Page 28 of The Naturals

YOU

You’re getting sloppy, killing so close to home, leaving the bodies spread throughout the back streets of the capital, like Hansel and Gretel dropping more and more bread crumbs the farther into the forest they go.

But from the moment you first laid eyes on her, it’s been harder to push back the desire to kill, harder to remember why you make it a point not to play in your own backyard.

Maybe this is the way it’s supposed to be. Maybe it’s fate.

Time to finish what you started.

Time to get their attention.

Time to come home.

I woke up on Saturday at noon to two sounds: the shuffling of cards and the faint, high-pitched whir of metal on metal. I opened my eyes and turned over onto my side. Sloane was sitting cross-legged on her bed, a mug in one hand and the other dealing out cards: seven columns, a different number of cards in each one, all of them facedown.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Sloane stared at the backs of the cards for a moment and then picked one up and moved it. “Solitaire,” she said.

“But all of the cards are facedown.”

“Yes.” Sloane took a sip from her mug.

“How can you play Solitaire if all of the cards are facedown?”

Sloane shrugged. “How can you play with some of them faceup?”

“Sloane is something of a card shark. Briggs found her in Vegas.” Lia stuck her head out of the closet. “If she skims the deck once, she can more or less track the cards, even once they’re shuffled.”

I registered the fact that Lia was in our closet. Metal on metal, I thought. Metal hangers sliding across a metal rack.

“Hey,” I said, taking a better look at Lia’s current attire. “That’s my dress.”

“Mine now.” Lia smiled. “Didn’t the FBI warn you that I have sticky fingers? Kleptomania, pathological lying—it’s all the same, really.”

I thought Lia was joking, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Kidding,” she confirmed after a few seconds. “About the kleptomania, not about the fact that I have no intention of giving this dress back. Honestly, Sloane is the klepto in this house, but this really is more my color than yours.”

I turned to Sloane, who’d ratcheted the speed of her game up a notch—or three.

“Sloane,” I said.

“Yes?”

“Why is Lia poking around in our closet?”

Sloane looked up, but didn’t stop playing. “Motivation is really more your domain than mine. I find most people somewhat bewildering.”

I rephrased the question. “Why would you let Lia poke around in our closet?”

“Oh,” Sloane said, once she took my meaning. “She brought a bribe.”

“Bribe?” I asked. And that was when I realized what, exactly, was in Sloane’s mug.

“You brought her coffee?”

Lia smoothed a hand over the front of my dress. “Guilty as charged.”