“I am not your son.”
Redding’s hands shot out. In a flash, he was on his feet. Dean must have been leaning forward, because somehow, Redding managed to get hold of his shirt. Father jerked son to his feet. “You are my son, more than you were ever your whore mother’s. I’m in you, boy. In your blood, in your mind, in every breath you take.” Redding’s face was close to Dean’s now, close enough that Dean would have felt the heat from his breath with each word. “You know it. You fear it.”
One second Dean was just standing there, and the next, his hands were fisted in his father’s orange jumpsuit, and Daniel Redding was being pulled bodily across the table.
“Hey!” Briggs came between the two of them. Redding let go of Dean first. He held his hands up in submission.
You never really submit, I thought. You never give in. You get what you want—and you want Dean.
Agent Sterling’s hand clamped around my elbow. “We’re going,” she told me. The guard tried to stop her, but she turned the full force of her glare on him. “One more word, one more step, and I swear to God, I will have your job.”
I looked back at Dean. Briggs put a hand on his chest and pushed, hard. Like a sleepwalker suddenly awakened, Dean jerked backward, dropping his hold on his father. He looked at the two-way mirror, and I would have sworn that he could see me standing there.
“Cassandra,” Agent Sterling snapped. “We’re going. Now.”
The last thing I heard before I left was Dean’s voice, empty and hard. “Tell me about the professor’s cabin.”
“This was a mistake.” Sterling waited until the two of us were ensconced in the car before saying those words.
“Going with the guard?” I asked.
“Bringing you here. Bringing Dean here. Staying in that room, watching that. All of it.” When Sterling said all of it, I got the sense that she wasn’t just talking about the way that Briggs and the director had chosen to handle this case. She meant the life Dean was living. The Naturals program. All of it.
“It isn’t the same,” I told her. “What we do as a team, and what they’re having Dean do in there with his father—it’s not the same.” Putting Dean in a room with Daniel Redding ripped open all the old scars, every wound that man had inflicted on Dean’s psyche.
That wasn’t what this program was. That wasn’t what we did.
“You should have seen Dean when we got the call that the FBI had recovered Mackenzie McBride,” I said, thinking of that Dean. Our Dean. “He didn’t just smile. He beamed. Did you know he has dimples?”
Agent Sterling didn’t reply.
“Dean was never going to have a normal childhood.” I wasn’t sure why it felt so important to make her understand that. “There are things you don’t come back from. Normal’s not an option, for any of us.” I thought of what Sloane had said. “If we’d had normal childhoods, we wouldn’t be Naturals.”
Agent Sterling finally turned to look at me. “Are we talking about Dean’s father or your mother?” She let that question sink in. “I’ve read your file, Cassie.”
“I’m Cassie now?” I asked. She wrinkled her forehead. I elaborated. “You’ve called me Cassandra since you showed up.”
“Do you want me to keep calling you by your full name?”
“No.” I paused. “But you want to keep calling me by it. You don’t like nicknames. They bring you closer to people.”
Sterling sucked in a breath. “You’re going to have to learn to stop that,” she said.
“Stop what?”
“Most people don’t like being profiled. Some things are better left unsaid.” She paused. “Where were you last night?”
My heart nearly jumped out of my chest. The question came out of nowhere.
I played dumb. “What do you mean?” She’d threatened the program when all Sloane had done was make use of the basement crime sets. If she knew what Lia, Michael, and I had done the night before, there was no telling what she might do.
“You think that I dislike you.” Sterling was using her profiler voice, getting into my head. “You see me as the enemy, but I am not your enemy, Cassie.”
“You have a problem with this program.” I paused. “I don’t know why you even took this job. You have a problem with what Briggs is doing here, and you have a problem with me.”
I expected her to deny it. She surprised me. “My problem with you,” she said, enunciating each word, “is that you don’t do what you’re told. All the instincts in the world are worthless if you can’t work within the system. Briggs never understood that, and neither do you.”