Killer Instinct (The Naturals, #2)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

“She was also his wife.”

“You’re thinking about last summer.”

the last book happened last summer??

“Six weeks ago,

bruh it was only a month and a half ago

She was his family.

hopefully we see proof of this in this book

“Hey,” he said softly. She peered up at him. “I’m not mad at you,” he told her. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I’ve got a lot of data to suggest I do or say the wrong thing at least eighty-six-point-five percent of the time.”

“you can’t go to a Colonial University frat party dressed in your pajamas.”

A profiler, an emotion reader, and a lie detector went to a party.…

Definitely a philosophy major. Any second, he was going to start quoting someone. “‘To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.’” And there it was.

Quite frankly, I thought that tools who lived in tool houses probably shouldn’t throw stones.

Most people built walls to protect themselves. Dean did it to protect everyone else.

Today, there was nothing grandfatherly about him.

“It’s considered impolite to talk above seventy-five decibels,” Sloane sniffed. “I believe it’s called shouting.”

“Was Sterling—our Sterling—

Dean needed this—physical contact. He needed to know that I wasn’t afraid of him, that he wasn’t alone.

Any second, Dean was going to pull back from my touch. But he didn’t. And I didn’t.

He didn’t let go, just stood there on the sidewalk, his fingers working their way from my wrists to my fingers, until our hands were interwoven.

Someday, I was fairly certain that Lia would write a book entitled Making an Awkward Situation Worse.

“Okay, I’m calling it,” Michael announced when the quiet got to be too much. “I’m turning on the radio. There will be singing. I would not be opposed to car-dancing. But the next person whose facial expression approaches ‘brood’ is getting punched in the nose. Unless it’s Cassie. If it’s Cassie, I punch Dean in the nose.”

“Touch her again,” Michael told Christopher conversationally, “and Dean will be the one trying to pull me off of you.”

It’s not the bad memories that tear a person apart. It’s the good ones.

Tell him how I went to cut her—how you took the knife from my hand, not to save her, but to do it yourself.

“I’m afraid I’ve told your Agent Briggs and my Dean everything I know.”

“Maybe I should go,” Sloane said thoughtfully. “No,” everyone in the room—including the director—said at once. “I know jujitsu,” Sloane cajoled.

“And pretty.” He flashed me a subtle smile. “Not that pretty,” I said.

“Something you don’t know,” Redding mused. “Okay. Let’s try this one: you will never find the man who murdered your mother.”

My mother? What did he know about my mother?

Like Christopher Simms was in a meeting with Briggs when someone killed his mother.

“He makes you smile.” And you deserve to smile.

He was saying Pick me.

“Eyes on me, Cassie.”

It took me a moment to realize why. She doesn’t want me to see him.

“Why couldn’t you just do what I asked? Why did you make him bring you, too?”

“Because,” I said, nodding toward my right foot and wincing when my head protested, “I’m wearing a GPS tracking anklet.”

“I never activated the tracker. I thought wearing it was deterrent enough.” The tracker was supposed to go off. It was supposed to lead Briggs right to us.

“I was wrong,” he said, “when I said I just felt something.” He was breathing heavily. I couldn’t breathe at all. “When I said I wasn’t sure it was enough.”

I rose up on my toes, my body pressed against his, and returned the kiss, the pain in my face fading,

I knew, objectively, what this was. If you can’t keep them from hitting you, you make them hit you.

“When the odds are bad,” she said, removing something from one of them, “you change the rules.”