BLAZE GREETED us at the door to the hotel room, his eyes wild with manic energy. “What took you so long? I had about five panic attacks thinking they’d surrounded you and gunned you down on the way back.”
Julius gave him a baleful look as we all tramped inside and nodded to Talon, who swiftly but gingerly picked up Blaze and hefted him back to his bed.
“There’s this thing called traffic,” the leader of the crew said dryly. “And I didn’t figure it’d be a good look to speed the entire way back here once we’d gotten away from the scene. Trying not to draw undue attention to ourselves and all that.”
Blaze huffed but sank back into the pillows, tucking my tiger under his arm. “You did practically die about ten times in the past hour. I think a little concern is understandable.”
“You shouldn’t be on your feet,” I told him. “You didn’t pull your stitches, did you?”
He threw his hands up in the air and then winced, which made me worry that he’d done it right then if he hadn’t already. “Pull my stitches, when you were facing off against a thousand highly trained government security officers—”
“I don’t think it was quite that many,” Garrison put in.
Blaze glowered at him. “It would have been if you’d gotten out of there even ten seconds later.”
I sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed next to Blaze. “But we didn’t. We’re okay. We’re back now. And a lot of that is thanks to you, you know.”
The worry fell from his face enough for him to smile back at me.
Garrison cleared his throat. “That last brilliant brainstorm was all me, I’d just like to point out.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “And you get full credit for it. But right now…” I pulled the flash drive out of my pocket. “We went through an awful lot of trouble to get this loaded up. Let’s see if it actually finished processing and made all that trouble worthwhile.”
I spoke casually, but as Blaze grinned and snatched the drive from my grasp, my pulse started to stutter almost as badly as when we’d had a horde of armed guards on our tails. We had gotten out, and not even with any serious injuries, but I was still going to feel massive guilt if we’d gone through all that craziness for nothing.
And it wasn’t as if we’d be able to break in again for a second try. This had been my one chance.
Blaze tossed his computer onto his lap and jabbed in the drive. His fingers raced over the keyboard so quickly they were almost a blur. Julius came up behind me, setting a firm hand on my waist as if to steady me while we both watched the screen. Garrison and Talon gathered on the other side of the bed.
The hacker let out a whoop of excitement. “There was a match!” A record sprang onto the screen. “A close one too. Parental—paternal.” He skimmed down past several paragraphs of data that apparently weren’t relevant to him. “Your dad’s name is…”
I was so keyed up with anticipation that when he trailed off into sudden silence, I couldn’t keep quiet. “What?”
Then my eyes settled on the name in bold partway down the screen. I blinked at it, read it again, leaned closer, and read it a third time. It didn’t change.
Damien Malik.
My lungs seized up. It was a few seconds before I could breathe again. I kept gaping at it, my thoughts whirling in my head.
“That’s why Noelle and the people she worked with were interested in him,” I said as the pieces slowly came together. “Because… because he was related to me. But how can he be related to me? Did he have some secret kid that somehow the media didn’t find out about in the two years or whatever before I got kidnapped? What the hell is going on?”
My voice got louder with each question. Julius lifted his hand to squeeze my shoulder instead. He and the other men were staring at the screen too.
“I don’t know,” Blaze said. “This doesn’t make any sense. Unless—” His eyes widened. His fingers darted over the keyboard again.
He brought up an article with the headline State Rep Malik Loses Daughter to Car Crash. Nodding, he tapped the date. “I never checked the exact details because it didn’t occur to me that they’d be relevant. That’s just a week before that first video we found of you being trained, Dess. She was the right age—twenty-one months, just shy of two years old.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “I’m not some zombie who got raised from the dead.”
Blaze turned to look at me, his eyes shining with a mix of excitement and sympathy that made my gut twist up. “No, you’re not,” he said. “I’m saying that Damien Malik’s daughter never died at all. Your household people must have staged the accident, left remains that were a convincing enough match that anyone would believe you’d died. But instead, they kidnapped you. It’s a near-perfect crime. If the parents think a kid is dead, then they’re not going to search for them, right?”
“But I… Could it be some kind of mistake?” I was still having trouble accepting this new version of events. I’d been wondering if Malik was the one who’d stolen me, for fuck’s sake, and now he was my dad? “If there was a family resemblance, wouldn’t we have noticed?”
Blaze brought up some photographs, flicking through them until he found one he was satisfied with that showed Damien Malik and his wife just a few months ago. “There aren’t any of the daughter. Usually the press is a little sensitive about showing photos with young children.” He cocked his head and zoomed closer. “His eyes are kind of like yours. The same color. I never noticed before because I wouldn’t have thought to compare. And she has black hair with a similar wavy texture to yours.”
“So do lots of people,” Garrison pointed out. “Otherwise, there aren’t many similarities.” He squinted at the photograph, and his eyebrows rose slightly. “Although… see if you can find any pictures of the wife when she was a lot younger. I think she must have had work done to her face a while back.”
“You mean plastic surgery?” I asked as Blaze dove back into his searching.
Garrison nodded. “The signs are only subtle—it was well done—but it’s hard to hide the evidence completely if you know what to look for.”
After a few minutes while we waited in tense silence, Blaze crowed in victory and brought up a slightly grainy photo of a dark-haired woman in a robe. “Her high school yearbook photo, senior year. Holy shit.”
My jaw went slack. The woman in the picture wasn’t a perfect match for me, but I felt as if I could have been looking at a younger sister. She had not just the same wavy black hair, but a long nose and thin lips that made her face echo mine.
“That’s her?” I murmured.
Blaze nodded.
“Looks like she had her nose done to give it more of a cute ski-jump thing,” Garrison observed, and glanced at me. “I personally think the version you’ve got is more elegant.” His gaze darted back to the photograph. “And a little plumping to her lips. Enough that the resemblance was obscured. But there’s no denying it seeing that picture.”
My mouth had gone dry. There really wasn’t any denying that this woman was related to me. I had no idea what to say or do about it. My whole body had frozen in place.
Blaze looked over at me. “Are you okay, Dess?” he asked in a gentle tone.
“I—I guess.” I rubbed my temple. “This all still seems so bizarre.” I paused. “Even if the household did kidnap me, why would they still be keeping tabs on Malik now? It’s been over twenty years. It must be obvious he doesn’t realize I’m alive.”
Julius frowned. “Maybe there’s more to their plan beyond simply kidnapping you. Let’s take a look at his recent activities again with the new perspective we’ve just gotten.”
Blaze typed away without any further prompting. A list of search results popped onto the screen—and the first one made my heart lurch to the base of my throat.
Damien Malik, Majority Whip, Victim in Brutal Attack. And the time stamp next to the headline was just this evening.
