“A motorcycle is closer to a hundred,” Sloane prattled on happily at high volume. “I’m betting this music is at one hundred and three. And a half. One hundred and three and a half.”
Lia finally switched the song to one of her dance tracks. “Come on,” she said, chancing coming within throttling range to take me by one hand and Sloane by another. “We caught the bad guy.” She pulled the two of us out onto the lawn, her hips swaying to the beat of the music, her eyes daring me to object. “I think this calls for a celebration. Don’t you?”
I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. I should have expected the nightmares. They’d plagued me on and off for five years. Of course Redding’s mind games had brought them back.
It’s not just that, I thought in a moment of brutal honesty with myself. They come back when I’m stressed. When things are changing.
This wasn’t just about Redding. It was about Michael and Dean, but most of all, it was about me. Sloane had asked me once, in a game of Truth or Dare, how many people I loved. Not just romantic love—any kind of love. At the time, I’d wondered if growing up with only my mother for company—and then losing her the way I had—had cut my ability to love other people off at the knees.
My answer had been one.
But now…
You want to know why you, in particular, concern me, Cassie? Agent Sterling’s words rang in my ears. You’re the one who really feels things. You won’t ever be able to stop caring. It will always be personal.
I cared about the victims we fought for—the Mackenzie McBrides and the nameless girls at coffee shops. I cared about the people in this house—not just Michael and Dean, but Sloane and Lia. Lia, who would have thrown herself on an open flame for Dean.
Lia, who’d flung herself in the middle of my moment with Michael with that same determination.
I tried to lull my mind into silence and myself back to sleep.
Mackenzie McBride. The girl in the coffee shop. My thoughts circled back. Why? I turned my head to the side on my pillow. My chest rose and fell with steady, even breaths.
The FBI had gotten Mackenzie McBride’s case wrong. They’d missed the villain hiding in plain sight. But we hadn’t missed anything on this case. Christopher Simms was the villain. They’d caught him in the act. He’d had supplies in his truck—bindings for the girl’s ankles and wrists, a knife, the brand.
The girl in the coffee shop. That was what I kept coming back to. Who was Christopher’s intended victim? Redding had known that someone was scheduled to die. He’d told us to expect it.
How do you choose who dies?
I don’t.
Clark had chosen Emerson.
Christopher had chosen his mother.
Fogle had been nothing but a complication that needed to be dealt with.
So who chose the girl?
There was no getting away from that question. Maybe it was nothing, but I slipped out of my bed, out of the room. The house was silent, but for the sound of my own light footsteps as I made my way down the stairs. The door to the study—Agent Sterling’s temporary lodging—was open a crack. The faint glow of lamplight from inside the room told me that she wasn’t asleep, either.
I hovered at the door. I couldn’t quite bring myself to knock. Suddenly, the door flew inward. Agent Sterling stood on the other side, her brown hair loose and messy, her face free of makeup, and her gun at the ready. When she saw me, she let out a breath and lowered the weapon.
“Cassie,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here,” I responded automatically.
“You live directly outside my door?”
“You’re on edge, too,” I told her, reading that much in her behavior, the fact that she’d answered the door with a gun. “You can’t sleep. Neither can I.”
She shook her head in chagrin—though whether that emotion was directed at herself or at me, I couldn’t tell—and then she took a step back, inviting me into the room. I crossed the threshold, and she shut the door behind me, flipping on the overhead light.
I’d forgotten that Briggs’s study was full of taxidermy—predators, posed seconds before they struck. “No wonder you can’t sleep,” I told her.
She bit back a smile. “He’s always had a flair for the dramatic.” She sat down on the end of the folded-out couch. With her hair loose, she looked younger. “Why can’t you sleep?” she asked. “Ankle tracker giving you problems?”
I glanced down at my feet, bewildered, as if they had only just appeared on my body. The constant weight on my right ankle should have been more bothersome than it was, but there’d been so much going on the past few days, I’d barely even noticed it.
“No,” I said. “I mean, yes, I’d love for you to take it off, but that’s not why I’m up. It’s about the girl, the one that Christopher Simms was meeting at the coffee shop. The one he was planning to abduct.”