Cassie enters the kitchen intending to ask Michael for bacon, but finds Judd cooking, Agent Briggs present, and Lia ready to tease her. The awkward moment makes it clear Cassie, Michael, and Sloane have been trying to hide something poorly. Briggs calls Cassie aside before she can leave.

Briggs takes Cassie to his study, a room filled with mounted predators that he says remind him of what his team faces. Cassie realizes Briggs already knows about the files Michael, Sloane, and Cassie accessed. Briggs explains that Judd told him, then reveals that he confiscated the printed case materials from Michael and the USB drive from Sloane, and that Sloane’s laptop will be checked by the FBI tech lab.

Cassie recognizes that Briggs is shutting her out before she can formally present her suspicions, but she presses anyway. Briggs insists the FBI cannot authorize teenagers to work active cases, especially when the UNSUB is dangerous and local. Cassie challenges the hypocrisy of using Dean’s profiling ability as a child, then argues that the case may be connected to Cassie’s mother because of the victims’ occupations, red hair, and knife wounds.

Cassie further deduces that the latest victim’s hair was dyed red, turning the hair color from victim selection into part of the UNSUB’s signature. Cassie reasons that if the hair was dyed after death, it is a deliberate message to investigators that hair color matters and that the murders are connected. Briggs refuses to discuss the case officially, but his silence and attention show that Cassie’s analysis has landed.

Briggs tells Cassie that her involvement in the active case ends immediately and offers to let her start on cold cases instead. He warns that if Cassie investigates this case again, there will be unpleasant consequences, implying he could send her home and leave the program with only one Natural profiler. Cassie says she understands but leaves Briggs with a warning: if the killer is dyeing hair, the rules are changing and the violence will get worse.

The chapter shifts to the killer’s point of view. The UNSUB feels closer than ever to the true object of obsession, seeing previous victims as mere imitations. The killer restrains a screaming girl with duct tape, cuts a lock of her hair with scissors, and then cuts her, confirming that another victim is already in danger and that the pattern is escalating.