All In (The Naturals, #3)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Part of me would always be in that blood-spattered dressing room with my mother. Part of me would always be at the safe house with Locke.

“You don’t tell Briggs, and in exchange, your father—” “He’s very generous.” Michael’s words cut into me. The car he’d been driving, this hotel—that was the price Michael was exacting for the damage his father had inflicted? You make him pay because you can. You make him pay because at least then you’re worth something.

“You’re good at being there for people,” Dean murmured behind me. “But you don’t have much practice at letting people be there for you.”

“This,” Judd muttered, “is why we can’t have nice things.” He’d tried to tear us away from our work—and there work was, sitting at the bar.

Aaron’s father. My stomach twisted, because if this was Aaron’s father, he was Sloane’s father, too.

Five minutes after Camille Holt and Tory Howard exited the restaurant, Aaron excused himself from his family’s table.

“It’s the Fibonacci sequence.”

the Fibonacci sequence was. “It’s a series of numbers, derived from a deceptively simple formula where each subsequent integer is calculated by adding together the two previous numbers in the series.”

We might as well start calling this game Two Truths, a Lie, and a Hug,

“The power to predict what she would do,” he continued. I concentrated. “The power to influence her. To knock over the first domino and watch the rest fall.” “To do the math,” Dean filled in.

“It’s about outsmarting them.”

“More violent with each kill,” Dean said. “And more personal. He’s escalating.”

“a killer who moves on to progressively more violent means with each subsequent kill is escalating.”

“Why our UNSUB escalated, and why he or she stopped.”

“It’s not done yet. The Grand Ballroom is next.”

“If you start at the origin of the spiral and work your way out, you can stop at any time. But if you start at the outside and work your way in, there’s a start, and there’s a finish. The pattern is set.”

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

“It showed up this morning, itching like hell.” More than thirty-six hours after we’d left Vegas. “Toxicodendrons.”

“Pretty sure I’d know if I’d been exposed before,” Michael pointed out. “Poison ivy and poison oak are toxicodendrons.” Michael did a one-eighty and nodded sagely. “I have been exposed before.”

“So you’re not planning to sneak off to Vegas tomorrow by yourself to try to lure this UNSUB out?”

“You aren’t going back there to play bait.” Dean got up and went to stand toe to toe with Michael. “You aren’t leaving this house.” “I’m touched, Redding,”

“I get it. You don’t like running away.” Dean’s voice was quiet, his eyes never leaving Michael’s. “You don’t run. You don’t hide. You don’t cower. You don’t beg.”

“Get out of my head.” Michael’s

Michael was marked for death. A serial killer from Judd’s past was stalking us all. But we were doing this—right here, right now. “I never had friends,” I said. “Growing up, it was just me and my mom. There was never anyone else. She never let there be anyone else.”

“I didn’t know how to really be with people. I couldn’t…” The words wouldn’t come. “I kept everyone at a distance, and there you were, smashing through every wall. I felt something,” I told Michael. “You made me feel something, and I am grateful for that. Because you were the first, Michael.”

“The first friend,” Michael said finally, “that you ever had.”

“It’s not running,” I told Michael, “if we catch him first.”

“Letting someone write a number on my arm in invisible, poison-ivy ink?” Michael suggested archly. “Shockingly, no. I remember dropping something. I remember bending down to pick it up.” He closed his eyes. “I dropped something,” he repeated. “I bent to pick it up. And then…”

“Four variables.” Sloane tapped the thumb on her right hand to each of her fingers as she rattled them off. “Date, location, method, and victim.” “If the equation changes, the UNSUB has to adapt.”

“You would change victims rather than location,”

“Maybe it’s too late for me,” Judd continued, his voice hard, “and maybe it isn’t, but I’m telling you, he’ll be there tomorrow.”

“Hypothetically speaking,” Lia said to Judd, “if Sloane were hacking the Majesty’s security feed, would you want to know?”

“His pupils were dilated,” Michael put in. “Before the lights went off, his pupils were already dilated—alertness, psychological arousal.”

“The suspect’s not wearing gloves.” Lia was the one who made the observation. “I doubt he left fingerprints on the knife. So what gives?”

“Something disposable. You wrap the knife in it, dispose of it separately.”

say. If we don’t find it, if we don’t find the person who has it… Our killer would win.

“Thomas Wesley’s assistant.” Michael recognized him, too. “Not a big fan of the FBI, is he?”

“She won’t talk to you,” I said out loud, “but she might talk to Sloane.”

“So you are going to listen,” Sloane continued. “You’re going to listen, because you know. You know that just because you ignore something, that doesn’t make it go away. Pretending something doesn’t matter doesn’t make it matter less.”

“We’ll tell you about our killer,” I continued evenly. “And then you’ll tell us.”

“Have you ever seen Beau draw a spiral?” That was a gamble, but the violence we’d seen these past few days was years in the making.

“He used to draw them in the dirt.” Tory’s voice was hoarse.

“They found Beau half-dead in the desert. He was six years old, and someone just left him there. No food, no water. He’d been out there for days.” Her voice shook slightly. “No one knew where he’d come from or who left him. Beau couldn’t tell them.

“Keep going,” Michael told them, his words going to the earpiece both agents wore. “He’s surprised that you know about the others. And the way his eyes just darted toward his lawyer? Agitation. Anger. Fear.”

You weren’t expecting this. You weren’t expecting the FBI to know. Beau went pale. The FBI can’t know.

was born for this. The rest of them, they’re recruited as adults, but number nine is always born within their walls.

The symbol. I know that symbol. Seven circles around a cross. I’d seen it carved into the lid of a plain wooden coffin, uncovered at the crossroads on a country dirt road. “You wish you were Nine,” Agent Sterling said, still pressing. I felt my limbs going numb. Blackness crept in on my field of vision.

The symbol Beau had carved into his own flesh had also been carved into my mother’s coffin. Not possible. June twenty-first. Not a Fibonacci date. My mother died in June.

“I don’t,” he struggled to say. “I don’t wish I was Nine.”

Beau was poisoned. I thought the words, but didn’t understand them. The cult killed him. Nightshade killed Beau. Beau,