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.”