The Naturals

hard to remember she was holding a gun. “I’ve got a present for you. I’m going to go get it. If you move while I’m gone, if you so much as blink, I’ll put a bullet in your knee, beat you within an inch of your life, and put a matching bullet in lover boy’s head.”

She gestured toward Dean. He was unconscious, but alive. And Michael …

I couldn’t even look at Michael’s body, lying prone on the floor.

“I won’t move.”

She was only gone for seconds. I took a single step toward Michael’s abandoned gun and froze, because I knew our captor was telling the truth. She’d kill Dean. She’d hurt me.

Even a moment’s hesitation was too long, and an instant later, Locke was back—and she wasn’t alone.

“Please don’t hurt me. Please. My dad has money. He’ll give you whatever you want, just please don’t —”

It took me a moment to recognize Genevieve Ridgerton. There were ugly cuts on her neck and shoulders. Her face was swollen beyond recognition, and there was blood crusted on her scalp. The skin around her mouth was pink, like someone had just ripped off a strip of tape. She made a mewling sound, halfway between a gargle of water and a moan.

“I told you once,” Agent Locke said to me, knife in hand and a wide smile growing on her face, “that I was only ever a Natural at one thing.”

I struggled to remember the exchange, one of the first things she’d ever said to me, a mischievous gleam in her eyes. I’d assumed she was referring to sex—but the helpless, hopeless expression in Genevieve’s eyes left very little doubt what Locke’s so-called gift was.

Torture.

Mutilation.

Death.

She considered herself a Natural killer, and she was waiting for me to say something. Waiting for me to compliment her work.

You knew my mother. You hit me, you hurt me, you told me it was my fault. You were almost certainly abused as a child. You called me kiddo. I’m not like your other victims. You sent me presents. You groomed me.

“The first day we met,” I said, hoping the expression on my face looked earnest enough, innocent enough to please her, “when you said you were a Natural at only one thing, you also said that you couldn’t tell me about it until I was twenty-one.”

Locke looked genuinely pleased that I remembered. “That was before I knew you,” she said. “Before I realized how very like me you were. I knew you were Lorelai’s daughter. Of course I knew—I was the one who flagged you in the system. I spoon-fed you to Briggs. I brought you here, because you were Lorelai’s, but once I started working with you …” Her eyes were alight with a strange glow, like a blushing bride’s or a pregnant lady’s, brimming with happiness from the inside out. “You were mine, Cassie. You belonged with me. I thought I could wait until you were older, until you were ready, but you’re ready now.”

She pushed Genevieve roughly down to her knees. The girl collapsed, her body shaking, the taste of her terror potent in the air. Locke saw me looking at Genevieve, and she smiled.

“I got her for you.”

Gun still in her right hand, Locke held her knife out to me with her left, hilt first. The look in her eyes was hopeful, vulnerable, hungry.

You want something from me.

Locke didn’t want to kill me—or maybe she did, but she wanted this more. She wanted me to take the knife. She wanted me to slit Genevieve’s throat. She wanted me to be her protege in more ways than one.

“Take the knife.”

I took the knife. I eyed the gun, still in her hands, trained on my forehead.

“Is that really necessary?” I asked, trying to act as though the thought of turning this knife against the sobbing girl on the floor didn’t make me want to throw up. “If I’m going to do this, I want it to be mine.”

I was speaking her language, telling her what she wanted to hear: that I was like her, that we were the same, that I understood that this was about anger and control and having the power to decide who lived and who died. Slowly, Locke lowered the gun, but she didn’t put it down. I measured the distance between us, wondering if I could sink the knife into her before she could get a shot off at me.

She was stronger than I was. She was better trained. She was a killer.

Stalling for time, I knelt next to Genevieve. I bent down, bringing my lips to her ear, letting the expression on my face take on a hint of the madness I saw in Locke’s. Then, my voice so low that only Genevieve could hear me, I whispered to the girl, “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to get you out of here.”

Genevieve looked up, her body still crumpled into a ball on the floor. She reached out and grabbed me by the front of my shirt.

“Kill me,” she pleaded, the words escaping cracked and bleeding lips. “You kill me, before she does.”

I knelt there, frozen, and Locke lost it. She morphed from a teacher observing her star pupil into an angry, animal creature. She pounced on Genevieve, turning the girl on her back, pinning her to the floor, her hands encircling her neck.

“You don’t touch Cassie,” she said, her voice rising to a yell, her face so close to Genevieve’s that the younger girl had nowhere to go. “You. Don’t. Get. To. Decide.”

My brain whirred. I had to get her off Genevieve. I had to stop her. I had to—

One second Locke was on Genevieve, and the next she ripped the knife out of my hand.

“You can’t do it,” she spat at me. “You can’t do anything right.”

Genevieve opened her mouth. Locke plunged the knife into her side. I’d promised to protect Genevieve, and now …

Now, there was blood.

CHAPTER 37

Locke stood up. She kicked Genevieve’s body to the side, like the girl was already dead, even though the gasping, whimpering sounds the dying girl made told me she was not. Locke’s gun was on the floor, forgotten, but the way she was holding the knife as she stepped toward me told me that I wasn’t any safer than I’d been a moment before.

She was going to cut me.

She was going to slice me open.

She was going to kill me.

“You’re a liar,” she said. “You couldn’t do it. Do you even want to? Do you?”

She was screaming now. I took a step backward. I opened my mouth to tell her what she wanted to hear, to tell her that I did want it, to stall for time, but she never gave me the chance. Looking at me over the blade, she took another step forward.

“You were supposed to kill her,” she said. “I got her for you.”

“I’m sorry—”

“‘Sorry’ never did anything! Lorelai was sorry. She was sorry, but she had to go, and she left me there alone.” Locke’s voice broke, but the fury was still clear in every word. “You were supposed to kill the girl. It was supposed to be us, Cassie. You. And me. But you left!”

She wasn’t talking to me anymore. She didn’t see me when her wild eyes landed on mine. The blade in her hand gleamed. The blood dripped onto the floor. I had two seconds, maybe three.

“What do you mean, I left?” I asked, hoping my words would break through the fog in her brain, bring her back to the here and now. “Left where?”