I STUDIED BLAZE’S FACE, but I didn’t know if I could trust my instincts when it came to him. He looked as genuine as he always had. And he’d been lying to me the whole time, just like the others.
My gaze slid between the other three men. They watched me warily, but they were holstering their guns. I didn’t appear to be next on their list of targets.
But that didn’t change the crimes they’d already committed.
“Why should I listen to or believe anything you say?” I asked, annoyed at how rough my voice sounded. “You killed everyone in the household—you killed them horribly…”
“Hey,” Garrison said, “I think we actually did a very nice job with that one.”
“Shut up, kid,” Julius said, sounding weary. He turned back to me. “We had nothing against the people in your house, whoever they really were to you. It was a job. We work for hire. Someone paid us to go in and deal out our specific brand of chaos, so we did.”
A job. They hadn’t even known Anna or the rest of them?
I glared at him. “So you slaughtered them for money? Is that supposed to make me feel better about it?”
“They weren’t good people,” Blaze piped up. “What Garrison said before about human trafficking was true. They were a branch of some secretive criminal syndicate—secretive enough that it was hard for me to dig up much about them, but I found enough. I always confirm that we’re only taking on targets society is probably better off without.”
I guessed to someone else’s eyes I might be a criminal. My kills had all been for the protection of the household, but their enemies wouldn’t have seen it that way. And somehow I had trouble summoning my usual conviction about the people I’d been protecting after the way Noelle had just tried to haul me away.
“What about me?” I said. “You didn’t kill me.”
“You weren’t there when we were carrying out the job,” Julius said, and I realized they honestly didn’t know I’d lived there. I’d lied plenty to them too. “You weren’t on the manifest. I don’t know why or how you ended up in the building or what your relation is to those people, but our client didn’t want you dead. It’s possible you’re the missing thing he expected to find, but he hasn’t specified, so we can’t be sure.”
He paused, as if waiting for me to fill in a few of the blanks for them. I crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t need to tell you anything.”
They were my enemies… weren’t they? I’d sworn to kill the people who’d slaughtered the household.
But this wasn’t quite the situation I’d pictured. If the men before me had been hired, if they hadn’t held any grudge or had personal reasons for taking all those people down… then the real villain was whoever had hired them. That was who I should take my revenge on.
In a way, Julius and his crew had simply been a weapon wielded by someone else to wreak their intended havoc. What good would destroying the weapon do when the person behind it could just pick up another one?
Maybe they were my enemies, maybe they weren’t, but they were definitely my only tie to the person responsible.
“Who hired you?” I demanded.
“We don’t know,” Garrison said, setting aside the snark for once. “Everyone goes by code names. All communication is highly secure. They don’t know who we are, and we don’t know who they are, not really.”
They obviously had some means of communicating with them, though. I wet my lips.
“We don’t have anything against you, Dess,” Julius said. “We don’t want to hurt you. But we need to understand how you fit in so we can make that call. What we’ve found… It’s raised a hell of a lot of questions.”
I swallowed hard, thinking of Noelle’s betrayal. Of the way she’d talked to me, of the secret phrase I hadn’t known was programmed into my brain to make me obey.
“After what happened here today, I’m not totally sure how it all comes together either,” I admitted. I wasn’t ready to tell them more than that.
“Can I show you something on my phone?” Blaze asked. “I was able to pick up a signal from a laptop in that woman’s vehicle, and I scraped a bunch of the files. A lot of them relate to you. It might give you a starting point.”
I stared at him. What could he possibly have found?
What could I lose by letting him show me? I nodded tentatively, still braced to defend myself.
Blaze slid his phone from his pocket and began typing. “There were a bunch of videos. I only had a chance to glance at one of them before we came down here—I wouldn’t even have stopped to do that if we’d known how much trouble you were in. But that one reveals a lot all on its own. I can play it for you.”
He was talking to me as if I were fragile. He knew I wasn’t. The unease that roiled in my stomach begged for me to turn down the offer, but the part of my mind that yearned for information took control of my voice. “Show me.”
He nodded and turned the phone to face me, the video already playing. He stretched out his arm, and I allowed myself to walk a couple of steps closer, drawn in by the images moving on the screen.
A little girl, no more than a toddler, stood in a blank white room. Her wavy black hair was strewn around her face, and her eyes were red-rimmed. Tears streaked down her cheeks.
She didn’t look much like the face I saw in the mirror these days, but I recognized her immediately. It was me. In my training room in the household. What the—
A man stepped into view, dressed in sweats, his hands wrapped. “Fists up,” he said. “We’ll go through it again. You need to focus, and then you’ll get to have your playtime.”
Child-me sobbed and shook her head. “I want Mommy and Daddy. I want to go home. Please, I want to see them. Please, please, please.”
My heart wrenched. Mommy and Daddy? I didn’t remember this at all. I didn’t remember ever thinking I had parents I could have seen if I asked. And the household had always been my home.
Hadn’t it?
A woman came into the frame with brisk strides I recognized immediately. She was younger, no gray in her hair and her face unlined, but there was no mistaking Noelle.
She looked down at child-me with a cold expression so much like the one she’d aimed at me just minutes ago. “You can’t see them. They’re gone. This is your home from here on. You belong to us now, and we’re shaping you up so that the bad things that happened to them never happen to you. Now listen!”
The little girl’s sniffling intensified, but the loud sobs stopped as she hung her head. With obvious reluctance, she raised her tiny fists.
My throat constricted. What the hell was going on there? It didn’t fit with anything I knew.
“I don’t remember this,” I admitted. “I don’t remember anything before being part of the household.”
“Kids don’t typically keep their memories from that young,” Julius said. “It’s not surprising. But from the looks of it, you didn’t have much choice about the company you were keeping.”
My voice came out in a whisper. “I had no idea.”
“You didn’t know they took you from your family?” Blaze said, sympathy filling his eyes.
“No, I thought—I thought my parents were gone, like Noelle said there. But that they’d been part of the household before. That I’d always been part of it.”
But that wasn’t true. The child me hadn’t acted as if I’d already known Noelle or the man. I’d asked for some other home where I thought my parents would be. And Noelle had talked as if they’d only recently taken me in. You belong to us now.
My legs wobbled under me as I grappled with the questions spinning in my head. Was Blaze right? Had I been stolen away from some family who had nothing to do with Noelle and the others?
Who was I really? And why would the people in the household have kidnapped a terrified little girl… and shaped her into the killer I was today?
I looked at Blaze and then Julius, and they gazed steadily back at me. I didn’t know where we’d go from here, but for at least the next little while, I had no interest in fighting them.
I nodded toward Blaze’s phone. “I need to see more.”
