All In (The Naturals, #3)(53)

Unable to get further than that, I took a step back and viewed this from the other side of the equation. I knew very little about Nightshade, but I knew a few things about Judd’s daughter. Months ago, Agent Sterling had told me a story. We’d been held captive at the time, and she’d told me that as a kid, her best friend, Scarlett, was continually coming up with ridiculously dire scenarios and brainstorming how to get out of them. You’ve been buried alive in a glass coffin with a sleeping cobra on your chest, she would say. What do you do?

On another occasion, Judd had indicated that a school-aged Scarlett had once convinced a young Veronica Sterling to accompany her on a “scientific expedition” that involved some minor (or possibly not-so-minor) cliff-scaling.

You were fearless and funny and too stubborn to be talked out of anything once your mind was set, I thought, reading between the lines of what I knew. Scarlett had grown up to work in the FBI labs. Were you working the Nightshade case? I asked her silently. Is that why you were in the lab that night? I thought of Sloane getting a puzzle on the brain and refusing to let go until the numbers made sense. Was that what you were like?

Without reading the file, there was no way for me to know. Did you see your killer, Scarlett? Did he watch you die? The questions kept coming, one after another. Was it fast, or was it slow? Did you call for help? Did you think about cobras and glass coffins? About Sterling and Briggs and Judd?

A knock at the door pulled me from my thoughts. I shivered. Like a kid saying Bloody Mary into a mirror, part of me felt like I might have pulled the dark thing toward me, just by thinking his name.

Dean stood and walked toward the door, Michael and Lia on his heels. Dean stared through the peephole. “What do you want?” Whoever was on the other side, Dean wasn’t feeling friendly.

“I have something for you.”

The voice was muffled slightly by the door, but I recognized it anyway.

“Aaron?” Sloane came to stand beside Dean. For a split second, her face lit up. I saw the exact moment she remembered that her half brother might not be all that different from the father they shared.

“Sloane.” Aaron spoke to her now, instead of Dean. “I know what you do for the FBI. My father told me.”

I didn’t trust Sloane’s father—and that made it very hard to trust Aaron.

“I don’t like it,” Aaron continued. “This isn’t the kind of life I want for you. This isn’t the conversation I want us to be having. But I need to get something to the FBI.”

Dean’s eyes darted to Lia. She nodded. Aaron was telling the truth.

“Then give it to the police,” Dean barked back, still not inclined to open the door.

“My father owns the police.” Aaron pitched his voice lower. I struggled to hear him. “And he wants Beau Donovan in jail.”

At the mention of Beau’s name, I took a step forward. What Aaron was saying fit with what Agent Briggs had said about the powers that be wanting a neat resolution to their little serial killer problem.

“Please,” Aaron said. “The longer I stand in the hallway, the better the chances someone catches me on a security feed, and then we’ll have bigger problems than the fact that you don’t trust me.”

Dean walked into the kitchen. He opened one drawer, then another. A moment later, he went back to the front door.

Carrying a butcher’s knife.





Dean opened the door. Aaron stepped in, eyed Dean’s knife, and let the door shut behind him.

“I appreciate that someone’s watching out for Sloane,” Aaron told Dean. “But I also feel compelled to point out that a knife like that wouldn’t do much good if the person on the other side of this door had a gun.”

All that glitters is not gold, I thought, taking in the warning embedded in Aaron’s words. You’re used to the people around you being armed. The world you grew up in is a dangerous, glittering place.

Dean gave Sloane’s brother a dead-eyed stare. “You might be surprised.”

Aaron must have seen something there that sent a chill down his spine. “I’m not armed,” he assured Dean, “and I’m not here to hurt anyone. You can trust me.”

“Not an incredibly trusting fellow, Dean,” Michael said lightly. “Must come from being raised by a psychotic serial killer with a fondness for knives.” He gave Aaron a steely smile. “Do come in.”

Aaron’s eyes sought out Lia. “You’re the one who can detect lies?” he asked.

“Who?” Lia said. “Me?”

“I’m not armed,” Aaron said again, staring her straight in the eye. “And I’m not here to hurt anyone.”

Without another word, he took a seat in the living room. Dean sat opposite him. I stayed standing.

“As you are doubtlessly aware,” Aaron started, “Beau Donovan and I got into an altercation last night.”

The debacle backstage at Tory’s show seemed like a lifetime ago—and given what we’d learned since then, almost painfully insignificant.

“You brought another girl to Tory’s show.” Sloane didn’t look at Aaron as she spoke. She stared at the window behind him—at her map and her calculations and the Fibonacci spiral. “Beau considers Tory his sister. I suspect a nontrivial percentage of his demographic would have reacted similarly, under such circumstances.” Then, as if that weren’t clear enough, Sloane elaborated. “According to my calculations, there was a ninety-seven-point-six percent chance you deserved to be punched in the nose.”