ONE
Decima
I wasn’tsure 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.