All In (The Naturals, #3)(78)

You didn’t just stumble across the pattern. You knew to look for it. You spent your whole life looking for it. And the reason you did that lies in those first six years.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Beau’s voice was no louder than a whisper, but it cut through the air. “You couldn’t possibly know.”

“We know they didn’t want you.” Sterling went for the kill. Beau’s murders had taken the cult’s pattern to the next level. He’d been appealing to them, attacking them, showing them just how worthy he was. “They left you to die. You weren’t good enough for them.” Sterling paused. “And they were right. Look at you. You got caught.” Her eyes trailed over his orange jumpsuit, his cuffs. “They were right.”

“You have no idea what I am,” Beau said, his voice shaking with emotion. “You have no idea what I’m capable of. Neither do they. No one knows.” His voice rose with each word. “I was born for this. The rest of them, they’re recruited as adults, but number nine is always born within their walls. The child of the brotherhood and the Pythia—blood of their blood. Nine.”

“Nine is a name to him,” Dean said. “A title. Tell him it’s not his. Tell him he doesn’t deserve it.”

“You’re not Nine,” Sterling said. “You’re never going to be Nine.”

Beau lifted cuffed hands to his own collar. He latched his fingers over his shirt and pulled it roughly off his shoulder. Underneath, etched onto his chest, was a series of jagged cuts, halfway healed and on their way to a scar.

Seven small circles forming a heptagon around a cross.

I stopped breathing. That symbol—I knew that symbol.

“Seven Masters.” Beau’s face was taut, his voice full of fury. He ran his fingers around the outside of the heptagon. Seven circles. “The Pythia.” He pressed his finger into the wound and pulled it down the vertical line on the cross. His hand trembled as he went to do the same with the horizontal. “And Nine.”

The symbol. I know that symbol. Seven circles around a cross.

I’d seen it carved into the lid of a plain wooden coffin, uncovered at the crossroads on a country dirt road.

“You wish you were Nine,” Agent Sterling said, still pressing. I felt my limbs going numb. Blackness crept in on my field of vision.

“Dean,” I wheezed.

He was with me in an instant. “I see it,” he said. “I need you to breathe for me, Cassie. I see it.”

The symbol Beau had carved into his own flesh had also been carved into my mother’s coffin. Not possible. June twenty-first. Not a Fibonacci date. My mother died in June.

On-screen, Beau’s hands were still trembling. His fingers tensed. They clawed at his neck. His back arched. And then he fell to the floor, convulsing.

Screaming. I registered the sound as if it were coming from very far away. He’s screaming.

And then he was gargling, choking on blood as it poured from his lips, his fingernails clawing violently against his own body, against the floor.

Poison.

“Breathe,” Dean repeated.

“We need help in here!” Sterling was screaming. Beau is screaming, and Sterling is screaming—and finally, the convulsions stopped. Finally, Beau was still.

Seven small circles forming a heptagon around a cross.

I forced myself to suck in a breath. And then another and another.

Beau’s cracked lips moved. He looked at Briggs in one final moment of clarity. “I don’t,” he struggled to say. “I don’t wish I was Nine.” He sounded like a child.

“You’ve been poisoned,” Briggs told him. “You need to tell us—”

“I don’t believe in wishing,” Beau murmured. And then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he died.





Beau was poisoned. I thought the words, but didn’t understand them. The cult killed him. Nightshade killed Beau. Beau, who’d carved a symbol onto his own chest—a symbol someone else had carved into the box that contained my mother’s remains.

“My mother didn’t die on a Fibonacci date,” I said. “It was June. There are no Fibonacci dates in June, none in July….”

I realized on some level that Michael and Lia were staring at me, that Dean had wrapped his arms around me, that my body had collapsed against his.

My mother had disappeared five years ago—six in June. The person who’d attacked her had used a knife. It was poison that year. In the pattern, it was poison. Nightshade was the killer. The knife was New York, six years before that. There wasn’t supposed to be another one for twenty-one years.

Nothing about my mother’s death fit the pattern—so why was the symbol etched onto her coffin?

I struggled out of Dean’s arms and went for my computer. I pulled up the pictures—the royal blue shroud, the bones, my mother’s necklace. My finger hit at the keys again and again until the symbol showed up.

Lia and Michael came up behind us. “Is that…”

“Seven Masters,” I said, forcing my hand around the circles on the outside of the symbol. “The Pythia.” The vertical line. “And Nine.”

“Seven Masters.” Sloane appeared in the doorway, as if the mere mention of numbers had called her to us. “Seven circles. Seven ways of killing.”