The Naturals: All In Part 5

"Leverage," Lia repeated softly. "You don't tell Briggs, and in exchange, your father-"

"He's very generous."

Michael's words cut into me. The car he'd been driving, this hotel-that was the price Michael was exacting for the damage his father had inflicted?

You make him pay because you can. You make him pay because at least then you're worth something.

I swallowed down the ball of sorrow and anger rising in my throat and backed away from the door. I hadn't consciously thought of myself as eavesdropping until I'd heard something I had no right to hear.

"I'm sorry," I heard Lia say.

"Don't be," Michael told her. "It doesn't suit you."

The door clicked into place. I stood there, staring at it, until someone came up behind me. Without turning around, I knew it was Dean.

I always knew when it was Dean.

"Flashback?" he asked quietly. Dean knew the signs, the same way I could tell when he'd become absorbed in red-tinged memories of his own.

"A few minutes ago," I admitted.

Dean didn't touch me, but I could feel the warmth of his body. I wanted to turn toward him, toward that warmth. Michael's secret wasn't mine to share. But I could tell Dean my own-if only I could make myself turn around. If only I could make my mouth form the words.

I had a flashback because I was thinking about my mother. I was thinking about my mother because the police found a body.

"You're good at being there for people," Dean murmured behind me. "But you don't have much practice at letting people be there for you."

He was profiling me. I let him.

"When you were a kid," he continued, his voice even and low, "your mother taught you to observe people. She also taught you not to get attached."

I hadn't told him that-not in words. Finally, I turned toward him. Brown eyes held mine.

"She was your whole world, your alpha and your omega, and then she was gone." His thumb gently traced the line of my jaw. "Letting your father and his family be there for you would have been the worst kind of betrayal. Letting anyone be there for you would have been a betrayal."

I'd been thrust into a family of strangers-loud and affectionate and overbearing strangers. I hadn't been able to share my grief. Not with them. Not with anyone.

You're not doing it alone. This time, Judd's words didn't seem as much like an order. They were a reminder. I wasn't twelve years old anymore. I wasn't alone.

I leaned into Dean's touch. I closed my eyes, and the words finally came.

"They found a body."

"If I could make this better for you, I would." Dean's voice caught slightly on the last word. He had dark places and horrible memories of his own. He had scars-visible and invisible-of his own.

I brought my hand to the side of his neck, felt his pulse, slow and steady beneath my touch. "I know."

I knew that he would feel this for me if he could.

I knew that he knew "better" wasn't even a blip on my radar.

Dean couldn't erase the marks my past had left on me, any more than I could do that for him. He couldn't take away my pain, but he saw it.

He saw me.

"Dinner?" Sloane popped into the room, oblivious to the depth of emotion on my face, on Dean's.

I dropped my hand to my side, held Dean's dark eyes for a moment longer, and nodded. "Dinner."

As the hostess led us to our table at the Majesty's five-star sus.h.i.+ restaurant, I tried to keep all hints of my conversation with Dean off my face.

Lia was the first to claim a chair at our table, her fingers drawing lazy rings around the base of an empty winegla.s.s. Michael helped himself to the seat next to her. They both had a natural aura of fearlessness and self-possession, like if someone dropped a cobra in the middle of the table, they'd both just sit there, Lia continuing to circle her winegla.s.s and Michael artfully slumped in his chair.

I took a seat across from them and hoped Michael's eyes wouldn't meet mine. Between overhearing his conversation with Lia and telling Dean about the update in my mother's case, I felt drained, empty, but for a dense ball of emotion, barely contained in the pit of my stomach, like a grenade.

Get it under control, Ca.s.sie. If you feel it, he'll see it. So don't feel it.

"Can I tell you about our specials?" A waitress appeared beside our table. The six of us managed to place both drink and food orders before Michael turned his attention to my side of the table. I could feel him working his way up and down my face. He glanced briefly at Dean, then back at me.

"Well, Colorado," Michael mused out loud. "Slight tension in your neck and jaw, eyes cast downward, brows pulled together ever so slightly."

I felt naked under his gaze, laid bare.

I'm angry. I'm angry that the police found a body and angry that it took them five years to find it. I'm angry about what your father did to you.

"You're sad and you're angry and you feel sorry for me." An edge worked its way into Michael's voice. He wasn't a person who let other people feel sorry for him.

Nothing hurts you unless you let it.

"And you," Michael said, pointing a chopstick lazily at Dean, "are having one of those oh-so-Dean moments: self-loathing and inadequacy, check. Longing and fear, check. Constant, seething anger, bubbling just under the surface-"

"When you lose the remote control to your television, four percent of the time it ends up in the freezer!" Sloane blurted out loudly.

Michael glanced at Sloane. Whatever he saw there must have convinced him that now wasn't a good time to be stirring things up with Dean and me. He turned back to Judd and said, "I believe your line is 'This is why we can't have nice things.'"

Beside me, Dean snorted, and the tension that had settled over the table dissolved.

"Check out the company." Lia nodded to the bar. I turned to look. Camille Holt. She was sitting at the bar, wearing black shorts and a backless top, sipping a red drink and talking with another woman.

"Person of interest number five," Dean murmured, eyeing Camille's friend. "Tory Howard."

Next to Camille, Tory Howard-stage magician and rival of our second victim-drank beer from a bottle. Her dark hair was wavy and damp, like she'd come here straight from jumping out of the shower. No muss. No fuss. I tried to reconcile that with the fact that she was a performer, an illusionist, pulling off tricks that were larger-than-life.

"This," Judd muttered, "is why we can't have nice things."

He'd tried to tear us away from our work-and there work was, sitting at the bar.

"Mr. Shaw." The hostess's voice broke into my thoughts. I glanced toward the front of the restaurant, expecting to see Aaron. Instead, I saw a man who looked the way Aaron would in thirty years. His thick blond hair was tinged silver. His lips were set in a permanent half smile. He wore a three-piece suit as comfortably as other people wore a T-s.h.i.+rt and jeans.

Aaron's father. My stomach twisted, because if this was Aaron's father, he was Sloane's father, too.

Beside him, there was a woman with light brown hair coifed at the nape of her neck. She was holding a little girl, no older than three or four. The child was Korean, with beautiful dark hair and eyes that took in everything. Their daughter, I realized. Aaron's little sister. As the hostess led the trio to a table near ours, I wondered if Sloane knew her father had adopted a child.

I knew the exact moment Sloane saw them. She went very still. Underneath the table, I reached for her hand. She squeezed mine, hard enough to hurt.

Several minutes later, our food was deposited on the table. With great effort, Sloane let go of my hand and pulled her gaze away from the happy threesome, just as Aaron slid into the empty seat at the table to join his family.

His family. Not hers.

I tried to catch Sloane's eye, but she wouldn't look at me. She concentrated all of her attention on the sus.h.i.+ in front of her, carefully disa.s.sembling it and dividing each roll into its parts. Avocado. Salmon. Rice.

At the bar, Camille and Tory finished their drinks. As they gathered their possessions and turned toward us, I noticed two things. The first was the thick silver chain Camille wore looped multiple times around her neck.

The second thing was Aaron Shaw noticing Camille.

Five minutes after Camille Holt and Tory Howard exited the restaurant, Aaron excused himself from his family's table. Half an hour after that, Mr. Shaw carried his delighted little girl through the room to get a cherry at the bar. As father and daughter returned to their seats, I saw Shaw register Sloane's presence. He never faltered, never altered the pace of his stride.

But my gut told me he recognized her.

This was a man who oozed power and control. Based on the son he'd raised, I was willing to bet he knew everything that went on in this casino. Aaron might not know that Sloane is your daughter, but you do. You've always known.

Beside me, Sloane looked so nakedly vulnerable that my eyes stung for her.

"Sloane?" Michael said quietly.

She forced her lips upward in a valiant attempt at a smile. "I'm digesting," she told Michael. "This is my digesting face, that's all."

Michael didn't press her on it, the way he would have if it were Dean or Lia or me. "And what a pleasant digesting face it is," he declared.

Beside me, Sloane developed an intense interest in her lap. By the time dessert arrived, she was moving her finger back and forth over the surface of her skirt. It took me a moment to realize that she was tracing out numbers.

3213. 4558. 9144.

I wondered how much of Sloane's fascination with numbers had arisen during moments like this one, when numbers were easy and people were hard.

"Well," Lia said, snagging a bite of mint ice cream with her spoon. "I, for one, am ready for bed. I'm also considering joining a nunnery and have no interest whatsoever in hitting the shops."

"I'm not going shopping with you," Dean said darkly.

"Because you're afraid I might try to introduce actual colors into your wardrobe?" Lia asked innocently.

Beside me, Sloane was still going, number after number drawn with the tip of her finger on the surface of her skirt.

"How many shops are there in Las Vegas?" Lia said. "Do you know, Sloane?"

The question was a kindness on Lia's part-though she wouldn't have liked me thinking of her as kind.

"Sloane?" Lia repeated.

Sloane looked up from her lap. "Napkins," she said.

"Not going to lie," Michael put in. "I had no idea that was a number."

"I need napkins. And a pen."

Judd fished a ballpoint pen out of his pocket and handed it to her. Dean grabbed some c.o.c.ktail napkins off the bar.

3213. 4558. 9144. The second that Dean handed her the napkins, Sloane scrawled out the numbers, each sequence on its own napkin.

"It's not three," she said. "It's thirteen. He cut off the one. I don't know why he cut off the one."

He as in the UNSUB. Sloane wasn't a profiler. She'd never been trained to use I or You.

"That's why I didn't see it before." Sloane added a vertical line to the left of the first number. "It's not 3213," she said. "It's 13213." She moved on to the next napkin. "4558. 9144." With the pen, she began grouping the numbers into pairs. "Thirteen. Twenty-one. Thirty-four. Fifty-five. Eighty-nine." Finally, she circled the last three digits. "One hundred and forty-four." She looked up from the napkins, her eyes bright, as if she expected this to clarify everything. "It's the Fibonacci sequence."

There was a long pause. "And the Fibonacci sequence is what exactly?" Lia asked.

Sloane frowned, her forehead wrinkling. Clearly, it hadn't occurred to her that the rest of us might not know what the Fibonacci sequence was. "It's a series of numbers, derived from a deceptively simple formula where each subsequent integer is calculated by adding together the two previous numbers in the series." Sloane sucked in a breath, but babbled on. "The Fibonacci sequence appears throughout the biological world: the arrangement of pinecones, the family tree of honeybees, nautilus sh.e.l.ls, flower petals...."

Across the room, a man wearing a suit and an earpiece walked straight past the hostess. Even if I hadn't spent the past few months interacting with FBI agents, I would have recognized him as security.

People walk differently when they're the only ones in the room carrying a gun.

"The Fibonacci sequence is everywhere," Sloane was saying. The man in the earpiece approached Mr. Shaw and bent to whisper something in his ear. The casino owner's face remained carefully controlled, but when Michael followed my gaze, he must have seen something I didn't. His eyebrows shot up.

"It's beautiful," Sloane continued. "It's perfection."

I met Michael's eyes across the table. He held my gaze for a few seconds, then he raised one finger. "Check, please."

The UNSUB's calling card had just taken on a whole new meaning. I'd a.s.sumed the numbers might have personal significance to the killer. But if they really were part of some famous mathematical sequence, there was a chance the point of the numbers was less about fulfilling our killer's emotional needs and more about sending a message.

What message? I smoothed a hand over my dress as we began the long walk back toward the main body of the hotel and casino. That your actions aren't emotional? That they're as predetermined as numbers plugged into an equation?

I barely noticed the lights and sounds that bombarded our senses when we hit the casino floor.

That you're a part of the natural order, like pinecones and seash.e.l.ls and bees?

Judd, Dean, and Sloane hung a left toward the lobby. Michael began veering right. "Shopping?" he asked Lia.

Somehow, I doubted that Michael and Lia, if left to their own devices in Sin City, would spend their time perusing the shops. Judd must have been thinking the same thing, because he gave the two of them a look.

"I'll have you know I'm very fas.h.i.+onable," Michael told Judd.

You saw something when security came for Sloane's father, Michael. You asked for the check an instant later. You're not going shopping.

Dean knew me well enough to recognize when I was profiling someone. "I'll go with Sloane to call Sterling and Briggs," he told me. I heard what he wasn't saying: Go.

Whatever Michael and Lia were about to do, I wanted in on it-and if part of the reason was that going back upstairs meant going back to the information that awaited me on that drive, Dean didn't begrudge me that.