He knows, I thought. He knows this was Locke’s, and he knows why I kept it.
“I can’t stop thinking about them,” Dean said after a moment. “Gary Clarkson. Christopher Simms. They were never my father’s endgame.”
I lowered the lipstick back into the tube and capped it. “You were,” I said, knowing it was true, knowing that somehow, this had always been about Dean.
Dean closed his eyes. I could feel him next to me, feel each breath in and each breath out. “I can’t decide if my father engineered this whole thing just so I’d be forced to go see him, or if he was banking on one of his students eventually trying to prove himself the better man by killing me.”
Dean’s eyelids lifted, and I thought through his words. Emerson’s murderer had killed Clark. That was the work of an UNSUB who wanted to be Redding’s only apprentice. His only heir. His only son.
“Your father doesn’t want you dead,” I told Dean. For Redding, that would be a last resort. He’d kill Dean only if he believed he’d truly lost him—and Daniel Redding was incapable of ever believing he’d truly lost.
“No,” Dean agreed, “he doesn’t want me dead, but if one of the UNSUBs had escalated, if one of them had come here to kill me, I would have defended myself.”
Maybe, in Redding’s mind, that was the way this was supposed to end, with Dean killing the others. Redding saw Dean as an extension of himself. Of course he thought Dean would win—and if Dean didn’t, well, then maybe Daniel Redding believed that he deserved to die. For being weak.
For not being his father’s son.
The phone rang. My muscles tensed. I was frozen, unable to move, unable to breathe. Two seconds later, the phone stopped ringing. Someone had answered.
Please let them have found him in time. Please let them have found him in time.
“Dean.” I managed to force his name out of my suddenly dry mouth. He sat, just as immobile, beside me. “Last summer, after everything that happened, Michael told me to figure out how I felt. About you.”
I didn’t know why I was saying this now—but I needed to. Any second, someone would come in with news. Any second, things could change. I felt like a train hurtling toward a tunnel.
Please don’t let there be another body.
“Townsend, he means something to you,” Dean said, his own voice as hoarse as mine. “He makes you smile.” And you deserve to smile. I could practically hear him thinking it, could feel him fighting against the words he said next, unable to keep them back. “What did you figure out?”
He was asking. And if he was asking, that meant that he wanted to know, that the answer mattered to him. I swallowed. “Do you—Dean, I need to know what you feel. For me.”
Any second, things could change.
“I feel…something.” Dean’s words came unevenly. He turned toward me, his leg brushing against mine. “But I don’t know if I can—I don’t know if it’s enough.” He closed my hand around the tube of lipstick I was holding, his hand covering mine. “I don’t know if I can….”
Can what? Open up? Let go? Risk letting something matter so much that losing it could push you off the edge?
Michael appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Dean let go of my hand.
“They found him,” Michael said, coming to a standstill and looking up at us. “Briggs’s team found Christopher Simms.”
They apprehended Christopher Simms outside of a coffee shop, waiting for a girl. In his truck, they’d found zip ties, a hunting knife, a cattle brand, and black nylon rope.
Body after body after body, Redding had promised. Because you aren’t smart enough. Because you’re weak.
But we weren’t, and this time, we’d won. That hunting knife wouldn’t slice into another girl’s skin. Her hands wouldn’t be bound behind her back. She wouldn’t feel burning metal melting through her flesh.
We’d saved that girl at the coffee shop, the same way we’d saved little Mackenzie McBride. Another victim would be dead right now if I hadn’t sat down across the table from Daniel Redding. If Sterling hadn’t wound him up enough to bait him into torturing us with the truth. If Lia hadn’t been there behind the mirror, reading Redding for deception and finding none. If Sloane hadn’t realized that Lia’s ability wasn’t on the fritz.
If Michael and I had never met Clark, if Dean hadn’t gone out to visit Trina, how would this have played out?
Dean was off dealing with the news in his own way. Michael had retreated to working on his car. I was standing in the backyard, eyeing the trash can, the Rose Red lipstick in my hand.