YOU
The president’s lawn was a nice touch. You could have dumped her anywhere. You didn’t have to risk being seen.
“No one saw me.” You murmur the words with a self-satisfied hum. “But they saw her.”
They saw the lines you carved into her body. They saw the noose you slipped around her neck. Just thinking about it, about the way her eyes bulged as the life drained out of her, fragile little arms tensing against the restraints, pale skin dyed with dainty rivulets of red…
Your lips curve into a smile. The moment has passed, but the game—the game is long. Next time, you won’t be so eager. Next time, you’ll have nothing to prove. Next time, you’ll take it slow.
Dean left the room right after dropping the bombshell about his father’s MO. The rest of us sat there in silence, the minutes ticking by, each more saturated than the last with all the things we weren’t saying.
There was no point in trying to take a practice GED. The only thing I could think about was the girl in the video, her body dangling off the front of the car, black noose fitted tightly around her lifeless neck. Dean hadn’t said what it was about the video that had convinced him that the UNSUB was mimicking his father’s crimes.
The fact that her arms and her legs were bound?
The way she was hung from the car?
Logically, those could have been coincidences. But Dean had sounded so sure, and he had believed me at a time when I’d had a theory that sounded just as crazy. Crazier, even.
“You’re thinking about last summer.” Michael was the one who broke the silence as he directed those words to me. “Your whole body is hunched with the effort of holding it in.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird?” I said, my eyes darting from Michael to the others. “Six weeks ago, Locke was reenacting my mother’s murder, and now someone’s out there playing copycat to Dean’s dad?”
“News flash, Cassie.” Lia stood up, her eyes flashing. “Not everything is about you.” I was taken aback by the venom in her voice. Lia and I might not have been friends—exactly—but she didn’t usually see me as the enemy, either.
“Lia—”
“This. Is. Not. About. You.” She turned on her heels and stalked toward the door. Halfway there, she stopped and turned back, her eyes boring through mine. “You think you know what this is doing to Dean? You think you relate? You don’t have any idea what he’s going through. None.”
“You’re not angry at Cassie, Lia,” Michael cut in. “You’re angry at the situation and the fact that Dean’s off somewhere, dealing with this alone.”
“Screw you, Michael,” Lia spat back. She let the words hang in the air, her fury a palpable thing, and then she left. A few seconds later, I heard the front door open and slam shut. Sloane, Michael, and I stared at one another in stunned silence.
“It’s possible I was mistaken,” Michael said finally. “Maybe she’s not just angry at the situation.”
Michael could diagnose the precise mix of emotions a person was feeling. He could pinpoint the difference between annoyance and simmering fury and fight-or-flight rage. But the whys of emotions…That fell somewhere in between his skill and mine. The things that mattered to people, the things that hurt them, the things that made them the people they were—that was all me.
“Lia’s known Dean longer than any of us,” I said, mentally going through the details of the situation and the personalities involved. “No matter how many people come into this house, to Lia, they’ll always be a unit of two. But Dean…”
“Unit of one,” Michael finished for me. “He’s Mr. Lone Wolf.”
When things got bad, Dean’s impulse was to put up walls, to push other people away. But I’d never seen him shut Lia out before. She was his family. And this time, he’d left her on the outside—with us.
“Dean likes Cassie,” Sloane announced, completely oblivious to the fact that perhaps now was not the time for a conversation about any fondness Dean might feel for me. Michael, ever a master of masking his own emotions, didn’t show any discernable reaction as she continued. “Lia knows Dean likes Cassie. I don’t think she minds. Mostly, I think she just thinks it’s funny. But right now…it’s not funny.”