I WASN’T sure I’d ever seen anything quite as horrifying as the videos Blaze had loaded onto his phone.
They weren’t disturbing in a gory, blood spewing everywhere kind of way. That, I could have stomached no problem. Instead, I watched a child—no more than four years old—learn to fight like a professional killer. I could see the way she put all of her efforts into training for the sake of appeasing her tutors. She wielded a knife with her right hand and repeated the motions that she’d been taught only once.
She moved unlike any other four-year-old I’d ever seen. Which made sense, considering that this video was two years into her training. She would have given an experienced soldier a hard time despite the little hands and the angelic face that was occasionally whipped by the long braid of dark hair that ran down her back.
She was deadly. Fast. Strong.
She was me.
In the past two hours, I’d watched dozens of these videos. They’d started when I was around two years old, crying for a mother I didn’t remember. By four years old, it looked like I’d completely forgotten her, which I guessed also made sense. Most people couldn’t remember their earliest years. I’d been so young when they must have taken me.
It hadn’t taken long before Noelle was both my family and trainer in one.
Now and then, I still struggled to wrap my head around the fact that the little girl in the videos was me, especially when I didn’t remember that entire chunk of my life. But she was. Even the video files were named “Decima” with a date and series of numbers attached. If they hadn’t been, I still would have recognized myself in that childish face. As I got farther into the videos, I started to come across training sequences that had stuck in my memory from way back then.
As the video I was currently watching came to an end, I decided I’d had enough. What more could I learn from them? The household had stolen me from my parents when I’d been a toddler. They’d instructed me in fighting arts and stealth for reasons I didn’t understand. No explanations were given in the video records. Noelle must have carried them on her for some kind of reference if she’d needed to push on a specific part of my training.
It wasn’t just physical training in there, after all. A few of the videos had shown the psychological conditioning I hadn’t even realized I’d gone through. The conditioning that had embedded the awful phrase that had let them take over my free will: Garlic milkshake. And programmed me with other innate responses through hypnosis and punishment too.
Suddenly I understood why I’d always felt uncomfortable about the idea of turning on the TV in any of my hotel rooms while on assignment unless I had to in order to gather information. Why I’d never been the slightest bit tempted to step outside my rooms in the household without explicit permission. Why I’d barely asked any questions about my role in the household until I’d finally escaped it.
They’d honed my body and shaped my mind into the exact tool they’d wanted me to be. A shudder ran through me at the thought.
I shifted on the picnic bench and reached across the space between that table and the one where the guys were sitting, handing the phone back to Blaze. We’d come to this secluded corner of a park in the wan early morning light so that he could show me more of what he’d discovered. We hadn’t wanted to linger at the scene where Noelle had attacked me—and where she and her men had met their deaths.
I was still wary of the four hitmen eyeing me from across the distance between the tables, but I couldn’t resist flopping back on my own and closing my eyes, trying to put a cap on the emotions that were roaring through me.
Who was I really? Were my parents still out there? Why had Noelle and the others treated me like this?
The strongest emotion by far was confusion. That and queasiness at the awareness that I had no idea who I’d been before I’d been kidnapped or who I’d have grown to be.
But that part didn’t matter, really. I was Decima now, and nothing would change that.
The yawning sense of loneliness I’d never understood before opened up inside me. I’d been missing my real family this whole time without knowing it. My fingers itched for my stuffed tiger toy—the one I’d seen myself clutching in the earliest videos before I’d become more compliant. I must have brought it from home.
No wonder I’d had such a hard time leaving it behind. It’d been my one connection to the home I’d lost.
Blaze’s foot tapped against the pine boards of his picnic bench. He’d been stirring restlessly since I’d started watching the videos, but so far he’d managed to keep his energy contained enough to avoid peppering me with questions. Apparently the hyperactive hacker’s patience had run out.
“How much of all that do you remember?”
I pushed myself into a straighter sitting position, eyeing the guy. The breeze tossed through his floppy, pale red hair until he pawed it behind his ear.
What could it hurt to be honest? I cleared the lump from my throat. “I know that I was trained all through my childhood and teenage years. I remember a few of the sessions I saw in the videos, as I got a little older, but none of the really early stuff. And I have no idea about anything before the household. But there has to be a before, right? I wouldn’t have been crying for my mom if there wasn’t. I was so young…”
Blaze gave a sympathetic shake of his head. “You couldn’t have been older than one and a half or two in the first videos,” he said with a flash in his eyes that was unexpectedly protective. Then he paused. “What were they training you for?”
They still didn’t know that part. Well, they could probably guess, given the training they must have received for their own line of work. No one learned to wield a knife like child-me had just to carve up a turkey. And the guns…
I drew in a breath and hesitated. Four pairs of eyes remained locked on me. I still barely knew these men, even though I’d been living with them for several days. I hadn’t been aware that they were contract killers rather than cops until last night. That was a pretty major deception.
But then, I’d lied through my teeth to them when it came to so much about myself. They were brutal killers… and so was I. If anyone could understand the life I’d been living, maybe it was them.
There was still so much I didn’t know about who I was, and they might be the only people who had a real chance of helping me figure it out. They’d come to back me up when I was in trouble. And I had to admit that even with their initial kidnapping taken into consideration, they’d treated me with more respect than anyone in the household truly had.
“What do you think it was for?” I said. “You’ve seen how I can fight. I was learning how to kill. Once I was older—starting when I would have been around eight or nine, I think—they started sending me on missions. Small local ones at first, then farther out.” I wrapped my arms around myself instinctively. “They told me I was taking down bad people—that the world was an awful place and almost everyone in it was awful, and getting rid of the men and women they pointed me at would make things a little better. Make the household a little safer. I never saw any reason to believe anything different…”
Because the people who’d taught me hadn’t allowed me to. Until now. Until their carefully constructed façade had crumbled when these men had blasted into the household and blown them all away.
I still didn’t totally understand that either, even if I believed the guys that they’d been hired by a client to do it, that it hadn’t been personal for them.
I sealed my lips as I looked over the four imposing men at the picnic table parallel to mine. Blaze was still jiggling his knee. Garrison sat on the bench, his ankles crossed as he watched me intently with his piercing hazel eyes. In the sun, they appeared lighter than usual—a pretty, almost green color.
Julius leaned against the side of the table with one foot propped on the seat, his massive, muscular frame giving off a typically commanding air. With his military short hair, he looked every inch the ex-soldier. Talon was poised on the far bench with his elbows braced against the tabletop, his icy blue gaze fixed on me beneath the sheen of his pale, shaved scalp. The coldest killer of the bunch had the look of a lion ready to strike, but I didn’t think any of his animosity was directed at me.
“It makes sense that they could have convinced you,” Garrison said, somewhat grudgingly. The lanky blond man had tried to rankle me with his snark nearly every time we’d spoken to each other in the past couple of weeks. I didn’t think he liked offering any sympathy. “You had them brainwashing you from when you were so young. Even older kids are pretty impressionable.” Then he shut his mouth tight as if he’d said more than he thought he should.
Blaze frowned. “They started sending you off to kill people when you were still just a kid? That’s—”
His voice halted abruptly at a sudden movement from Julius. The crew’s leader straightened up. He took a step closer to me, peering at me with his deep blue eyes. Something in them sent a weird but not totally unpleasant shiver over my skin.
“I knew we’d met before,” he said with a startled expression that looked odd on his normally assured face. “I helped you once.”
I blinked at him, and a twinge of the unexpected sense of familiarity I’d felt here and there before rose up inside me again. “If we’d actually interacted, I would have thought I’d remember that.”
“Maybe not, given the circumstances.” His surprise faded away, replaced by his usual confidence—and a warmth I wasn’t totally used to. “It was more than a decade ago, not long after Talon and I had started the crew. Blaze and Garrison weren’t in the picture yet. The two of us were working a job in Miami one night. I had a bike back then—a Triumph. I was just getting on it in the alley where I’d parked when this girl who wouldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve came running down the alley toward me. It was dark—you were frantic—but it must have been you.”
Talon lifted his head to look at his boss. “That’s what really happened to the Triumph? You told me you totaled it.”
Julius shook his head. “She was bleeding from a cut on her side, and I could hear people running after her. The alley was a dead end. I wasn’t going to leave some kid for a bunch of creeps to find. So I told her to wait there and marched out, told the people who were charging over that I’d seen her running off in a different direction. And right when I went back to check on her, the bike came roaring out of the alley with her perched on it. She left me in the lurch.” He chuckled, seemingly unoffended in hindsight. “I figured I could always get another one. She obviously really needed it.”
My mouth fell open. I did remember him now that he’d pieced the details together. I’d partly bungled a mission, caught a trip wire on my way out of the house where I’d made the kill and gotten several guards on my tail. One of them had shot at me and nicked the side of my chest. It was the first time I’d had a mission go haywire, and I’d been freaking out underneath. In the darkness and the haze of my panic, I’d barely registered the facial features of the stranger who’d protected me.
Then cool logic had kicked in thanks to my training, and I’d made use of the resources available to me. A.k.a., his bike.
“I did,” I said. “Need it. Thank you. I probably would have figured out how to get out of that mess one way or another, but… you made it a lot easier.”
Once I’d left the city well behind, I’d ditched the bike at a junkyard and called the household to orchestrate my pickup. I’d never mentioned that anyone other than me had been responsible for getting me out alive. Julius couldn’t have known that story unless he’d really been there. And studying him now, I could easily superimpose his authoritative presence over the shadowy impression in my memory.
And now we’d somehow stumbled back into each other’s lives when it turned out I might need him again—in a much bigger way. The realization brought a strange mix of relief and unease.
Garrison let out a light snort. “What kind of mission did they have you on at eleven years old? Did you kill your mean science teacher?”
My gaze darted to him, and the uneasy sensation within me expanded, twisting around my gut. “The household never told me any details about the people they sent me to kill other than what I needed to know to get the job done. That one… That one was a rich man who had a big house guarded by men with semi-automatic rifles. He kept a pet bearded dragon in his bedroom. I slipped in through a back window, dodged all the guards, and cut his throat in his sleep. I just… ran into a little trouble on the way out. I didn’t have as much practice then.”
Garrison blinked at me, his smug smile vanishing. “Okay, I stand corrected.”
Blaze’s eyebrows leapt up. “Twelve years ago in Miami? Was he an older man, in his 60s, with a house in North Beach? Big stucco number with bizarro gargoyle mounted over the door?”
I stared at him. He hadn’t even been in the crew yet then—how did he have any idea about this? He couldn’t have been out of his teens back then himself. “Yeah… How did you know?”
The hacker let out a disbelieving guffaw. “That hit still gets talked about in the circles we run in. That was Milo Evangelez—the gemstone baron of the southeast.”
Something shifted in Julius’s expression. He cocked his head. “What are some of the other missions you carried out? The particularly memorable ones?”
My skin started to itch with a deeper discomfort. Noelle had drilled it into me that I wasn’t supposed to talk about anything I did outside the household. And… a gemstone baron… Why would they have wanted to kill him?
Suddenly I wasn’t so sure I wanted to hear what else the guys might tell me.
But I couldn’t be a chicken about this, and Noelle didn’t dictate my life anymore. I wracked my brain for missions that stood out more than the others and forced my mouth to move.
“Like I said, I wasn’t told things like names. Even if I overheard information like that, I put it out of my mind.” Probably thanks to all Noelle’s hypnotic suggestions, I realized now with a grimace. “There were three businessmen in Italy who always went everywhere together. That made them difficult to take out. They acted all jovial and friendly in public, but in their hotel room, they were assholes to each other. I half-expected them to kill each other themselves before I poisoned them. Managed to sneak some special ice cubes into the drinks in a room service order they placed.”
I paused for just a second, pulling my lower lip under my teeth before I continued. “Another of the harder ones was this man in Osaka. I had to kill the guy in a bathhouse, and he was as big as a sumo wrestler. Do you know how hard it is to strangle someone who outweighs you by five hundred pounds with nothing but the towel they walked in with?”
The guys were staring at me in silence. It was kind of unnerving. Even Garrison the Indifferent was gaping at me.
Unsurprisingly, Blaze lost the ability to contain himself first. “Are you hearing this?” he said, glancing around at the others with an awe I wouldn’t have expected from my sparse descriptions. He met my gaze again. “The man in the bathhouse—the sumo wrestler type—that would have been Akio Nakamura, the founder of Nakamura Tech. The Italian brothers must have been the co-founders of the aerospace center in Rome—a big source of political debate.”
Those… didn’t sound like the horrible criminals Noelle had made them out to be either. My stomach started to knot. “How can you be so sure?”
“It all makes so much more sense now. Holy crap.” Blaze clapped his hand against his knee. “You’re the Ghost.”
I stared at him. “The what? What are you talking about?”
Julius cuffed his younger associate lightly on the shoulder. “What Blaze is doing a very bad job of explaining is that the mercenary underworld has been tracking certain high profile and highly skilled kills for years, trying to figure out who’s pulling them off. People started referring to the mysterious assassin they assumed was responsible for most—if not all—of them as the Ghost, since the assassin never left a trace. The three hits you mentioned were all attributed to the Ghost.”
“Somehow I don’t think anyone would have predicted it was a teenage girl,” Talon remarked in his deep baritone. I couldn’t tell from his tone whether he was impressed or merely stating a fact.
“Everyone’s been incredibly impressed by your work—and curious as hell about who you are,” Blaze said, his eyes shining with unrestrained excitement. “Holy shit, we’ve had the Ghost staying in our apartment for days and we didn’t even know it.”
Garrison recovered from his shock enough to look me up and down with a skeptical expression. “From what I’ve seen during that time, I wouldn’t say you quite live up to the expectations we all built up.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “I’m sorry if I couldn’t immediately overpower four highly trained hitmen while on my own with no preparation and multiple injuries. Also, FYI, I probably could have killed you at least five times if that was what I really wanted to do, but I was waiting you all out to see what you knew about the murders at the household.”
“So, your excuse is that supposedly you were going easy on us?”
I shrugged, leaning forward on the bench. “You could try me right now. I think I’m ready to take off this brace.” I tapped the plastic structure around my arm that’d been shielding my previously sprained wrist. “One-on-one, let’s see who comes out on top.”
I didn’t really mean the challenge, but even Garrison of the many masks couldn’t stop uncertainty from flickering in his eyes as he looked me over again. Facing me—a woman with an immaculately deadly reputation—scared him in a way that he wouldn’t admit.
The entire crew was impressed by my kills and the reputation I’d built up with them—a reputation I’d had no idea about. The idea that mercenaries all around the world might have been discussing each of my hits and comparing notes and theories made me want to squirm. All I’d been doing was following orders.
With that thought, the knots in my stomach turned into a dull ache. “The people I mentioned,” I said tentatively. “And whoever else it seems like I killed, that you attributed to the ‘Ghost’… Were they involved in illegal activities as well as the legit businesses? Were they some kind of criminals?”
Julius sobered in an instant. “Some of them definitely had questionable ties,” he said quietly. “But many of them, as far as any of us knew, were sticking to at least the letter of the law. We assumed they were being taken down by competitors or people with a personal beef, not for any real crimes.”
I dragged my gaze away from him to stare off through the trees. Why had Noelle really ordered me to kill each of my targets, then?
I’d been surrounded by lies my entire life, so was it really a surprise if the people I’d killed weren’t as deserving of their horrible fates as I’d been told?
I’d been nothing but a tool for the household, a tool for their own selfish ends. They were the bad guys in this scenario, not the heroic underdogs they’d painted themselves as.
Nausea trickled through me, and I had the sudden urge to march right back to the mansion and kill them all over again.
Within a few seconds, the flare of rage faded into more queasiness. I rubbed my face. I’d learned so much, and all of it only made my life and the mission I’d given myself more complicated. Where the hell did I go from here?
And how was this crew of hitmen going to factor into it?
“What now?” I asked, focusing on Julius, since ultimately it’d be his decision. “You know who I am, I know who you are…”
He contemplated me for a moment. “That’s up to you. What do you want to do with everything you’ve discovered?”
I’d never heard those first four words before—never been given the freedom to do whatever I wanted. What did I want to do?
I felt my answer out slowly. “I want to know who I really am—or who I was before I was taken. I want to find out why the household took me and trained me, and why you were ordered to kill them. I need to understand where I fit in and why they want me back.”
Blaze was the first to speak. “We can help you with all of that.” He glanced at Julius for confirmation.
Julius nodded. “Whether you like it or not, we’re all tangled up in this mess together. After everything we put you through getting to this point, maybe we owe it to you to find you some answers. And frankly, I’d like to know what those answers are too.”
With his dark eyes on me, I couldn’t help wondering how much he was seeing me, the fully grown woman with fifteen years of kills under her belt, and how much the scared eleven-year-old girl who’d been briefly in over her head all that time ago. But I wasn’t going to argue against his decision, not when it benefitted me so much.
I couldn’t help checking Garrison’s expression. He didn’t exactly look thrilled, but he only scowled without a word in protest. Talon gave a brief dip of his head as if it didn’t matter much to him either way. I studied him next, searching for a sign of the man who’d turned so intense when we’d collided in the exercise room days ago.
As far as I could tell, he wanted to pretend we’d never had scorching-hot sex up against a wall. I guessed if he preferred to avoid the subject, I would too, even though I wasn’t sure I’d mind a repeat of our encounter.
At least he didn’t seem to feel he needed to avoid me.
I leaned back on the bench, taking the crew in as a whole. Julius may have agreed to help me, but I still had a choice. I would never sacrifice my free will again—not for these men or anyone else. I could still go off on my own to find answers if that suited me better.
What good would sticking to my own devices do me, though? I had little money and fewer resources. The contacts I’d known were all tied to Noelle, so I couldn’t trust any of them.
This crew was the best resource I’d found by far. Was I really going to throw that away just because I still cringed a little at the thought that they’d been the ones who’d torn the household apart?
I had no loyalty to the people who’d lived there. Noelle and her colleagues had kidnapped a toddler, brainwashed me, and controlled me for years. They’d sent me off to kill people for no reason but their selfish gain.
The men in front of me had connections and skills… and they’d also offered me something nobody else ever had: freedom. They were more than just a resource.
Resolve unfurled through my chest, steadying me. My mouth curved into a small smile. “What are we waiting for then? Let’s get started.”
