You used to work with Agent Briggs, I thought, picturing Veronica Sterling in my mind. You were on his team. Maybe you were even his partner. When I’d joined the program, Agent Locke had been Briggs’s partner. Maybe she’d been Agent Sterling’s replacement, before the situation was reversed.

You don’t like being replaceable, and you don’t like being replaced. You’re not just here as a favor to your father, I told Agent Sterling silently. You know Briggs. You didn’t like Locke. And once upon a time, you cared about Dean. This is personal.

“Did you know that the average life span of the hairy-nosed wombat is ten to twelve years?” Apparently, Sloane had decided that when I said I was fine, I was lying. The more coffee my roommate ingested, the lower her threshold for keeping random statistics to herself—especially if she thought someone needed a distraction.

“The longest-living wombat in captivity lived thirty-four years,” Sloane continued, propping herself up on her elbows to look at me. Given that we shared a bedroom, I probably should have objected more strenuously to cup of coffee number two. Tonight, though, I found Sloane’s high-speed statistical babbling to be strangely soothing. Profiling Sterling hadn’t kept me from thinking about Locke.

Maybe this would.

“Tell me more about wombats,” I said.

With the look of a small child awaking to a miracle on Christmas morning, Sloane beamed at me and complied.

YOU

You were nervous the first time you saw her, standing beside the big oak tree, long hair shining to halfway down her back. You asked what her name was. You memorized everything about her.

But none of that matters now. Not her name. Not the tree. Not your nerves.

You’ve come too far. You’ve waited too long.

“She’ll fight you if you let her,” a voice whispers from somewhere in your mind.

“I won’t let her,” you whisper back. Your throat is dry. You’re ready. You’ve been ready. “I’ll tie her up.”

“Bind her,” the voice whispers.

Bind her. Brand her. Cut her. Hang her.

That’s the way this has to be done. That’s what awaits this girl. She shouldn’t have parked so far away from the man’s building. She shouldn’t have slept with him in the first place.

Shouldn’t.

Shouldn’t.

Shouldn’t.

You’re waiting for her in the car when she climbs in. You’re prepared. She has a test today, but so do you.

She shuts the car door. Her eyes flit toward the rearview mirror, and for a split second, they meet yours.

She sees you.

You lunge forward. Her mouth opens to scream, but you slam the damp cloth over her mouth, her nose. “She’ll fight you if you let her,” you say, whispering the words like sweet nothings in her ear.

Her body goes slack. You pull her into the backseat and reach for the ties.

Bind them. Brand them. Cut them. Hang them.

It has begun.

I slept until noon and woke up feeling like I hadn’t slept at all. My head ached. I needed food. And caffeine. And possibly some Tylenol.

“Rough night?” Judd asked the second I stepped foot in the kitchen. He had a sharpened number two pencil in his hand and filled in a line on his crossword puzzle without ever looking up at me.

“You could say that,” I replied. “Have you met Agent Sterling?”

Judd’s lips twitched slightly. “You could say that,” he said, parroting my own words back at me.

Judd Hawkins was in his sixties. His official job description involved both looking after the house and looking after us. The house was in excellent condition. As for the five teenagers who lived here…well, other than making sure we were fed and our limbs were kept relatively intact, Judd was pretty hands-off.

“Agent Sterling seems to think she’s moving in,” I commented. Judd filled in another line on his crossword. If he was bothered by the fact that an FBI agent had shown up, more or less unannounced, he didn’t show it. “Can she even do that?” I asked.

Judd finally looked up from his puzzle. “If she were anyone else,” he said, “the answer would be no.”

Given that Agent Sterling had come here at her father’s request, I understood that there probably wasn’t anything Judd could do about it. What I didn’t understand was why Judd didn’t seem to want to do anything about it. She was here to write an evaluation of the program. She’d called it damage control, but from where I was sitting, it seemed more like an invasion.

“Good. You’re up.”

Speak of the devil, and she appears, I thought. Then I stopped myself. I wasn’t being objective—or fair. I was judging Agent Sterling based more on what I thought she would do than anything she’d done already. Deep down, I knew that no matter who they’d sent to replace Locke, I wouldn’t have been ready. Every similarity was salt in an open wound. Every difference was, too.

“Do you always make it a practice to sleep until noon?” Agent Sterling asked, cocking her head to the side and giving me the once-over. Since I couldn’t make her stop studying me, I returned the favor. She was wearing makeup, but didn’t look made up. Like the clear coat of polish on her nails, the colors she’d chosen for her eyes and lips looked almost natural.

I wondered how much effort it took her to look that effortlessly perfect.

If you want to get close to an UNSUB, I could practically hear Locke telling me, don’t say she or her. Say you.

“You spent the night here?” I asked Sterling, rolling that over in my mind. Locke never slept here. Briggs doesn’t. You don’t do things halfway.

“There’s a pullout sofa in the study,” Judd told me, sounding mildly disgruntled. “I offered her my room, but Miss Stubborn refused to take it.”

Miss Stubborn? Before working for the Naturals program, Judd had been career military. I’d never heard him refer to any FBI agent by anything other than their title or last name. So why was he referring to Agent Sterling in the exact same tone I would have expected him to use with Lia?

“I’m not kicking you out of your own bed, Judd.” The twinge of exasperation in Agent Sterling’s voice told me they’d already had this argument at least twice.

“Sit down,” Judd grunted in return. “Both of you. Cassie hasn’t had anything to eat today, and I can make two sandwiches as easy as one.”

“I can make my own sandwich,” I said. Judd gave me a look. I sat. This was a side of him I hadn’t seen before. In a strange way, he almost reminded me of my very Italian grandmother, who thought I was off at some kind of progressive, government-sponsored gifted program. Nonna considered the putting of food in bellies one of her major missions in life, and woe be to the unfortunate soul who stood in her way.

“I already made myself a sandwich,” Agent Sterling said stiffly.

Judd made two sandwiches anyway. He slid one in front of me and put the other in front of an empty spot at the table before sitting down and resuming his crossword. He didn’t say a word, and after a long moment, Agent Sterling sat.

“Where are the others?” I asked Judd. Usually, I couldn’t spend five minutes in the kitchen without Lia coming in to swipe some ice cream, or Michael helping himself to food off my plate.

Agent Sterling was the one who answered. “Michael hasn’t made an appearance yet. Dean, Lia, and Sloane are in the living room, taking a practice GED.”

I almost choked on a bite of ham. “A what?”

“It’s September,” Agent Sterling replied, in that too-calm tone that I imagined made her very good at interrogating suspects. “If you weren’t a part of this program, you’d be in school. In fact, I’m fairly certain your family was told that you would be receiving schooling here. Some people might be willing to let that slide. I’m not.”

I got the distinct feeling that when Agent Sterling said “some people” she was talking about Agent Briggs, not Judd.

“You’re lucky enough to have a family who might actually check up on your schooling someday,” she continued. “Not everyone in this house is so fortunate, but you will all receive the education you were promised.” Her eyes flicked over to Judd, then back to me. “Dean and Lia have been homeschooled here for years. If Judd’s done his job right, they should be able to pass the GED. I’m not concerned about Sloane.”