BLAZE STILL SEEMED cheerful when I returned to the apartment, led by Julius, but he mustn’t have had any exciting news, because he nudged his laptop aside and asked, “Find out anything interesting?”
I scratched my hairline, which was still a bit itchy from the wig, and frowned. “They were gone.”
Garrison’s head snapped up from where he’d been flicking through his phone in the kitchen area while waiting for the kettle to boil, and Talon set down his knitting. “Gone?” the bigger man repeated with a frown.
“Vanished from the face of the Earth. The guy at the bakery hadn’t shown up for his shift in at least a couple of days, and the other woman’s shop was all closed up.” A frown of my own tugged at my lips. “I don’t like it.”
A laugh tumbled out of Blaze. When I narrowed my eyes at him, not understanding how the situation was funny in any way, he waved his hand. “The bakery, huh? One of your sources works there?”
“Yeah, so what?”
The words had barely left my mouth when I realized the tidbit of information I’d revealed. It hadn’t been that long ago when I’d been hiding as much as I possibly could from them.
Garrison had arched his eyebrows, his tone more sardonic than Blaze’s. “It wasn’t the chocolate chip cookies you wanted out of that place after all.”
I rolled my eyes. They knew I’d lied about a hell of a lot of other things. This one wasn’t a big deal.
“It was at least as much for the cookies,” I retorted. “I know you thought they were amazing too. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. My contact there is gone, and anything he could have told me is gone with him. And I have no idea what happened to him or my other contact.”
Julius ran his hand along his chin. “It could be that once you’d made contact with them, the household called them in to find out what they knew about you.”
“Maybe.” But how long would that have taken? Why wouldn’t they be back sooner?
I shoved those uncomfortable questions aside and focused on Blaze. “I’ve got nothing. Did you come up with anything here?”
“You mean did his fancy app come up with anything,” Garrison remarked.
Both Blaze and I ignored him. Blaze looked back at the computer and made a face. “We might need to move on to plan B.”
My heart sank. “The program’s gone through all the missing kid reports and didn’t get a single match?”
“Well…” He pulled the laptop back to him and started clicking on files. Talon came over and Julius drew closer as I did for a better look. Garrison, being his typical nonchalant self, stayed where he was like he didn’t give a shit, but his gaze lingered on us anyway.
“These are the sorts of things I got in the loose matches,” Blaze said, motioning to the screen.
I snorted at the first one. “The household didn’t change my ethnicity.”
One girl in the image—young, no more than two years old—did have gray eyes and black hair like mine, but the shape of her features marked her as clearly East Asian in heritage. I guessed mine weren’t that different, but they were different enough to set our ancestors continents apart.
“Yeah, I know.” Blaze clicked open another, which showed a girl whose eyes, nose, and chin mimicked my toddler self so closely I could see how the software might have picked up on the similarity… but her wavy hair was bright red, and freckles dappled her cheeks. “And this obviously isn’t you either, unless they managed to inject permanent dye receptacles right into your hair follicles.”
I stared at him for a second. “That’s not actually possible, right?”
He chuckled. “No, thank God, or my job would be a lot harder. Anyway, the others are all like this—specific details that make it clear they’re not you—and there were no exact matches. I did end up connecting one missing toddler to her adult self living out in Des Moines… I’m not sure she has any idea her dad stole her away from her mom after they separated… I sent a tip with the information to the police department who handled the original case so hopefully they can finally set things straight.”
He grinned with satisfaction at the victory that had nothing to do with our original mission. It was hard to feel too frustrated about it in the face of his delight at solving some problem, even if it hadn’t been ours. He hadn’t needed to go to the trouble—he could have shuffled aside that case and moved on—but it’d mattered to him to give the woman and her mother some peace.
There was a lot more to Blaze than the incisive hacker and gleeful backup shooter, wasn’t there? As he tapped away at his keyboard to bring up whatever he wanted to show me next, I couldn’t help noticing the way his head tilted to the side and his bright brown eyes sharpened with concentration. The late-afternoon sunlight streaming through the apartment’s tall windows highlighted the planes of his smoothly handsome face and the light red hair that fell nearly to his shoulders.
Before, his regular flirting and gestures of affection had put me so on guard that I hadn’t really appreciated how attractive he was. But when he was caught up in a puzzle, eagerly putting the pieces together, there was no denying he had a certain appeal.
Maybe I should give kindness another chance.
The thought provoked a memory of honeyed words and a vicious smile that sent a shiver through me. Thankfully, Blaze redirected my thoughts.
“My best guess is that your kidnapping wasn’t reported,” he said. “Possibly you were taken in a country with an incompetent police force.”
“Or she wasn’t kidnapped at all,” Talon said.
Blaze cocked his head at the other man, and I knit my brow. “What do you mean? The household obviously—”
“They were connected to human trafficking operations,” the former military man interrupted, firmly but more gently than I’d usually expect from him. “We found that out during our initial research. Kids who get trafficked aren’t always taken from unaware families. It’s possible you were sold.”
A chill washed over my skin and condensed in my chest. I’d had a vision in my mind since seeing the videos of me as a child—a vision of a happy family who’d loved me and tucked me into bed every night. I’d assumed that it was the only explanation. People didn’t just sell their children to random criminals, right? My parents wouldn’t have looked at me and decided that loving me wasn’t worth it.
But they could have done just that. Now that the possibility had been presented, I had to admit it was plausible, especially with the lack of a missing child report. I was coming to recognize that Noelle had been correct about one thing: the world was a dark, brutal place for anyone who didn’t have the means to defend themselves.
“It’s possible,” Blaze admitted, looking between me and Talon. I could tell that he didn’t want to admit it—not with me here. My heart dropped into my stomach, and he drummed his fingers on the table in front of him. “It’s more than possible. There’s no way to trace the connections if that’s the case, though. Even within the organization, any trail of records would be long-destroyed by now.”
I swallowed hard. What was the point in searching for my birth parents if they hadn’t cared enough to hold on to me to begin with? We didn’t know for sure, but did I really want to know if it was? I tried to push down the painful emotions rising through me, but a tendril of hopelessness twined around my gut.
Before I could dwell any longer on the thought of a family who’d purposefully given me over to be trained as a murdering machine, Blaze switched gears, clicking through to a different set of photos—these ones of Noelle. I recognized her emerging from an alley near the entrances to the sewer system where we’d met, and another of her through the windshield of a vehicle stopped at a red light, dressed in the same sleek clothes. A flash of anger burned through my momentary despair.
Whether my family had wanted me or not, the household still had to account for the way they’d treated me. The lies and the training I’d been forced into. The freedom they’d stolen from me. That mattered.
“I managed to get these screenshots from traffic and security camera footage from yesterday morning,” Blaze said. “They should be clear enough to run the facial recognition on. Since we can’t trace your origins, we can see what we can find out about the people who took you, and she’s our best lead.” He tapped on the touchpad, and the screen started flickering with its search.
I folded my arms over my chest. The idea of spying on Noelle brought out a kneejerk refusal that I tamped down on. The household didn’t get to decide what lines I shouldn’t cross now. But all the same—
“She’s dead. How much are we really going to learn this way?”
Blaze smiled at me and the men flanking me. “I’m hoping that we’ll turn up some other associates who are less dead. She’s probably had meetups in public places for various reasons. When you don’t trust anyone outside your own organization, that’s the way to go. And who knows what other connections she might have?” His smile widened. “Silly question. In a few hours, we’ll know.”
“How much can you even search?” I asked, watching the screen. Images streaked into new folders every few seconds, much faster than when he’d been running the search for my childhood face. Of course, most of them were probably loose matches that wouldn’t turn out to be Noelle at all.
“My software can crawl through all the still images and video footage that’s ever been uploaded onto the internet, from social media sites to news outlets,” Blaze announced, his voice warm with pride. “And it’ll peek into more private avenues too where I’ve opened up access. She might be dead, but she’ll still give us some answers. And this kind of interrogation is a lot less hassle than the bloody type.”
He paused and glanced up at me. “Is this bothering you? I know she was… important to you.”
That was probably the best way of putting it. I wasn’t sure Noelle had ever cared about me, at least not for anything other than how well I could carry out her assignments. And after finding out that and how thoroughly she’d programmed me to be her tool, I wasn’t sure I cared about her either. But her death and my discovery of her betrayal were still so fresh, maybe it made sense that my emotions were a little muddled.
An assassin couldn’t afford to focus on emotions. I needed a clear head and a steady hand. Noelle had been right about that too, no matter how many other ways she’d been wrong.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I want the answers too, as fast as we can get them.”
“It looks like we’ve already got a few exact matches. Let’s see what we’ve dug up…”
He opened a folder and clicked on the first file. A slightly grainy image filled the screen.
It was a selfie, a blond girl posing in front of an old stone statue with her mouth pursed into duck lips. She didn’t look remotely like Noelle. I was about to ask Blaze if his software needed a tune-up when my gaze caught on the figures in the background.
Just beyond the girl’s shoulder, a woman with dark brown hair was walking along a park path. I could only see her face in profile, but every nerve in my body jangled with recognition. It was Noelle.
And she wasn’t alone. She was talking next to a skinny man with graying hair whose mouth was open in animated conversation. I narrowed my eyes at him, straining my mind.
“Do you know him?” Julius asked.
I shook my head as I committed the details of his face to my memory. I would know him if I saw him again. “I didn’t usually interact with anyone other than Noelle and Anna within the household. There are probably all kinds of people they worked with who I’d have no idea about.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Blaze said, chipper as ever. “I’ll save him and send him through the scans later. Leave no stone unturned.”
The next one was a video clip. We had to watch it three times, me leaning closer to the screen with each iteration, before we picked out Noelle in the bottom of the frame at the left side. From the length of her hair, I could tell this footage was from at least a couple of years ago.
She’d briefly turned to glance at something behind her, but around her a mass of other people were gazing toward something up ahead. Several of them were waving signs and banners. I studied them all, not sure what to make of this. “What’s going on there?”
Talon pointed to a podium that showed at the upper corner of the shot. “Looks like a political rally. Damien Malik.”
Julius made a thoughtful sound. “This must be from when he was running for re-election a few years back.”
“Damien Malik?” I said. “Should I know who that is?” I was aware of the current president of the country and various other major figures, but that name sounded familiar only in the vaguest of ways.
“He’s a congressman,” Garrison spoke up from his spot on the other side of the room, where he wasn’t even doing a show anymore of not following our search. “Current majority whip in the House of Representatives. Kind of a big deal for anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock.”
I glowered at him, half-heartedly wishing I had a rock to toss at his head, and turned back to the screen. Unfortunately, I had to ask, “What exactly does a majority whip do?”
“He’s supposed to rile up the rest of the representatives in his party to pass the legislation the president wants,” Julius said. “Although there’ve been murmurs about Malik pushing his own ideas a little harder than people would prefer.”
That didn’t sound too ominous. When the household wanted to “push an idea,” they obviously knocked off whoever was standing in their way rather than just talking about it. I’d presumably helped them do so more times than I wanted to think about.
“Should we read anything into her being there?” I asked.
Blaze shrugged. “I wouldn’t think so. A rally would be a good place to blend into the crowd and carry out some kind of surreptitious transaction that has nothing to do with the purpose of the gathering. Can you see if she’s reaching out to anyone there?”
We squinted at the recording again, but the part that’d caught Noelle only showed her making that brief turn. We couldn’t even see what or who she’d been looking at. I blew out an irritated breath.
“Hey,” Blaze said reassuringly, “we’ve got lots more to get through. Those answers are in here somewhere.”
We checked out a few more photos, none of them very enlightening. Here was Noelle walking down a sidewalk alone. Here was Noelle exiting an organic grocery store with a shopping bag over her arm. Here was Noelle sitting at a patio table with a different man from the first picture, but one who was equally unfamiliar to me.
Blaze set that one aside for further investigation and opened the next file, which was another video. The three of us behind him leaned in automatically to take a closer look. But I immediately recognized the scene, so definitively that my heart skipped a beat.
It was a different day. Noelle wore different clothes, and the cast of the light was different, as if the sky had been overcast rather than cloudless. But there was no mistaking the signs and the banner by the podium.
She was at another Damien Malik rally.
Blaze hummed. “Well, that’s starting to look like a pattern.”
Julius’s forehead furrowed. “I’d say.”
I stared at the screen—at Noelle, who turned her head to stare straight toward the stage with her usual implacable air.
Was Damien Malik tangled up with the household somehow? And if so, what kind of part did he play in this mess?
