“Worst thing about this case.” Dean sat at the end of my bed. It had taken three days—and Briggs calling in a favor—for my boyfriend to get twenty-four hours of leave from Quantico. Given that Briggs had also had to grease the wheels to excuse Michael’s better-to-ask-for-forgiveness-than-permission trip to Maine, I was starting to suspect that someone at the FBI Academy was going to be read in on the Naturals program fairly soon.

“The worst thing about this case…” I took my time to feel the weight of the words. “The worst thing is knowing that Mackenzie could have died because I got it wrong.”

I’d left a vulnerable twelve-year-old alone with a killer whose specialty was exploiting vulnerabilities. I knew better than to make assumptions. I knew how easily one wrong mental turn could lead even the strongest profiler astray.

And yet…

Dean took my hand in his and turned it over so that he could trace his thumb along the lines of my palm. “Are you sure that the worst part wasn’t why you got it wrong?”

Being a Natural didn’t make a person infallible. I knew that, but I’d started working with the Bureau young enough that I also had a healthy amount of experience under my belt. Normally, when I made mistakes, they were smaller.

Normally, I self-corrected.

I didn’t need to turn too much of my profiler’s eye inward to know why it had been far too easy for me to see a psychologist as the enemy. I’d thought from the beginning that the woman didn’t—and couldn’t—understand what Mackenzie had been through.

Just like the Bureau psychologist I’d been assigned when I was a teenager had never understood me.

“You think I should see someone.” I let my fingers curl slowly into a fist, and Dean cupped his hand around mine.

“I think it might help.” His lips brushed, white-hot, over my knuckles.

As much as I’d fought to ignore my own scars, I’d never tried to make Dean forget his. I had never—and would never—pretend that the worst moments of his life didn’t matter. I knew and accepted that Behavior, Personality, Environment wasn’t a one-time calculation, that everything we did and experienced became a part of us.

I knew that the things that happened when we were young had the longest to burrow in.

Without our particular childhoods, none of us would have been Naturals. Lia wouldn’t have been Lia without growing up in the cult. Sloane had always had an affinity for numbers, but isolation had turned them into a coping mechanism. Michael’s sensitivity to emotions developed as a survival skill, and Dean understood killers because he’d been raised to be one. I’d long since accepted the role that my own childhood had played in making me a Natural profiler.

Why was it so much harder to accept that there were other traumas whose effects had formed me just as much?

“Quentin Nichols had a sister.” I leaned back against the headboard, my fingers intertwining themselves with Dean’s. It was easier—always—to talk about someone other than myself. “She killed herself when she was eighteen. Quentin was four years younger.”

“He was there.” Dean didn’t make that a question.

“His family blamed him for not being able to stop it.” That was what I’d been able to piece together, after the fact. “According to people who knew him, Nichols always said that was why he went into crisis negotiation—to save lives. But in reality…” I closed my eyes, just for a moment, knowing that Dean deserved more than me talking about the case because it was easier than addressing the elephant in the room.

“In reality,” I continued, opening my eyes to his deep brown ones, “Nichols convinced himself that he had saved his sister. He was there for her, in the end. He told her it was okay. He let her go.”

Dean’s head tilted down toward mine. “He gave her what mercy he could.”

Dean and I had always acknowledged that to do what we did, a person needed a bit of monster in them. That was why he understood Nichols, why I could see the motive and understand it myself.

“I killed my mother.” I’d said those words to Mackenzie’s psychologist. I could say them to Dean now. “I was holding the knife. I felt it go into her chest.”

“You couldn’t stop it,” Dean told me. “The knife was in your hands. Her fingers wrapped around yours.”

I laid my hand on his chest. There was a spot, just inside the rib cage…

“You need to talk to someone,” Dean told me.

I closed my eyes. “I know.” For almost a minute, I sat there, listening to the sound of his heart, feeling it beat beneath my palm.

“Best part of this case.” Dean always knew exactly when I’d reached my limit, exactly how to distract me. He laid his hand on my chest. I could feel the warmth of it through my thin white T-shirt. I could feel him feeling my heartbeat.

“The best part of this case was Mackenzie.” I didn’t even have to think about my answer. “Before she came in—she danced.”

She was going to survive, just like she always had.

“You talked to her parents?” Dean asked.

I nodded. “She’ll come to us when she’s fifteen—if she still wants to.”

Mackenzie’s parents were hedging their bets on their daughter joining the Naturals program, but the profiler in me knew that their daughter wouldn’t change her mind about this. She’d spend the next three years convincing them that normal wasn’t an option.

Not for her.

Not anymore.

Without warning, Dean’s mouth descended over mine. I rose up to meet him, my hands on either side of his face, my legs wrapping themselves around his body.

I wasn’t normal.

Neither was he.

“The new girl can’t have my room.” The voice that issued that statement was completely matter-of-fact and utterly unbothered by what Dean and I were up to on the bed.

We split apart.

Laurel tilted her head to one side. “Do you prefer the screams,” she asked Dean softly, “or the blood?”

There was a single beat of silence, and then Lia sauntered into the room behind my little sister.

“I give that a nine out of ten for delivery,” Lia told Laurel. “But a ten for creepy content.”

Laurel shrugged, her expression unchanging. “I try.”

Most of the time, Laurel tried not to be creepy—and failed. But my sister was strangely at ease with Lia, who was already training her to use her unnatural solemnity to her advantage and to spot lies.

“The new girl can’t have my room when she gets here,” Laurel repeated emphatically. “I don’t care if it’s not for another three years.”

Technically, my grandmother was the one raising my sister. Technically, our base of operations was not Laurel’s house. Technically, she didn’t have a room here, but when we’d returned from this case, we’d found the bedroom Laurel sometimes stayed in completely decorated with ponies.

I belong here. That was what the expression on Laurel’s tiny face said. Her mouth, in contrast, addressed Dean. “I was just messing with you about the blood.” She paused. “And the screams.”

I glanced at Lia, and she shrugged, which I took to mean that statement was mostly true.

“Come on, short stuff.” Lia tweaked the end of Laurel’s ponytail. “Let’s leave Angsty and the Brood here to their special alone time, and I’ll teach you how to convince your teacher that the dog really did eat your homework.”

Before Lia could actually leave Dean and me to our own devices, her cell phone rang.

“Video call,” she told us. “It’s Sloane.”

It took all of two seconds before Lia had helped herself to a slice of the bed. The moment she did, Laurel took off.

“Hey, Sloane.” Lia answered and angled the phone’s screen so that Dean and I could see.

“The nine millimeter Luger was designed by a German weapons manufacturer in 1902.” Sloane’s greeting was unconventional, if not entirely unexpected. “In 2015, the FBI shifted to using a one-hundred-and-forty-seven grain nine millimeter Gold Dot G2 for ammunition.”

Lia took one for the team and responded to that statement. “Either you’re in the middle of weapons training, or you’ve spent the past forty-eight hours with Celine.”

Special Agent Delacroix had fired a shot in the line of duty. She’d saved Mackenzie’s life—and taken the life of a killer. There was a process that had to be followed in the wake of an event like that. Celine had to be cleared—legally and psychologically—before she could return to the field.

“Celine needs me.” Sloane fiddled with something, though I couldn’t quite make out what she held between her fingers. “No one has ever needed me before.”

“We all need you,” Dean told her. Sloane was our light in the darkness.

“Dean,” Sloane said very seriously, “I hope this is not oversharing, but Celine needs me in a very different way.” Knowing Sloane, I half expected her to share exactly what that very different way entailed—possibly with graphs, almost certainly with precise description of angles and body parts—but she spared us the explicit details and opted instead for another statistic. “Did you know that forty-six percent of Texans meditate at least once a week?”

“You don’t say.” Lia grinned.

Sloane frowned into the camera. “I just did say. And, Cassie? I looked into those brothers in Texas, and the thing is, they aren’t.”

“Aren’t brothers?” I asked.

“Aren’t in Texas,” Sloane corrected. “At least, they’re not there anymore. The whole family picked up and moved with no warning. Even weirder? I can’t figure out where they went.”

“And if you can’t figure it out…” Michael plopped down beside Sloane and squeezed into the frame. “There’s a very good chance they’re off the grid.”

“A ninety-seven point four percent chance,” Sloane clarified.

“Exactly,” Michael declared. “Now, on a somewhat unrelated note: adorable onesies for the Sterling-Briggs Wonder Twins, yay or nay?”

He held up what appeared to be a custom-made infant onesie emblazoned with the words SPECIAL AGENT BABY.

“I was thinking of putting something inappropriate, but humorous and endearing, on the back,” he clarified.

There were nine and a half weeks left until Michael and Sloane would be home. Nine and a half weeks before I could look at Dean and know he wasn’t leaving the next day.

Three years until Mackenzie would join the program.

Who knew how long to find the brothers.

But Briggs and Sterling’s twins were expected to make their arrival early—and that meant any day.

“I vote yes on the onesies,” I declared.

“All in favor?” Sloane asked formally.

I leaned back against Dean, and Lia leaned against me before we all chorused in unison, “Aye.”