the table, I reached for her hand. She squeezed mine, hard enough to hurt. Several minutes later, our food was deposited on the table. With great effort, Sloane let go of my hand and pulled her gaze away from the happy threesome, just as Aaron slid into the empty seat at the table to join his family. His family. Not hers.

“How many shops are there in Las Vegas?” Lia said. “Do you know, Sloane?” The question was a kindness on Lia’s part—though she wouldn’t have liked me thinking of her as kind. “Sloane?” Lia repeated. Sloane looked up from her lap. “Napkins,” she said. “Not going to lie,” Michael put in. “I had no idea that was a number.” “I need napkins. And a pen.”

“If you make me go up to the suite right now, there’s a very good chance that I will give a full-length performance of The Ballad of Cassie and Dean. Complete with musical numbers.” “And there is a very good chance,” Michael added, “that I will be forced to accompany those musical numbers with a stunning display of interpretive dance.”

“I’m going to hurt you,” I muttered in Lia’s general direction. “You can’t hurt me,” she shot back brightly. “It’s my birthday.” The bouncer grinned. “Happy birthday,” he told Lia.

I believed that he knew what it was like to be broken. I believed that I wasn’t broken to him.

“Sloane slipped two pairs of chopsticks into her sleeve last night at the end of the meal.” Lia’s statement confirmed my gut instinct. “Not disposable ones. The nice ones they had on the table.” In addition to being our resident statistician, Sloane was also our resident klepto. The last time I’d seen her take something, she’d been stressed out about a confrontation with the FBI. For Sloane, sticky fingers were a sign that her brain was short-circuiting with emotions she couldn’t control.

expected Lia to have a knee-jerk reaction to those words, but she didn’t. “Once upon a time,” she said, her voice even as she turned to stare out at the Strip, “someone used to give me gifts for being a good girl, the way Michael gets ‘gifts’ from his father. You might think you understand what’s going on in Michael’s head right now, but you don’t. You can’t profile this, Cassie. You can’t puzzle it out.”

“What I’m saying here is that Michael is about one downward spiral–induced bad decision away from eloping with a showgirl, and Sloane has been acting weird—even for Sloane—since we got here. We are officially at issue capacity, Cassie. So I’m sorry, but you don’t get to be effed up right now.” She tapped the tip of my nose with her finger. “It’s not your turn.”

“Pretend for a moment,” Lia told her, “that we’re all very, very slow.” “I’m not very good at pretending,” Sloane told her seriously. “But I think I can do that.”

Briggs had told Sloane that he needed her to figure out where the UNSUB would strike next. She had clearly taken that request to heart. You want to be needed. You want to be useful. You want to matter, even a little.

“You can do this,” I told her. “And even if you can’t, we’ll love you just the same.”

“She was wearing a white dress.” Sloane’s voice was very small. “It was clean. Did you notice?” “No,” I said softly. “Children stain white clothes within an hour of putting them on at least seventy-four percent of the time,” Sloane rattled off. “But not her. She didn’t ruin it.” The way Sloane said the word ruin told me that she wasn’t just talking about children staining their clothing. She was talking about herself. And clothing was just the tip of the iceberg. “Sloane—” “He brought her to the bar to get a cherry.” Her hand stilled, and she turned to look at me again. “He brought me cherries,” she said. “Just once.” Sloane could have told me the number of cherries, the exact day and time, the number of hours that had passed since—I could see that information, repeating itself over and over again in her head. “Does it help if I hate him for you?” I asked. Him. As in her father. “Should it?” Sloane asked, wrinkling her forehead and sitting up. “I don’t hate him. I think that maybe, someday, when I’m older, he could not-hate me.” When you’re older—and better and normal and good, my brain filled in. Sloane had told me once that she said and did the wrong thing over eighty-four percent of the time. The fact that her biological father had played a role in teaching her that lesson—the fact that she still hoped that he might develop even the barest hint of affection for her someday, if only she could do things right—physically hurt me.

“Dean,” she said, her voice wavering slightly. “I’m pregnant.” Dean’s eyelid twitched. “No, you’re not.”

“What I suggest,” Lia said, “is that we spend the next three hours and twenty-seven minutes doing our best impressions of actual teenagers.” She flopped down on the couch between Dean and me. “Who wants to play Two Truths and a Lie?”

I love when teens get to just be teens <3

“The average litter size for a beagle is seven puppies.” Sloane paused, then offered up a second statement. “The word spatula is derived from the Greek word spathe, meaning broad, flat blade.” Sloane didn’t quite grasp the intricacies of the game, but she knew that she was supposed to say two true statements and one false one. She twisted one hand into the other in her lap. Even if her truths hadn’t been obvious, it was clear she was preparing to lie. “The man who owns this casino,” she said, the words coming out in a rush, “is not my father.” Sloane had spent her entire life keeping this secret. She’d told me. She couldn’t bring herself to tell the others—but she could lie. Badly, obviously, in a game devoted to spotting lies.

“You have to guess.” Sloane swallowed, then looked up from her lap. “You have to. Those are the rules.” Michael poked Sloane’s foot with his. “Is it the one about the beagles?” “No,” Sloane said. “No, it is not.” “We know.” Dean’s voice was as gentle as I’d ever heard it. “We know which one the lie is, Sloane.” Sloane let out a long breath. “Based on my calculations, now would be an appropriate time for someone to hug me.”

“This hug is now completed.” Sloane pulled back

“I killed a man when I was nine years old.” Lia did what she did best—provided a distraction. “I’m currently considering shaving Michael’s head while he sleeps. And,” she finished, her tone never changing, “I grew up in a cult.”

girl I swear if shaving Michael's head is the lie omg

Why did you escalate? Why did you stop?

“That really is your color,” Lia told me. It was my mother’s color, too, I thought.

“Hello?” “Cassie.” It took me longer to recognize my father’s voice than it would have taken me to recognize Sterling’s or Briggs’s.

ouch

Across the way, the solemn-eyed little girl eyeing the lollipop was joined by her father. He held out his hand. She took it. Simple. Easy. “I was just calling to see how you’re doing.” My father was trying. I could see that—but I could also see the ease with which the man across the way hoisted his little daughter onto his shoulders. She was three, maybe four years old. Her hair was red, brighter than mine, but it was easy enough to picture myself at that age. I hadn’t even known I had a father.

“Sloane just made a beeline out the employees-only exit,” she said, her voice low. “And so did about five hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise.”

Aaron cursed—loud enough that I could make out the words—then kicked the metal door. “That’s my favorite curse word, too,” Sloane whispered.

“I meant to steal that shirt.” I groaned internally. Sloane had no capacity for deception whatsoever. Then again, I thought, she’s sitting here across from her father’s son, not saying a word. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Aaron told us, a smile tugging at the edges of his lips. It was hard to reconcile the man in front of us with the one we’d seen in the alleyway.

“Tavish.” Aaron repeated Sloane’s last name back to her, then paused, like his mouth had gone dry. “My father had a friend once,” he continued softly. “Her name was Margot Tavish.” “I have to go.” Sloane bolted to her feet. She was trembling. “I have to go now.” “Please,” Aaron said. “Sloane. Don’t go.” “I have to,” Sloane whispered. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m not supposed to tell.” She wanted him to like her. Even panicked, even trying to get away from him, she wanted him to like her so badly that I could feel it. “We have the same eyes,” Aaron told her. “They call them Shaw blue, did you know that?”

“You can’t know about me,” Sloane told Aaron softly. “That’s the rule.” “It’s not my rule.”

Sloane was our family, more than she would ever be his, and right now, she was vulnerable and raw and bleeding.

Mr. Shaw turned the full force of his presence on the rest of us. “I’d like a moment with Sloane alone,” he said. “And I’d like a dress made of rainbows and a bed full of puppies who never grow old,” Lia shot back. “Not happening.”

“If I wish to speak to my daughter, I will speak to my daughter.” Sloane’s expression was painfully transparent when he said the word daughter. He meant it as an expression of ownership. She couldn’t help hoping—desperately hoping—that it might be one of care.

Michael’s father had traded him to the FBI for immunity on white-collar crimes. Sloane’s, apparently, had just wanted her out of town and away from his son.

She’s just a child. None of this is her fault, is it?” he asked, his tone still so gentle, I wanted to hit him as hard as Michael had punched the man at the pool. None of this is Sloane’s fault, either.

“It’s not a ridiculous idea.” Sloane stood up. Her voice trembled. “You just can’t see it. You don’t understand it. But just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean you get to ignore it. You can’t just pretend the pattern doesn’t exist and hope it goes away.” The way he pretends you don’t exist, my brain translated. The way he ignores you.

“The dates match?” he asked her. Sloane nodded, and once she started, she couldn’t stop nodding. “I wish they didn’t,” she said fiercely. “I wish I’d never seen it. I wish—” “Don’t,” Judd told her sharply. “Don’t you ever apologize for being what you are.”

I saw the exact moment she remembered that her half brother might not be all that different from the father they shared.

it occurred to me that—per the rules of the game—both of those statements could be true, so long as what she’d said about considering shaving Michael’s head was not. It would be just like Lia to tell outrageous truths and a joking, mundane lie.

yeah that's what I thought immediately lol

She loved him, but right now, she didn’t want him. She didn’t want anyone. Lia rarely showed us her true self. But what we’d just seen was more than that. The flat voice, the words she’d said—that wasn’t just the real Lia. That was the girl she’d spent years running from. That was Sadie.