All In: (The Naturals #3) (8 page)

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 sushi in front of her, carefully disassembling 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.

F
ive 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 cocktail 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
1
3213.” 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 shells, 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.”

T
he UNSUB’s calling card had just taken on a whole new meaning. I’d assumed 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 seashells 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 fashionable,” 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.

When I was ready, he would be there.

“Fair warning.” Lia eyed Dean and me before turning back to Judd. “If you make me go up to the suite right now, there’s a very good chance that I will give a full-length
performance of
The Ballad of Cassie and Dean
. Complete with musical numbers.”

“And there is a very good chance,” Michael added, “that I will be forced to accompany those musical numbers with a stunning display of interpretive dance.”

Judd must have decided that it was in the best interest of team harmony to avoid that performance at all cost. “One hour,” he told Michael and Lia. “Don’t leave the
building. Don’t separate. Don’t approach anyone related to this case.”

“I’ll go with them,” I volunteered.

Judd eyed me for a moment. Then he gave a brisk nod. “Make sure they don’t burn the place down.”

It took exactly thirty seconds after we parted ways with the others for Michael to confirm my assumption that he hadn’t been overcome with a need to hit the shops. He came to a stop as we
reached the edge of the casino floor. For several seconds, he stood there, his gaze moving methodically from one party of people to the next.

“What are you looking for?” I asked him.

“Curiosity. Irritation.” He zeroed in on a group of women coming toward us. “That mollified look people get when they’re offered free drinks in exchange for an
inconvenience.” He hung a right. “This way.”

As Lia and I followed, Michael continued scanning faces. As we worked our way from the slots to the poker tables, I could sense an emotional shift in the air, even if I couldn’t pinpoint
it the way Michael could.

“Incoming,” Michael murmured to Lia.

Seconds later, a bouncer was glaring down at us. “IDs, please,” the man said. “You have to be twenty-one or over to be in this area.”

“As luck would have it,” Lia told him, “it’s my twenty-first birthday.” She said those words with a coy smile and just the right level of underlying giddiness.

“And your friends?” the bouncer asked Lia.

Lia linked an arm through Michael’s.
“We,”
she said, “just met. And as for Miss Sweet-and-Innocent-Looking over there, I know for a fact that there are some
pretty incriminating pictures of
her
twenty-first floating around on the interwebs, which is why
my
clothes will be staying on this evening.”

Did she just
…My cheeks flushed scarlet as I processed the fact that, yes, Lia had really just implied that my fictional twenty-first birthday had taken a Girls Gone Wild turn.

The bouncer leaned to one side to get a better look at me. If anything, the mortified expression on my face seemed to sell Lia’s story.

“I’m going to hurt you,” I muttered in Lia’s general direction.

“You can’t hurt me,” she shot back brightly. “It’s my birthday.”

The bouncer grinned. “Happy birthday,” he told Lia.

Chalk one up for the professional liar.

“But I’m still going to need to see some ID.” The bouncer turned back to Michael. “Company policy.”

Michael shrugged. He reached into his back pocket and removed a wallet. He flashed an ID at the bouncer, who examined it carefully. It must have passed muster, because then he turned to Lia and
me. “Ladies?”

Lia opened her purse and handed him not one, but
two
IDs. He glanced at them and raised an eyebrow at Lia.

“It’s not your birthday,” he said.

Lia executed a delicate shrug. “What’s the fun of only turning twenty-one once?”

With a snort, the bouncer handed the IDs back to her. “This area is closing,” he said. “For maintenance. If you’re looking for poker, you’ll want to hit the tables
on the south side.”

When we were a good ten feet away, Michael turned to Lia. “Well?”

“Whatever this area’s closing for,” she replied, “it’s not maintenance.”

I tried to process the fact that Lia had fake IDs for
both
of us, then caught sight of something about a hundred yards away.

“There,” I told Michael. “By the sign that says
restrooms
.”

A half-dozen security personnel were directing patrons away.

“Come on,” Michael said, looping around to come at the blocked-off area from behind.