My whole life, we’d been running from something, and I didn’t even know it.
“She never should have left me there,” Locke repeated. “Eventually, I stopped dreaming about finding her and being a family again, and I started dreaming about finding her and hurting her, the way Daddy hurt me. Making her pay for leaving me there. Peeling her face off until no one thought she was the pretty one, until just looking at her made you scream.”
The dressing room. The blood. The smell …
“But by the time I found her—by the time I found you—it was too late. She was already dead. She was gone, and it wasn’t fair. I was supposed to kill her. I was supposed to be the one.”
My aunt hadn’t killed my mother—because someone else had gotten there first.
“When I found out that she was dead, and you were gone, when I found out that they’d sent you to live with your father’s family—I was your family, too! I thought about taking you. I even went to Colorado, but when I got there, there was this junkie at my motel. She was cheap and loose and dirty, and her hair was the exact right shade of red. I killed her, and I said, ‘How do you like that, Lore?’ I carved her up until I could imagine Lorelai’s face underneath, and God, it felt good.” She paused. “It was the sweetest, you know. The first time. It always is. And after the first time, you always need more.”
“Is that why you joined the FBI?” I asked. “Lots of travel, easy access, the perfect cover?”
Agent Locke took a step toward me. Every muscle in her body was taut. For a moment, I thought that she would hit me—again and again and again.
“No,” she said. “That’s not why I joined.”
When people ask me why I do what I do, I tell them that I went into the FBI because a loved one was murdered.
Locke’s words came back to me then, and I realized that she’d been telling the truth.
“You joined the FBI because you wanted to find my mother’s killer.”
Not because she was upset that my mom was dead. Because she’d wanted to be the one to kill her.
“I changed my name. I studied. I planned. I passed the psych exams with flying colors. Even once Briggs and I started working together and he brought me in on the Naturals program, no one really saw me. They only saw what I wanted them to see. Lia never caught me in a lie. Michael never saw a hint of unsavory emotion. And Dean—I was like family to him.”
Hearing Dean’s name made my eyes dart over to his body. He still wasn’t moving—but Michael was. His eyes were open. He was bleeding. He couldn’t walk, he couldn’t even crawl, but he was pulling himself slowly across the floor—to his gun.
Locke moved to follow my gaze, but I stopped her.
“It isn’t the same,” I said, my voice decisive and calm.
“What isn’t?” Locke—no, her name wasn’t really Locke, not if she was my mother’s sister—said.
I had less than a second to think of an answer, but growing up the daughter of a woman who made her living by pretending to be psychic hadn’t just taught me the BPEs. For better or worse, I’d learned to put on a show, so I said the one thing I could think of that would keep Lacey Hobbes’s attention focused solely and 100 percent on me.
“You tried to restage my mother’s murder, but you got it wrong. What you’re doing to these women isn’t the same as what I did to my mother.”
The woman in front of me had wanted to kill my mother, but she’d also desperately wanted her acceptance. She’d wanted to be a part of a family, and she’d brought me here tonight with some twisted hope that I could be that for her. She’d enjoyed being my mentor. She wanted me to be like her.
Now my job was to convince her that I was.
“My mother didn’t protect you,” I said, mirroring the rage and desperation and hurt I saw on her face. “She didn’t protect me, either. There were men. She didn’t love them. She didn’t stay with them. She didn’t say a word when they took their frustrations out on me. She was weak. She was a whore. She hurt me.”
Lia would have known I was lying, but the woman in front of me wasn’t Lia. I smiled, letting the expression spread slowly across my face, keeping my eyes on my aunt, never looking, even for a second, at Michael.
“So I hurt her.”
My aunt stared at me, her face still twisted in disbelief, but her eyes wistful with longing.
“She was getting ready. Putting on her lipstick. Pretending she was so perfect and so special, that she wasn’t a monster. I said her name. She turned around, and I took my knife. I plunged it into her stomach. She said my name. That was it. Just ‘Cassie.’ So I stabbed her again. And again. She fought. She kicked and she screamed, but this time, I was the one with the power. I was the one doing the hurting, and she was the one getting hurt. She fell on her stomach. I flipped her over so I could see her face. I didn’t drag the knife over her cheekbones. I didn’t carve her up. I dipped my fingers into her side. I made her scream. And then I painted her lips with blood.”
Locke—no, Hobbes—Lacey was captivated. For a single second, I thought she might believe me. Her knife hand hung loosely by her side. Her other hand reached into her pocket. She pulled something out—I couldn’t see what. She fingered it for a moment—gingerly, carefully—and then she crushed her fingers into a fist.
“An excellent performance,” she said. “But I’m a profiler, too. I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have, Cassie, and your mother wasn’t killed by a twelve-year-old girl. You’re not a killer. You don’t have what it takes.” She lifted the knife and started forward, the longing in her eyes turning to something else.
Bloodlust.
“You’re not going to get away with this,” I said, dropping the act as she advanced on me. “They’ll know it was you. They’ll catch you—”
“No,” Locke corrected. “I’ll catch Dean. You called me from his phone. I was worried, but when I called the house, you weren’t there. Everyone went into an uproar. They found out Dean was missing, too, and that he’d stolen Briggs’s guns. I tracked you down. I found Dean here with Genevieve. He shot Michael. He carved you up. I’m the heroic agent who stopped him, who figured out that the DC murders were the work of a copycat with access to our system, unrelated to the other murders altogether. I was too late to save you, but I did manage to kill Dean before he could kill me. Like father, like son.