All In (The Naturals, #3)(69)

Drowning. Strangling. Those victims had been young, female. The gorier deaths had been reserved for males.

You don’t like hurting women. I turned that over in my head. You will, of course, to suit your goal. But given a choice, you’d prefer it to be neat. That made me wonder about the UNSUB’s other relationships. A mother? A daughter? A love?

My temples pounded. What else? I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t let myself stop. We had five hours before Michael left for the Majesty. No matter how heavily guarded he was, no matter how much we knew, that wasn’t a risk I wanted to take.

January twelfth. The Grand Ballroom. The knife.

I had to keep going. I had to think. I had to see whatever it was that we were missing.

Think. We were looking for someone highly intelligent, organized, charming enough to put people at ease. Alexandra Ruiz. The girl at Tory’s show. Michael. The UNSUB had hypnotized at least three people.

“Cassie.” Michael’s voice broke into my thoughts. “Go to bed.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Liar.” Lia was two-thirds asleep on the couch. She didn’t even open her eyes to speak. She’d been going back over interviews, looking for anything she might have missed the first time.

Sloane had been staring at the pattern for hours.

“Briggs and Sterling are calling in the cavalry,” Michael said. “There will be no fewer than a dozen agents, armed to the teeth, watching my every move. The moment they catch sight of a knife, the UNSUB goes down.”

That was how this was supposed to go, but there was a reason this plan was a last resort.

Victimology, I thought. Four victims. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t. Not until the agents came the next morning to take Michael away.





They put Michael in a bulletproof vest. They put a wire on him. Video, audio—whatever he saw, whatever he heard, Sterling and Briggs would, too. The other agents were also wired—video only—and those feeds would be accessible not only by Briggs as he coordinated the mission, but by the rest of us back at the safe house.

It only takes one detail, I thought. One moment, one realization for everything to fall into place.

I couldn’t push down the part of me that was thinking that it only took one moment, one mistake, for this to go wrong, too.

Dean, Lia, Sloane, and I sat huddled on the couch as we waited. Lia refused to show any sign of nerves. Sloane, in contrast, was rocking back and forth.

Beside me, Dean shook his head. “I don’t like this,” he said. “Townsend’s unpredictable. He has no regard for his own safety. He’s constitutionally incapable of backing down from a fight.”

“Tell you what, Dean,” Lia replied. “When Michael gets back, we’ll get the two of you a room. Obviously, there are feelings involved.”

“We’re all worried,” I told Dean, ignoring Lia. “I don’t like this any more than you do.”

Sloane whispered something beside us. I couldn’t make out what she said.

“Sloane?” I said.

“January twenty-third,” she whispered. “February first, February third, February thirteenth.”

It took me a second to register that she was rattling off the next four Fibonacci dates.

I need nine.

We’d been focused on the next kill—January twelfth. But if we didn’t catch the UNSUB, this was what was next.

“The parking garage,” Sloane said. “Then the buffet, then the day spa.” The spiral was centered on the Majesty. It started out and spiraled in—and once it settled there, it kept going, closer and closer to the spiral’s center.

“Where does it end?” I asked her. We’d been so focused on what the UNSUB had already done that I hadn’t given much thought to the rest of the pattern. My heart pounded.

One detail. It only takes one detail.

Michael was still in transit. He wasn’t there yet. It would be minutes yet before the plan was put in motion.

Please, I thought, not sure who or what I was begging—or even what, precisely, I was begging for.

“It ends in the theater,” Sloane said, truly surprised the rest of us didn’t know. “On February thirteenth.”

“The poker tournament ends today.” Lia pointed out the obvious. “It’s going to be hard for most of the players to explain hanging around Vegas for long.”

Wesley. The professor.

“I chose the Majesty for a reason,” Dean said. “It was always going to end here. I knew, from the beginning, how this was going to end.”

Why the Majesty? My eyes were so dry they hurt, my throat the same. My heart threatened to shatter my rib cage in my chest.

On the coffee table, the tablets Briggs had left for us jumped to life one by one, the screens going from black to active.

The video feeds were live.

The Grand Ballroom. January twelfth. Michael was there.

“The theater.” I said the words out loud, my eyes on the screens, looking for anything, any hint of someone moving Michael’s way. “It ends in the theater with victim number nine.”

And that was when I saw it.

Alexandra Ruiz. Sylvester Wilde. Camille Holt.

What did they have in common?

“Victimology,” I told Dean. “We don’t have four victims. We have five.”