Killer Instinct (The Naturals, #2)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Detecting lies was as much about the words people used as the way they said them.

“Lia, I will give you one thousand dollars to never refer to Sterling and Briggs as Mommy and Daddy again.”

There was an intimate connection between a killer and the person they’d killed. Bodies were like messages, full of symbolic meanings that only a person who understood the needs and desires and rage that went into snuffing out another life could fully decode. This isn’t a language anyone should want to speak.

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.

I couldn’t keep from feeling his pain and recognizing in it an echo of my own.

But at the same time, I couldn’t keep from thinking that maybe shutting the rest of us out was less about what Dean wanted and more about what he wouldn’t let himself want. There was a chance—a good one—that Dean didn’t need to be alone so much as he thought being alone was what he deserved.

“Maybe,” I said softly, “to do what you and I do, we have to have a little bit of the monster in us.”

When Sloane got absorbed in something, the rest of the world ceased to exist.

Knowing what people wanted and knowing what they feared were two sides of the same coin.

There was a point in time when he would have pushed the hair out of my face and let his hand linger on my jaw. Not anymore.