All In (The Naturals, #3)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

You’re told the FBI suspects that the next murder will take place in the Grand Ballroom. You’re told they’re watching it. Waiting, just like you. You take that to mean that someone has seen the pattern—just a fraction of it, just a piece.

“My client will not be answering any questions about Aaron Shaw.”

She didn’t hire him, I thought again. The Shaws did.

“Have you taught anyone?”

Aaron, I thought. She taught Aaron.

There was a card inside. I recognized the handwriting as Aaron’s. The message said simply, I’m not like my father.

The person who cares about Sloane.

“So are we all thinking that either Aaron’s little girlfriend is our killer and she just had a psychotic break, or that our killer somehow hypnotized her into delivering that message?”

Dean lunged forward. He hated violence. He avoided it at all costs because he could never be sure that he wouldn’t wake up one day and like it too much. But if anyone laid so much as a finger on Sloane…

YES PROTECT OUR GIRL SLOANE

I caught sight of Dean sleeping. He’d pushed his bed to one side of the room and slept with his back to the wall. His blond hair fell gently into his eyes. His face was free of tension. He looked peaceful.

The number of victims mattered, the same way the numbers on the wrists did, the same way the dates did.

“It was never closed. Sterling said that serial killers don’t just stop killing.”

Could we be dealing with the ...

The numbers matter.

A muscle in Beau’s cheek twitched. “Fear,” Michael said. “With a heaping side of anger, and underneath that…” Michael searched the lines of Beau’s face. “Playing around the corners of the lips—satisfaction.”

“Maybe Beau heard about the numbers,” I said, picking up where Lia had left off. “Not what the pattern was, exactly, just that there were numbers on all of the victims’ wrists.”

“That means the pattern’s not broken,” Sloane whispered. “The pattern isn’t wrong.” You are not broken, I translated. You are not wrong.

“Once upon a time, I was an amateur. Now, I’m an artist. Invincible. Unstoppable.” “And this time,” I said slowly, “you want credit.”

“Dance it off, Cassie.”

Serial killers don’t just stop.

I just hadn’t realized that Scarlett was Nightshade’s ninth.

You don’t want comfort. You never have. You want the man who killed your daughter, and you want him dead.

“Stop.” Sloane came over and grabbed his hand. “Judd,” she said, her heart in her eyes, “you can stop now.” But he couldn’t. “April fifth. April twenty-third. May fifth.” He swallowed, and even as his face tightened, I could see the sheen of tears in his eyes. “May eighth.”

STFU UGHHH

“Don’t,” Judd told her sharply. “Don’t you ever apologize for being what you are.”

STOOPPPPP

She didn’t like strangers, and she didn’t trust them—especially not with Sloane.

She was thinking—painfully hoping—that maybe Aaron wasn’t like their father after all.

One hundred and eighty-nine.

Profiling came with a cost.

I would pay it again and again and again to make it so that even just one child never came home to blood on the walls.

Sloane kept tearing pages off the notepad. The sound of her ripping sheet after sheet off was the only one in the room. She placed the blank pages in open gaps.

Her voice broke. Michael caught her and held her still, his arms wrapping around her and pulling her back to his chest. “I’ve got you,” he said.

My babyyyyy

Our UNSUB was going in order.

There is an order. You’re following it. But being a follower isn’t enough.

The Masters will finally see you for what you really are. What you have become.

“So?” Dean said. “Where are they going?” Sloane walked over to the window and stared out—through the spiral. “The Desert Rose.”

NO

But I won’t risk a single one of these kids.”

The concierge met us in the lobby. “Your departure is a bit abrupt.”

Im so suspicious of everyone, i even think its the concierge

She pressed her lips together and then blurted out, “I have gathered that there is an overwhelmingly large chance that your relationship with Aaron is intimate and/or sexual in nature.”

LMAAO

“It’s her.” I realized, when my father said the words, that he was crying. For a woman you barely knew? I wondered. Or for the daughter you don’t know any better?

I’m not. My face was wet, but I didn’t feel like I was crying. I didn’t feel anything.

“You’re an ugly crier,” Lia said. She brushed my hair lightly out of my face. “Hideous.”

My mother’s dead. She’s dust, and she’s bones, and the person who took her away from me buried her. He buried her in her best co...

I let myself be bundled away. I let myself retreat into Dean and Mic...

Every time I felt myself going under, they pulled me back up.

I knew. I made myself think the words. I always knew. If she’d survived, she would have come back for me. Somehow, some way. If she’d survived, she wouldn’t have left me alone.

This isn’t over. This isn’t done.

Dean was my voice when I had none.

“I already have tickets reserved under your name,” she said. “Six of them.”

WHAT

Six tickets.

First names. Last names.