“What happened?” Dean asked me, his voice thick with emotions I couldn’t quite identify. I knew he was probably asking about the abduction, about my face, about being tied up in the cabin and scrambling for my life, but I chose to interpret the question slightly differently.
“I hit him in the head with a rock. Then I jumped on him from up in that tree.” I gestured vaguely with one hand. Dean stared at me, his expression unreadable until the ends of his lips began to turn slowly upward.
“I was wrong,” he said, “when I said I just felt something.” He was breathing heavily. I couldn’t breathe at all. “When I said I wasn’t sure it was enough.”
He was scared, like me. But he felt it, and I felt it, and he was there. I’d spent so long trying not to choose, trying not to feel, and in an instant, I felt something inside of me break, like floodwaters bursting through a dam.
Dean pulled me gently toward him. His lips brushed lightly over mine. The action was hesitant, uncertain. My hands settled on the back of his neck, pulling him closer.
Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe when the smoke cleared, things would look different. But I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t keep living my life on maybes if I wanted to live.
I rose up on my toes, my body pressed against his, and returned the kiss, the pain in my face fading, washed away with the rest of the world, until there was only this moment—one that I hadn’t thought I’d live to see.
I spent the night at the hospital. I had a concussion, bruising on my neck from nearly being strangled, and countless cuts and abrasions on my hands and legs. They had to pry Dean away from me.
I was alive.
The next morning, the doctors released me into Agent Briggs’s custody. We were halfway to his car before I realized that he was being too quiet.
“Where’s Agent Sterling?” I asked.
“Gone.” We climbed into the car. I gingerly pulled on my seat belt. Briggs pulled out onto the road. “Her injuries were minimal, but she’s on a mandated leave until a Bureau psychologist gives her the green light for fieldwork.”
“Is she coming back?” My eyes stung as I asked the question. A week ago, I would have been glad to be rid of her, but now…
“I don’t know,” Briggs said, a muscle in his jaw ticking. He was the kind of person who hated admitting uncertainty. “After Redding captured her—after Dean helped her escape—she fought to get back to active duty. She threw herself into work.”
That was then. This was now. I’d thought Agent Sterling was coming around to the idea of the program, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the look on her face when she’d asked me why. Why hadn’t I listened to her? Why had I made the madman take me, too?
All she’d wanted, in those last moments, was to believe that I would make it out of that hellhole alive.
“She blames herself?” I asked—but it wasn’t really a question.
“Herself. Her father. Me.” Something in Briggs’s tone told me that Agent Sterling wasn’t the only one shouldering that guilt. “You were never supposed to be in the field,” he told me. “None of your lives were ever supposed to be on the line.”
If the Naturals hadn’t worked this case, Christopher Simms would have killed that girl. If I hadn’t gone with Agent Sterling, she’d be dead. No matter how much what I’d been through haunted Agent Briggs, I knew in my gut that at the end of the day, he would be able to live with the risks of this program. I wasn’t sure that Agent Sterling could.
“Where are we going?” I asked when Briggs drove past our exit on the highway.
He didn’t say anything for several minutes. Mile blurred into mile. We ended up at an apartment complex across the street from the prison.
“There’s something I want you to see.”
Webber’s apartment had two bedrooms. His life was highly segmented. He slept in one room—hospital corners on his bed, blackout curtains on the windows—and he worked in the other.
Briggs’s team was cataloging evidence when we walked in: notebooks and photographs, weapons, a computer. Hundreds—if not thousands—of evidence bags told the story of Webber’s life.
The story of his relationship with Daniel Redding.
“Go ahead,” Briggs told me, nodding toward the carefully documented bags. “Just wear gloves.”
He hadn’t brought Dean to this crime scene. He hadn’t brought Michael or Lia or Sloane.
“What am I looking for?” I asked, slipping on a pair of gloves.
“Nothing,” Briggs said simply.
You brought me here to look at this, I thought, slipping back into profiling mode without even thinking about it. Why?
Because this wasn’t about processing evidence. It was about me and what I’d been through out in the woods. I would always have questions about Locke, the way that Dean would always have questions about his father, but this UNSUB—this man who’d tried to snuff out my life—didn’t have to be some larger-than-life figure, another ghost to haunt my dreams.
Hospital corners and hunting rifles.