Killer Instinct (The Naturals, #2)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I knew that by the time a case was classified “cold” and found its way to us, we were probably looking for a body—not a little girl. But . . . But Mackenzie McBride was six years old. But her favorite color was purple. But she wanted to be a “veterinarian pop star.” You couldn’t stop looking for a kid like that. You couldn’t stop hoping, even if you tried.

“I take it you’re Michael,” she said. “The emotion reader with the attitude problem who’s continually doing stupid things for girls.” “That’s hardly a fair assessment,” Michael replied. “I do plenty of stupid things that aren’t for girls, too.”

“If I’m a bad boy, you’ll take away my keys?” Michael wiggled his eyebrows in a way that was both suggestive and ridiculous. “No,” I replied without even thinking about it. “If you’re a bad boy, I’ll give your car to Dean.” There was a moment of stunned silence, and then Michael put a hand over his heart, like he’d been shot—a gesture that would have been funnier before he’d taken an actual bullet to the chest.

“Lia and I are . . . whatever Lia and I normally are.

they need to kiss

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.

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

“What do you want?” Dean’s voice was completely flat. Redding either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “You,” the man said, his eyes roving over Dean, drinking in every detail, like an artist surveying his finest work. “I want to know about you, Dean. What have those hands been doing the past five years? What sights have those eyes seen?” There was something disconcerting about listening to Dean’s father break his body down into parts. Dean is just a thing to you, I thought. He’s hands and eyes, a mouth. Something to be molded. Something to own.

“There’s nothing to talk about. Is that what you want to hear? That these hands, these eyes—they’re nothing?” “They’re everything,” Redding replied, his voice vibrating with intensity. “And there is so much more you could do.”

“Methinks you doth protest too much, son.” “I am not your son.”

“They snuck out,” Sloane piped up from beside me. All of us turned to look at her. She’d been uncharacteristically quiet since Briggs had called all of us downstairs. “According to my calculations, Cassie was gone for two hours, forty-three minutes, and seventeen seconds. And she was only wearing two-fifths of a dress.” “Sloane!” I said. “What?” she shot back. “If you wanted me to keep my mouth shut, you should have taken me with you.” We hurt her feelings, I realized suddenly. It hadn’t even occurred to me to ask her.

“If it’s any consolation,” Michael told Dean, “I went along for the ride.”

I think that makes it worse actually

“We didn’t mean to leave you out,” I told her. “I’m used to it.” With the way Sloane’s brain worked, she’d probably spent her whole life before the program on the outside looking in. I was her roommate, and I was a profiler—I should have known better.

“I’m not good at mingling, or at parties. I say the wrong thing. I do the wrong thing. I know that—but

This is a mistake. This is right. Those thoughts came on the heels of each other, playing in stereo. Any second, Dean was going to pull back from my touch. But he didn’t. And I didn’t.

“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.”

“He asked, but I hadn’t gotten to introduce myself yet,” Dean cut in. “My name is Dean.” A spark of interest flickered in Trina’s eyes. “Dean?” she repeated. She took a step forward, elbowing me to the side. “Dean what?” Dean didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t react in any way to her scrutiny. “Redding,” he said. He glanced over at Christopher, then back at Trina. “I believe you know my father.”

“Did you know my father growing up?” Dean asked. His voice was perfectly polite. He seemed perfectly at ease. This was hurting him.

He didn’t want Dean in his house. He didn’t want Dean’s father’s picture on his walls. Not that I blamed him.

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

can all three of them date please

“Daniel would never do something so rash, so sloppy. And to think that someone else is out there—” She shook her head. “Claiming credit, trading on his reputation. It’s a crime, is what it is.” Murder is a crime,

“You wanted him to come here,” I whispered furiously to Michael, watching Dean from inside the car. “You gave him the keys—” “I gave him a choice,” Michael corrected. “I’ve seen Dean angry. I’ve seen him disgusted and drowning in guilt, scared of himself and what he’s capable of, scared of you.” Michael let that sink in for a moment. “But until today, I’ve never once seen him raw.” Michael paused. “It’s not the bad memories that tear a person apart like that, Cassie. It’s the good ones.” We fell into a momentary silence. Outside, Dean started walking down the dirt road. I watched him go, then I turned back to Michael. “Did you give him the keys because he needed to come here, or because once upon a time, he threw your past in your face?” Coming here might help Dean—but it would, without question, hurt, too. “You’re the profiler,” Michael replied. “You tell me.” “Both,” I said. Pseudo-rivals. Pseudo-siblings. Pseudo-something else. Michael and Dean had a complicated relationship, one that had nothing to do with me. Michael had arranged this to help Dean and to hurt him.

they have to fuck this out

“She got bored.” Dean walked like a soldier, eyes straight ahead, pace never faltering. “Bored with him. Bored with me. He’d brought her back to this small town, cut off all contact with her family.”

do you mean he cut her off having any contact with her family??? because sir. that sounds like she was abused and left a dangerous situation not like she got bored

“I was Daniel Redding’s son.” He stopped there—nine words to explain something I couldn’t even fathom. You were her son, too, I thought.

This time, as Briggs broke up the fight, I saw Redding smile. He’d gotten what he wanted. A hint of violence. A taste of Dean’s potential.

“Have you ever told Briggs precisely what you did to his wife, Dean?” Daniel Redding didn’t raise his voice, but the question seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the room. “Or does he still think it was me who drew the knife slowly down her shoulders and thighs, me who sank the brand into her flesh?” Briggs’s grip on Dean tightened. If he’d been steering him toward the door before, he was shoving him now—anything to get Dean out of there. But Dean’s feet were suddenly glued to the floor. Go, I told Dean silently. Just go. But he didn’t. Redding relished the moment. “Tell your agent friend there what you did, Dean. Tell him how you came out to the barn where I had Veronica Sterling bound hand and foot. 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. Tell him how you made her bleed. Tell him how she screamed when you burned an R into her flesh. Tell him how you asked me for her.” Redding closed his eyes and tilted his head toward the ceiling, like a man offering thanks to his gods. “Tell him she was your first.” First victim. For Redding, that was the only first that mattered, no matter how much innuendo he might jam into the word.

oh fuck oh what the fuck

the beginning of some kind of incantation. “I have to say, I’m surprised your dearest husband—excuse me, ex-husband—allowed you in such close quarters with the devil incarnate.” Sterling shrugged. “You’re just a man. A pathetic little man living in a cage.”

GET EMMM

“This isn’t your initial,” she said, dropping her voice to just above a whisper. “This is Dean’s initial. We knew you were listening. We knew you’d be back to check his work, and that the only way you’d believe that he didn’t have ulterior motives was if there was proof.” Her finger made another loop of the R. “I told him to do it. I begged him to, I made him promise to, and he did—no matter how sick it made him, no matter how much it has haunted him ever since, he did it. And it worked.” “No.” “You believed the act. You trusted him, because you wanted to believe that he was your son, that there was nothing of his mother in him. More fool, you.” Sterling righted her shirt. “I didn’t escape, Daniel. Dean let me go. He covered for me.”

ok this is the first time I actually got emotional from this book oh my baby

“He warned me away from you. I wasn’t listening. I didn’t understand, and when I came by without backup, when you jumped me—he was watching. He had a plan, and he executed that plan at all costs.” She smiled. “You should be proud. He’s just as brilliant as you are, smart enough, even, to pull one over on dear old dad.”

“Are you trying to replace Dean?” I asked. It was hard to look at him and not see Locke and the way she’d fixated on me.

“Do you know what he’s done? What he is?” I could feel Dean stiffening behind me, but I didn’t give in to the urge to turn around. “I know about Veronica Sterling. I know about Gloria, and all the others.” That wasn’t quite true—but I let Redding think that Dean had told me everything. “And you don’t care?” Redding said, tilting his head to one side and staring at me, into me. “You’re drawn to darkness.” “No,” I said. “I’m drawn to Dean, and I do care, because I care about him.

Some people said that broken bones grew back stronger. On the good days, I told myself that was true, that each time the world tried to break me, I became a little less breakable.