“My family and I were born into the syndicate. Therefore, I’m who you were programmed to hate. And, I saw your tattoo,” I reminded her. “I can assure you, that not all of our members are violent and I don’t believe for a second that we are a threat to you.”
She stared at me a long while, her fingers drumming against the arm of the couch. “Until I started thinking for myself, I figured out that I was being programmed much like a kid is programmed to be a racist. Despite the training and conditioning, I was strong enough to know better. However, I had to consider that I might be the bad guy.”
Shit! You had to have a strong mind to carry that around. To not have answers made things that much more difficult for her.
“Was there a reason why these particular women were picked to foster you? Do you know what your mom did for a living? What about your father? Maybe you were in a protective-custody situation.”
“Through eavesdropping and snooping I found that the ladies had grown up in an orphanage with my mother, and it was she who had appointed them guardians over me if anything ever happened to her. It had always been my mother and me, two peas in a pod. We used to do everything together. My estranged father was the one who killed her. I’d met him a few times, and each time he and my mother would argue and fight. One night, he showed up and initiated the mother of all arguments that led to him shooting my mom to death. He even turned the gun on me, but it jammed and he ran.”
On one hand, I wasn’t sure if my sympathetic expressions were helping and on the other hand, I sensed that she didn’t want my pity. These revelations explained why she was so tough and able to handle herself during deadly situations.
“As far as I knew, my mother had worked as a paralegal at a law firm. She took me to the place a few times. It’s where I had first met the ladies who fostered me. They’d worked there too. It wasn’t until I was older that I began to speculate that maybe that place wasn’t a law firm because I never saw any lawyers there. Could my whole childhood have been a lie, a cover to keep me in the dark about what was really happening?”
Her eyes fell closed at the notion before she opened them and pinned her gaze back on mine.
“I believe my mother didn’t tell me things for my own good because knowing would be the catalyst for chaos. About a month into my new situation with my keepers, they flashed me a picture out of the blue. Once I identified the man as my estranged father, they told me he was dead without any type of explanation of how he’d died.”
I didn’t know what to make of Patrena’s story. It was tragic and so unconventional that she very well could have been in protective custody after her mother’s death based on how she’d described her foster mothers.
“Did any of this occur here in Colorado?”
Patrena had been a question mark since I had started keeping an eye on her, but my attraction was a major distraction. Rhi had never found any information on her outside of the state, so her records appeared like she was born at the age of twenty when she enrolled at the local college and started working as a clerk at the registration office.
“We lived in New York and my mother was killed there. A week after her death, I was in North Carolina. Six months later, I was moved to California then Georgia, and finally, Virginia. The last place I ended up before moving to Colorado was Texas,” she stated.
Although her gaze was focused on my face, I could tell she was seeing events playing out in her head.
“Things went a bit haywire when I was sixteen. Our house in Texas was attacked in the middle of the night and my keepers, who I’d been with for ten years, were taken. They fought hard to make sure I got away. They always kept a get-away kit for me on standby like they’d expected trouble. The night of the attack, they hid me in a secret hideaway I didn’t know was in the house. All I’d left that house with that night was a wad of cash, a note telling me to hide in plain sight like I’d been trained to do, and legal paperwork emancipating me.”
“Patrena, that’s a lot to carry,” I whispered.
She nodded, and the far-off glint in her eyes told me the burden had never stopped riding her shoulders.
“Did you get a look at who attacked them? Were they dressed a certain way?” I questioned and hoped I didn’t sound insensitive to what she’d gone through.
She shook her head. “I heard more than I saw. My keepers had me slide into a casket-tight crawlspace hidden in the wall and demanded that I not come out until it was safe. They must have fought for hours before it quieted down. Other than my keepers, there was only the thundering sound of male voices, gunshots, and furniture being tossed and broken. When I slid from my hiding place, the scent of death was so thick in the air that I choked on it. All I wanted was to get out of there.”
She shut her eyes tight enough that I saw them moving rapidly beneath her lids.
“There were no bodies in the house when I wiggled from my hiding place. With the amount of damage and blood left behind, there was no way someone hadn’t died in that room. All I know is that they didn’t leave the dead. There were guns, bloody knives, even sharp pieces of bloody wood spread all over the floor, but no bodies. They even took my keepers, and I don’t know if they were dead or alive when they left. I got the hell out of there and took the route I’d practiced to the bus station. The lady who sold me the ticket picked Telluride, Colorado, because she said it was a place she’d read about and wanted to visit, so that was where I went.”
The mystery surrounding her life made me wonder how she managed to live such a normal life.
“My keepers had taught me all about the best routes out of Fort Worth and how to survive on my own by testing me. Each new city we arrived in, they would make me get out of the car and leave me on the streets to survive for a few weeks before they would pick me up. When it was time to fend for myself, even at sixteen, I didn’t have a problem.”
Slack-jawed, my gaze remained pinned on Patrena’s. Secrets, lies, and danger, it didn’t sound like she had lived a traditional day in her life.
“My first few years in Colorado, I lived in about eight different cities and towns, somewhat keeping to the transitory life I had lived. Instead of hopping from state to state, I randomly moved from and to cities and small towns. When I didn’t feel threatened, I settled in, lived cheap, and worked low-key jobs. The longer I stuck around without any trouble, the more I began to build a life for myself and moved to Denver when I was twenty.”
The update explained why her profile looked like she was born at twenty and why Rhi hadn’t been able to find any previous information on her. Who the hell were her mother and those ladies that they could delete her entire history?
“Things were great until my two best friends married into the organization I was programmed to hate. My first thought was to do what I knew how to do best and run, but I couldn’t leave the only family I knew. And I didn’t feel threatened, especially after I saw how you all were willing to risk your lives not only for Mecca and Desiree, but also for me. Now, we’re here, and I still have no idea what this tattoo on my back means or why I’m supposed to hate the syndicate.”
I didn’t get the sense that Patrena was lying, but it didn’t stop me from questioning the trust I had so easily handed her. Is she a spy? Do I even care?
“I’m not a spy, Tywin,” she, assured me, cutting a deadly side eye at me for even thinking it.
How the hell was she able to read me already?