I looked up from my work. I was going over the test Lia had filled out for me, correcting the wrong answers. “You want me to threaten you?”
“I want to know how you would threaten me,” Michael corrected. “Obviously, threatening the program wouldn’t be the way to go. I don’t exactly have the warm fuzzies for the FBI.”
I tapped the edge of my pencil against the practice test. Michael’s challenge was a welcome distraction. “I’d start with your Porsche,” I said.
“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.
“You’re the one who asked,” I said. Michael should have known by now not to throw down the gauntlet unless he wanted me picking it up.
“The depravity of you, Cassie Hobbes.” He was clearly impressed.
I shrugged. “You and Dean have some kind of pseudo-sworn-enemy, pseudo-sibling-rivalry thing going on. You’d rather I set your car on fire than give it to Dean. It’s the perfect threat.”
Michael didn’t contradict my logic. Instead, he shook his head and smiled. “Anyone ever tell you that you have a sadistic streak?”
I felt the breath whoosh out of my lungs. He couldn’t have known the effect those words would have on me. I turned back to the practice test, allowing my hair to fall into my face, but it was too late. Michael had already seen the split second of horror—loathing—fear—disgust on my face.
“Cassie—”
“I’m fine.”
Locke had been a sadist. Part of the pleasure she’d gotten out of killing had been imagining what her victims were going through. I had no desire to hurt anyone. Ever. But being a Natural profiler meant that I instinctively knew other people’s weaknesses. Knowing what people wanted and knowing what they feared were two sides of the same coin.
Michael wasn’t really calling me sadistic. I knew that, and he knew that I’d never intentionally hurt anyone. But sometimes, knowing that you could do something was almost as bad as having actually done it.
“Hey.” Michael tilted his head upside down to get a good look at my face. “I was kidding. No Sad Cassie face, okay?”
“This isn’t my sad face,” I told him. There was a point in time when he would have pushed the hair out of my face and let his hand linger on my jaw. Not anymore.
The unspoken rules said it had to be my choice. I could feel him, watching me, waiting for me to say something. He stayed there, staring at me upside down, his face just a few inches away from mine.
His mouth just a few inches away from mine.
“I know a Sad Cassie face when I see one,” he said. “Even upside down.”
I brushed my hair over my shoulders and leaned back. Trying to hide what I was feeling from Michael was impossible. I shouldn’t have even tried.
“You and Lia back on speaking terms?” he asked me.
I was grateful for the subject change. “Lia and I are…whatever Lia and I normally are. I don’t think she’s plotting my immediate demise.”
Michael nodded sagely. “So she’s not going to go for your throat the moment she figures out you broke the holy commandment of Thou shalt give Dean his space?”
I’d thought my visit to Dean last night had gone unnoticed. Apparently, I’d thought wrong.
“I wanted to see how he was doing.” I felt like I had to explain, even though Michael hadn’t asked for an explanation. “I didn’t want him to be alone.”
Reading emotions made Michael an expert at concealing them, so when I saw a flicker of something in his eyes, I knew that he’d chosen not to hide it from me. He liked that I was the kind of person who cared about the people in this house. He just wished that the person I’d spent last night caring about wasn’t Dean.
“And how goes Sir Broods-A-Lot’s familial angst?” Michael did a good imitation of someone who didn’t really care about the answer to that question. He might have even been able to fool another emotion reader—but my ability wasn’t just about posture or facial expressions or what a person was feeling at any given moment.
Behavior. Personality. Environment.
Michael was snarking to hide the fact that he did care about the answer to that question.
“If you want to know how Dean’s holding up, you can just ask.”
Michael shrugged noncommittally. He wasn’t going to admit that Lia, Sloane, and I weren’t the only ones worried about Dean. A noncommittal shrug was as close to an expression of concern as I was going to get.
“He’s not okay,” I said. “He won’t be okay until Briggs and Sterling close this case. If they’d just tell him what’s going on, it might help, but that’s not going to happen. Sterling won’t let it.”
Michael shot me a sideways glance. “You really don’t like Agent Sterling.”