“Stay. Calm.”
I nodded again and finally managed to say, “Okay.”
“You can do this,” Agent Locke said. “You and Dean are an incredible team, and I’m not going to let anything happen to either of you.”
Three sharp raps on the bathroom door made me jump, but I forced myself to follow Locke’s primary directive and stay calm. I could do this. I had to do this. Hanging up the phone, I stuffed it into my back pocket, turned the faucet off, and glanced at the door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me.”
Michael. I cursed inside, because there was calm and there was calm, and with Michael’s knack for emotions, he’d know in a heartbeat if I was faking.
Calm. Calm. Calm.
I couldn’t be angry. I couldn’t be scared. I couldn’t be panicked or guilty or show any signs that I’d just talked to Agent Locke—not if I wanted to keep Michael out of this. At the last second, as I opened the door, I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to do it.
He was going to realize that something was wrong—so I did the only thing I could think of to do. I opened the door, and I lied.
“Look,” I said, allowing the bevy of emotions I’d been holding back to show on my face, allowing him to see how tired I was, how overwhelmed, how upset. “If this is about the kiss, I really just cannot deal with this right now.” I paused and let those words sink in. “I can’t deal with you.”
I saw it the second the words hit their mark, because Michael’s facial expression utterly changed. He didn’t look angry or sad—he looked like he couldn’t have cared less. He looked like the boy I’d met in the diner: layers upon layers, mask upon mask.
I brushed past him before he could see that it hurt me to hurt him. Hitting the final nail in the coffin, I stalked down the hallway, knowing he was watching me, and I walked right up to Dean.
“I need your help,” I said, my voice low.
Dean glanced over my shoulder. I knew he was looking at Michael. I knew Michael was glaring at him, but I didn’t turn around.
I couldn’t let myself turn around.
Dean nodded, and a second later, I followed him up to the third floor, to his room. True to Agent Locke’s words, Agent Starmans received a phone call that kept him from following.
“Sorry—” I started to say, but Dean cut me off.
“Don’t apologize,” he said. “Just tell me what you need.”
I thought of the way he’d looked, walking in on Michael and me. “Locke wants me out of the house,” I said. “Either there’s a leak in the FBI and the UNSUB has a way in, or the UNSUB is already here and we just don’t know it. Locke said to tell you to use the combination to the safe in the study.”
Dean’s phone buzzed. A new text.
“That will be the location to the safe house,” I said. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to get down to the study and out of the house without anyone seeing us, but—”
“I do.” Dean kept things simple: no more words than absolutely necessary. “There’s a back staircase. They blocked it off years ago: too unsteady. Nobody but Judd even knows it’s there. If we can get down to the basement, I know a way out. Here.” He threw me a sweatshirt off his bed. “Put this on. You’re freezing.”
It was the middle of summer. In Virginia. I shouldn’t have been freezing, but my body was doing its best to go into shock. I slipped the sweatshirt on as Dean ushered me down the back staircase and into the study. I kept watch at the door as he knelt next to the safe.
“Do you know how to shoot?” he asked me.
I shook my head. That particular skill hadn’t been part of my mother’s training. Maybe if it had been, she’d have still been alive.
Dean loaded one of the guns and tucked it into the waistband of his jeans. He left the other one where it was and shut the safe. Two minutes later, we’d made it to the basement, and a minute after that, we were on our way to the safe house.
YOU
You weren’t supposed to make mistakes. The plan was supposed to be perfect. And for a few hours, it was.
But you messed it up. You always mess everything up—and there His voice is again in your head, and you’re thirteen years old and cowering in the corner, wondering if it will be fists or his belt or a poker from the fire.
And the worst thing is, you’re alone. Surrounded by people or throwing your hands up to protect your face, it doesn’t matter. You’re always alone.
That’s why you can’t mess this up. That’s why it has to be perfect from here on out. That’s why you have to be perfect.
You can’t lose Cassie. You won’t.
You’ll love her, or you’ll kill her, but either way, she’s going to be yours.
CHAPTER 35
The safe house looked like any other house. Dean went in first. He pulled his gun and held it expertly in front of his body as he cleared the foyer, the living room, the kitchen. I stayed close behind him. We’d made our way back to the foyer when the knob on the front door began to turn.
Dean stepped forward, pushing me further back. He held the gun out steadily. I waited, praying that it was Briggs and Locke on the other side of the door. The hinges creaked. The door slowly opened.
“Michael?”
Dean lowered his weapon. For a split second, I felt a burst of relief, warm and sure, radiating out from the center of my body. I expelled the breath caught in my throat. My heart started to beat again.
And then I saw the gun in Michael’s hand.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. Looking at him, at the gun, I felt like the stupid girl in the horror movie, the one who couldn’t see what was right in front of her face. The one who went to check on the radiator in the basement when there was a masked murderer on the loose.
Michael was here.
Michael had a gun.
The UNSUB had a source on the inside.
No.
“Why do you have a gun?” I asked dumbly. I couldn’t keep from taking a step toward Michael, even though I couldn’t quite read the look on his face.
In front of me, Dean raised his right arm, gun in hand. “Put it down, Townsend.”
Michael was going to put down the gun. That was what I told myself. He was going to put down the gun, and this was all going to be some kind of mistake. I’d seen Michael on the verge of violence. He’d told me himself that the potential for losing it was in him, but I knew Michael. He wasn’t dangerous. He wasn’t a killer. The boy I knew wasn’t just a mask worn by someone who knew how to manipulate emotions as well as he could read them.