“There’s something about that Agent Sterling that just makes me want to listen to what she has to say,” Lia continued earnestly. “I think we might be soul mates.”

Dean snorted, but didn’t look up from his practice test. Sloane set off her catapult, and I had to duck to keep from taking a pencil to the forehead.

“Agent Briggs is back,” I said once I’d straightened.

“Thank God.” Lia dropped the act and slumped back against the sofa. “Though if anyone tells him I said that, I’ll be forced to take drastic measures.”

I truly did not want to know what Lia’s idea of “drastic measures” entailed.

“Briggs knows Agent Sterling,” I announced. “So does Judd. They call her Ronnie.”

“Dean,” Lia said, drawing out his name in a way specifically designed to annoy him. “Stop pretending to work and tell us what you know.”

Dean ignored her. Lia raised an eyebrow at me. Clearly, she thought I’d have better luck at getting him to talk than she would.

“Agent Sterling was a part of the team that took down your dad, wasn’t she?” I said, testing out my theory. “She was Briggs’s partner.”

At first, I thought Dean might ignore me, the same way he’d ignored Lia. But eventually, he put down his pencil. He lifted his brown eyes to meet mine. “She was his partner,” he confirmed. Dean’s voice was low-pitched and pleasant, with a hint of Southern twang. Usually, he was a man of few words, but today, he had five more for us. “She was also his wife.”

She was his wife, I thought. Past tense—meaning that she’s not his wife anymore.

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“She’s Briggs’s ex-wife?” I said incredulously. “And the director sent her here? That can’t be ethical.”

Lia rolled her eyes. “Any more unethical than an off-the-books FBI program that uses underage prodigies to catch serial killers?” She smirked. “Or what about sending his own daughter to replace Agent Locke? Clearly, nepotism and shadiness are alive and well at FBI headquarters.”

Sloane looked up from making some adjustments to her catapult. “As of 1999, the FBI had no written policies on interoffice dating,” she rattled off. “Intercompany marriages between supervisors, agents, and support staff aren’t uncommon, though they constitute a minority of employee marital unions.”

Lia gave me a look and flipped her hair over her shoulder. “If the FBI doesn’t have an official dating policy, I doubt they have one for divorce. Besides, we’re talking about Director Sterling here. The man who basically bought Michael from his father by promising to make the IRS look the other way.” She paused. “The man who had the FBI haul me in off the streets and told me my other option was juvie.”

This was the first time I’d ever heard Lia mention her past before the program. Juvie?

“Briggs and Sterling both worked my father’s case.” Dean volunteered that information, using his own past to change the subject from Lia’s, which told me that she’d been telling the truth and he wanted to protect her from questions. “Briggs was the strategist,” Dean continued. “He was driven, competitive—not with her, but with any UNSUB they hunted. Briggs didn’t just want to catch killers. He wanted to win.”

It was easy to forget, when Dean said the word UNSUB, that his father had never been an Unknown Subject to him. Dean had lived with a killer—a true psychopath—day in, day out, for years.

“Sterling was impulsive.” Dean stuck to describing the agents. I doubted he would mention his father again. “Fearless. She had a hot temper, and she followed her gut, even when that wasn’t the smart thing to do.”

I’d suspected that Agent Sterling’s personality had undergone some major changes in the past five years, but even so, it was hard to see the connection between the short-tempered, instinct-driven woman Dean was describing and the Agent Sterling in the kitchen now. The additional data sent my brain into overdrive, connecting the dots, looking at the trajectory between past and present.

“Briggs has a case.” Michael liked to make an entrance. “He just got the call.”

“But his team just got back.” Sloane loaded her catapult again. “The FBI has fifty-six field offices, and the DC field office is the second-largest in the country. There are dozens of teams who could take this case. Why assign it to Briggs?”

“Because I’m the most qualified for the job,” Briggs said, coming into the room. “And,” he added under his breath, “because somewhere along the way, the universe decided I needed to suffer.”

I wondered if that last bit was about the case—or about the fact that Agent Sterling was on his heels. Now that I knew they’d been married, I doubted his irritation with her when he’d sent me out of the room had been entirely professional. She was playing in his sandbox—and they clearly had issues.

“I’m going with Agent Briggs.” Sterling pointedly ignored her ex-husband and addressed those words to us. “If any of you hope to come within ten feet of a training exercise or cold case this month, you’ll have those practice GEDs finished when I get back.”

Lia threw her head back and laughed.

“You think I’m joking, Ms. Zhang?” Agent Sterling asked. It was the first time I’d ever heard Lia’s last name, but Lia didn’t bat an eye.

“I don’t think anything,” Lia said. “I know that you’re telling the truth. But I also know that the FBI brass isn’t going to let you ground their secret assets from doing their jobs. They didn’t bring us here to take the GED. They brought us here because we’re useful. I’ve met your daddy dearest, Agent Sterling. He only plays by the rules when it’s useful for him to do so, and he definitely didn’t go to the trouble of blackmailing me into this program to let you clip my wings.” Lia leaned back against the sofa and stretched out her legs. “If you think otherwise,” she added, her lips parting in a slow, deliberate smile, “you’re lying to yourself.”

Agent Sterling waited to reply until she was certain she had Lia’s full attention. “You’re only useful as long as you aren’t a liability,” she said calmly. “And given your individual histories—some of them criminal—it wouldn’t take much for me to convince the director that one or two of you might be a bigger risk than you’re worth.”




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