Redding leaned forward. “I suppose I’d say that I wish I could be there to see what this group will do to you for coming after them. To watch them take you apart, piece by piece.”
Keep going, you sick monster. Keep telling me what they’ll do to me. Tell me everything you know.
Redding paused suddenly, then chuckled. “Clever girl, aren’t you? Getting me talking like that. I can understand what my boy sees in you.”
A muscle in my jaw ticked. I’d almost had him. I’d been this close….
“Do you know your Shakespeare, girl?” Among his plethora of charming qualities, the serial killer across from me had a fondness for the Bard.
“‘To thine own self be true’?” I suggested darkly, racking my brain for a way to reel him back in, to make him tell me what he knew.
Redding smiled, his lips parting to show his teeth. “I was thinking more of The Tempest. ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.’”
All the devils. The killer across from me. The twisted group that had taken my mother.
Seven Masters, a voice whispered in my memory. The Pythia. And Nine.
“From what I know of this collective,” Redding said, “if they’ve had your mother for all these years?” Without warning, he surged forward, bringing his face as close to mine as his chains would allow. “She might be quite the devil herself.”
The FBI agent at the door drew his sidearm the moment Redding lunged toward me. I stared at the killer’s face, inches from mine.
You want me to flinch. Violence was about power, about control—who had it and who didn’t.
“I’m fine,” I told my FBI escort. Agent Vance had worked with Agent Briggs off and on since I’d joined the Naturals program. He’d been tapped to stand guard because both Briggs and his partner, Agent Sterling, had decided to stay on the other side of the two-way mirror. They had a history with Daniel Redding, and right now, we wanted all of the psychopath’s attention focused on me.
“He can’t hurt me,” I told Agent Vance, saying those words as much for my target’s benefit as the agent’s. “He’s just being melodramatic.”
Minimizing language, designed to keep Redding engaged in this game of verbal chess. I’d gotten him to admit that, at the very least, he knew of this group’s existence. Now I needed to find out what he’d heard and who he’d heard it from.
I needed to stay focused.
“No reason to get testy.” Redding settled back in his seat and made a show of holding his cuffed hands up in a mea culpa for Vance, who holstered his sidearm. “I am simply being candid.” The edges of Redding’s lips twisted as his attention returned to me. “There are things that can break a person. And once broken, a person—such as your mother—can be formed into something new.” Redding tilted his head to the side, his eyes heavy lidded, as if he were caught in the midst of a particularly vivid daydream. “Something magnificent.”
“Who are they?” I asked, refusing to take the bait. “Where did you hear about them?”
There was a long pause.
“Say that I did know something.” Redding’s face stilled. His voice was neither soft nor loud as he continued. “What would you give me in return?”
Redding was highly intelligent, calculating, sadistic. And he had only two obsessions. What you did to your victims. And Dean.
My fingers curved into fists on the table. I knew what I had to do, and I knew, without question, that I was going to do it. No matter how sick it made me. No matter how much I didn’t want to say the words.
“Dean reaches for me more now than he used to.” I looked down at my hands. They were shaking. I forced myself to turn my left hand over and brought the fingers on my right hand to meet it. “His fingers entwine with mine, and his thumb…” I swallowed hard, my thumb making its way to my palm. “His thumb draws tiny circles on the palm of my hand. Sometimes he traces his fingers along the outside of mine. Sometimes…” My voice caught in my throat. “Sometimes I run my fingers along his scars.”
“I gave him those scars.” The look on Redding’s face told me that he was savoring my words, would savor them for a very long time.
A ball of nausea rose in my throat. Keep going, Cassie. You have to.
“Dean dreams about you.” The words felt like razor-edged sandpaper in my mouth, but I forced myself to continue. “There are times when he wakes up from a nightmare and can’t see what’s right there in front of him because the only thing that he can see is you.”
Telling Dean’s father these things wasn’t just making a deal with the devil. This was selling my soul. It was dangerously close to selling Dean’s.
“You won’t tell my son what you had to do to get me to talk.” Redding drummed his fingers along the tabletop, one after another. “But every time he reaches for your hand, every time you touch his scars, you’ll remember this conversation. I’ll be there. Even if the boy doesn’t know it, you will.”
“Tell me what you know,” I said, the words ripping their way out of my throat.
“Very well.” Satisfaction played along the edges of Redding’s lips. “The group you’re hunting looks for a specific type of killer. Someone who longs to be a part of something. A joiner.”
This was the monster, giving me my due.
“I’m not much of a joiner myself,” Redding continued. “But I am a listener. Over the years, I’ve heard rumors. Whispers. Urban legends. Masters and apprentices, ritual and rules.” He tilted his head slightly to one side, watching my reaction, as if he could see the workings of my brain and found them enticing. “I know that each Master chooses his own replacement. I don’t know how many of them there are. I don’t know who they are or where they’re located.”
I leaned forward. “But you did know that they took my mother. You knew she wasn’t dead.”
“I’m a man who sees patterns.” Redding enjoyed talking about what kind of man he was, demonstrating his superiority to me, to the FBI, to Briggs and Sterling, whom he must have suspected were hiding behind the glass. “Shortly after I was incarcerated, I became aware of another inmate. He’d been convicted of murdering his ex, but insisted she was still alive. There was never a body, you see. Just a copious amount of blood—too much, the prosecutors argued, for the victim to have lived.”