All In (The Naturals, #3)

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Anything can be counted. The hairs on her head. The words she’s spoken to you. The number of breaths she has left. It’s beautiful, really. The numbers. The girl. The things you have planned. The thing you’re destined to become.

My mother wasn’t a person who’d believed in missing anything for long.

“Too young to party, just old enough to participate in federal investigations of serial murder.” Lia let out an elaborate sigh. “Story of my life.”

Home isn’t a place, Cassie. The memory crept up on me. Home is the people who love you most, the people who will always love you, forever and ever, no matter what.

“Did you know,” she said brightly, making another attempt at conversation, “that elevators only kill about twenty-seven people per year?”

“I may have led them to believe Judd was my butler.” That got nothing more than a slight eyebrow raise out of Judd, who poured himself a cup of coffee without responding. “If anyone asks,” Michael called to him, “your name is Alfred.”

You like trying different people’s skin on for size. You’re fascinated by the way the mind works, the way it breaks, the way people survive things no one should be able to survive.

“When you lose the remote control to your television, four percent of the time it ends up in the freezer!” Sloane blurted out loudly.

As they gathered their possessions and turned toward us, I noticed two things. The first was the thick silver chain Camille wore looped multiple times around her neck. The second thing was Aaron Shaw noticing Camille.

“It’s the Fibonacci sequence.”

Believe me, he’d said. I believed that he knew what it was like to be broken. I believed that I wasn’t broken to him.

We are officially at issue capacity, Cassie. So I’m sorry, but you don’t get to be effed up right now.” She tapped the tip of my nose with her finger. “It’s not your turn.”

“I didn’t see it at first,” she continued. “The pattern picks up mid-integer.” “Pretend for a moment,” Lia told her, “that we’re all very, very slow.”

You know what comes next. You know the order. You know the rules. This is bigger than ants in an ant farm could ever imagine. No one can stop you. You are Death. You are the house. And the house always wins.

“Who picked the restaurant?” Sterling asked. Tory shrugged. “She did.” Behind me, Lia swung her legs off the couch and stood. “And there we have it,” she told us. “That’s the lie.”

“First, defensiveness isn’t an emotion. It’s a combination of emotions that plays out in different ways in different people at different times. In this case, we’ve got a tantalizing cocktail of anger and self-presentation and guilt.”

“Temporary freezing of the facial muscles, brows fighting the urge to draw together, lips just barely stretching themselves back.” He shifted his flask rhythmically from one hand to the other and back again, then clarified. “Fear.”

“I was just asking Ms. Howard if anyone could verify her whereabouts after she parted ways with Ms. Holt.” And she asked for her attorney. Briggs let the second half of that statement go unsaid.

Beau and Tory both answered the question, and they both said the exact same thing. “Thomas Wesley.”

“I’m surprised you don’t know.” Wesley’s voice broke through my horror. “Tory Howard is a decent magician, but her real talent is hypnosis.”

“Based on my calculations, now would be an appropriate time for someone to hug me.” Beside her, Dean opened his arms, and Sloane melted into them. “Raise your hand if you didn’t realize Dean was a hugger,” Michael said, raising his own hand. Lia snorted.

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

Sloane replied brightly. “And you’ll never guess what I found.” Security holes that the world’s most elite crime-solving agencies seriously need to patch?

“The UNSUB who killed Scarlett,” I said. “Nightshade. How many people did he kill?” I realized, distantly, that the question I’d asked couldn’t be answered with a yes or a no. Judd’s expression wavered, just for an instant. I thought he would refuse to answer, but he didn’t. “As far as we know,” he said, his voice hoarse, “he killed nine.”

Everything can be counted. Everything but true infinity has its end. Without the knife in hand, all you can do is lightly trace the pattern on the surface of your shirt. You can feel the cuts underneath, feel the promise you etched into your own skin. Around. Up and down. Left and right. Seven plus two is nine. Nine is the number. And Nine is what you were always meant to be.

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

“You go.” Lia beat me to responding. “We’ll be fine.” Lia rarely spoke in sentences that short. The look on her face reminded me that Judd had been taking care of Lia since she was thirteen years old.

“You really think this is the appropriate time to drink?” Dean asked him. Michael stared at him. “Redding, I think this is the very definition of ‘an appropriate time to drink.’”

“In Alaska, you can be criminally prosecuted for feeding alcohol to a moose.”

“Why bring this to us?” Lia asked. “Daddy Dearest isn’t going to be very happy with you.” “He rarely is.” Aaron stood, shrugging off the words like they meant nothing—which, of course, told me they meant more than he would ever admit.

Profiling came with a cost. But 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.

The only group not represented was children. No kids. I wanted to cling to that, but I couldn’t.

Drowning, burning alive, impaled through the heart— Alexandra Ruiz. Sylvester Wilde. Eugene Lockhart. Our UNSUB was going in order.

You need nine, because that’s the way this is done. Those are the rules. My understanding of the Vegas UNSUB shifted. There is an order. You’re following it. But being a follower isn’t enough.

“Cult 101,” she said. “You don’t talk to outsiders.” Her voice was strangely flat. “You don’t tell them what they’re not blessed enough to know.”

Lia rarely showed us her true self. But what we’d just seen was more than that. The flat voice, the words she’d said—that wasn’t just the real Lia. That was the girl she’d spent years running from. That was Sadie.

“for those of you who might be a little slow on the uptake. Whoever our killer is, I’d bet a lot of money that he’s not a part of this group. If he were, the cult would be monitoring him. And if they were monitoring him and they found out that he’d shared even one of their secrets?” Lia shrugged, the very picture of careless indifference. “He wouldn’t be our problem. He’d already be dead.”