“But how did you—”

“Your ankle tracker.”

“Agent Sterling said she hadn’t activated it.”

Briggs smiled wryly. “She hadn’t, but since she was on a playing-by-the-rules kick when she checked it out, she filled out all the paperwork. I’s were dotted. T’s were crossed. We had the serial number and were able to activate it remotely.”

It was ironic—I’d saved Agent Sterling’s life by breaking the rules, and she’d saved mine by following them.

Briggs helped me to my feet. “My team’s on their way in,” he said. “We left straight from the house, so we had a head start.”

We?

“Cassie.” Dean broke through the brush.

“I told him to wait at the cabin,” Briggs said to me. “I told you to wait at the cabin,” he reiterated to Dean, annoyance creeping into his voice. But he didn’t stop me from taking three steps toward Dean, or Dean from crossing the remaining space between us in a heartbeat. The next second, he had a hand on each of my shoulders, touching me, confirming that I was okay, that I was here, that I was real.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

His hands went from my shoulders to my face. His right hand cupped the left side. His left gently bypassed my injuries, burying itself in my hair and holding my head up for me, like he thought my neck might not be able to do the job.

“Activating the tracker was Sloane’s idea. Everyone else forgot about it. Briggs was at our place when we got the coordinates. I may have arranged it so that I was in his car when he went to leave.”

Briggs wouldn’t have wasted even a second trying to kick him out.

“What happened?” Dean asked me, his voice thick with emotions I couldn’t quite identify. I knew he was probably asking about the abduction, about my face, about being tied up in the cabin and scrambling for my life, but I chose to interpret the question slightly differently.

“I hit him in the head with a rock. Then I jumped on him from up in that tree.” I gestured vaguely with one hand. Dean stared at me, his expression unreadable until the ends of his lips began to turn slowly upward.

“I was wrong,” he said, “when I said I just felt something.” He was breathing heavily. I couldn’t breathe at all. “When I said I wasn’t sure it was enough.”

He was scared, like me. But he felt it, and I felt it, and he was there. I’d spent so long trying not to choose, trying not to feel, and in an instant, I felt something inside of me break, like floodwaters bursting through a dam.

Dean pulled me gently toward him. His lips brushed lightly over mine. The action was hesitant, uncertain. My hands settled on the back of his neck, pulling him closer.

Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe when the smoke cleared, things would look different. But I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t keep living my life on maybes if I wanted to live.

I rose up on my toes, my body pressed against his, and returned the kiss, the pain in my face fading, washed away with the rest of the world, until there was only this moment—one that I hadn’t thought I’d live to see.

I spent the night at the hospital. I had a concussion, bruising on my neck from nearly being strangled, and countless cuts and abrasions on my hands and legs. They had to pry Dean away from me.

I was alive.

The next morning, the doctors released me into Agent Briggs’s custody. We were halfway to his car before I realized that he was being too quiet.

“Where’s Agent Sterling?” I asked.

“Gone.” We climbed into the car. I gingerly pulled on my seat belt. Briggs pulled out onto the road. “Her injuries were minimal, but she’s on a mandated leave until a Bureau psychologist gives her the green light for fieldwork.”

“Is she coming back?” My eyes stung as I asked the question. A week ago, I would have been glad to be rid of her, but now…

“I don’t know,” Briggs said, a muscle in his jaw ticking. He was the kind of person who hated admitting uncertainty. “After Redding captured her—after Dean helped her escape—she fought to get back to active duty. She threw herself into work.”

That was then. This was now. I’d thought Agent Sterling was coming around to the idea of the program, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the look on her face when she’d asked me why. Why hadn’t I listened to her? Why had I made the madman take me, too?

All she’d wanted, in those last moments, was to believe that I would make it out of that hellhole alive.

“She blames herself?” I asked—but it wasn’t really a question.

“Herself. Her father. Me.” Something in Briggs’s tone told me that Agent Sterling wasn’t the only one shouldering that guilt. “You were never supposed to be in the field,” he told me. “None of your lives were ever supposed to be on the line.”

If the Naturals hadn’t worked this case, Christopher Simms would have killed that girl. If I hadn’t gone with Agent Sterling, she’d be dead. No matter how much what I’d been through haunted Agent Briggs, I knew in my gut that at the end of the day, he would be able to live with the risks of this program. I wasn’t sure that Agent Sterling could.

“Where are we going?” I asked when Briggs drove past our exit on the highway.

He didn’t say anything for several minutes. Mile blurred into mile. We ended up at an apartment complex across the street from the prison.

“There’s something I want you to see.”

Webber’s apartment had two bedrooms. His life was highly segmented. He slept in one room—hospital corners on his bed, blackout curtains on the windows—and he worked in the other.

Briggs’s team was cataloging evidence when we walked in: notebooks and photographs, weapons, a computer. Hundreds—if not thousands—of evidence bags told the story of Webber’s life.

The story of his relationship with Daniel Redding.

“Go ahead,” Briggs told me, nodding toward the carefully documented bags. “Just wear gloves.”

He hadn’t brought Dean to this crime scene. He hadn’t brought Michael or Lia or Sloane.

“What am I looking for?” I asked, slipping on a pair of gloves.

“Nothing,” Briggs said simply.

You brought me here to look at this, I thought, slipping back into profiling mode without even thinking about it. Why?

Because this wasn’t about processing evidence. It was about me and what I’d been through out in the woods. I would always have questions about Locke, the way that Dean would always have questions about his father, but this UNSUB—this man who’d tried to snuff out my life—didn’t have to be some larger-than-life figure, another ghost to haunt my dreams.

Hospital corners and hunting rifles.

Briggs had brought me here so that I could understand—and move on, as much as a person could move on after something like this.

It took me hours to go through it all. There was a picture of Emerson Cole tucked into the side of a journal. Webber’s writing—all capital letters, angled to one side—marked the pages, telling me his story in horrific, nauseating detail. I read it, sifting through those details, absorbing them and building a profile.

Six months ago, you transferred onto Redding’s cell block. You were fascinated with him, mesmerized by the way he played the other prisoners, the guards. The prison was the only place you had any power, any control, and when another rejection came in from the police academy, that wasn’t enough anymore.

You wanted a different kind of power. Intangible. Undeniable. Eternal.

Webber had become obsessed with Redding. He’d thought he was successfully hiding that obsession until Redding had offered him a very special job.

He recognized your potential. You needed to prove yourself—to prove that you were smarter and better and more than everyone who looked down on you, rejected you, and shoved you to the side.

Redding had asked Webber to do two things: keep tabs on Agent Briggs and find Dean. Webber had proven himself on both fronts. He’d followed Agent Briggs. He’d found the house where Dean was living. He’d reported back.

That was the turning point. That was the moment when you knew that to eclipse that mewling little brat in Redding’s eyes, you’d have to do more.