2
Patrena
Iwas stuck straddling the fence of my consciousness, aware that I was dreaming but unable to drag myself free of its grasp. The dreams showed up and punched holes in the reality I had built for myself. They were like a past injury that ached before a storm blew in.
The dreams were reminders that I wasn’t innocent, that the chaos written in my history would someday shine light on my future. After some of the revelations I had received while having dinner with my friends, I believed that day had arrived.
My mind cast away the rest of my living reality and I drifted into the silent stillness of the unknown. Unconsciousness was in the driver’s seat now and it had chosen a classic, a blast from the past, a memory that I’d never forget.
A trickle of sweat slipped down the side of my forehead, inching down my face like an exploring bug. My pulse drummed under my skin like the beats were being hammered out with anvils against iron. This was another test, all others I passed with flying colors and with reassuring smiles of approval from my keepers.
I adjusted my grip on the pistol and steadied my aim, making sure the crosshairs formed a perfect cross that cursed the center of my target’s forehead. After being put through every test I believed imaginable, this one was by far the toughest. Thankfully, I was blessed with an abundance of determination that wouldn’t allow me to fail.
Determination was something my mother had been forging in me since my first memory. Though I lost her at five years old, it didn’t stop me from understanding what she was building within me. Her death didn’t stop me from remembering how good it felt to be wrapped in her arms, hear her tell me she loved me, and smell her honey-blossom scent.
I didn’t know what it was called back then, but it was an incredible sense of power and confidence she was instilling in me. The reality of my current situation had me calling on the values she planted that had somehow taken root deep within me.
This specific test was the only way I would know if I had what it took to defend the person I was being trained to protect—me. My heart hammered fast, thumping out a trembling beat that rattled my ribcage, but I held steady, not letting what I felt inside affect my focus. Sweat seeped from my pores, the wet droplets being drawn out by the sun blasting down on me.
The air had stilled, and I held my breath to match its deadly calm. At first, I fought my keepers, giving them hell for the horrific lessons I’d once rejected vehemently, but I eventually learned to endure them.
“No matter how hard something gets, remember you are harder, tougher, and smarter. No matter how bad something hurts, you can overcome the pain because your mind holds the ultimate power, not your body.” The statements had been branded onto my brainstem, repeated by my mother so often, I remembered them like she still spoke them.
Now, here I stood, letting my mother’s words be the confidence booster I needed to persevere. Even while deep in my thoughts, the pistol in my hand had never wavered.
“You saw the tapes, girl,” Malin, one of my keepers spoke and pointed a stiff finger at the man’s head, keeping her arm aligned with the height at which I maintained my steady aim. “He’s not only a member of the organization that threatens your very existence, but he also kidnaps unsuspecting young girls, ties them up, and tortures them to satisfy his sick fantasies.”
I was being reminded of what the middle-aged, seemingly normal Caucasian man in front of me did to girls just like me. His wife and two children were a cover to hide his favorite pastime of murder.
My keepers set it up so that I had bumped into him at the library. Unaware of his background, I had fallen for his pleasant charm and became one of his victims. Thankfully, I was the bait needed to catch him in the act of doing what he loved, and it was a lesson I needed to learn in order to see the monster unveil himself.
Glasses, low-cut hair, decent body and looks, he was a man who worked, took care of his wife and children, cut the yard, and pruned the hedges. He hosted barbeques and invited the neighbors and went on double dates with his and his wife’s friends. He would never make the suspect list because he didn’t fit the profile, murdered every victim, and covered every track. He was a demon who hid in plain sight, uplifted by his church, and adored by his family.
My gaze locked on his dark gray horror-filled eyes, and I focused my aim, remembering the terror running through my body like wet fire when he tied me to the bed in his hidden cabin and wheeled out a table filled with cutting instruments he had planned to use on me.
The sounds around me began to fade into the background and my heart rate slowed to an obedient thump. The man’s naked body jerked against the fat hairy rope binding his arms and legs to the thick wooden chair he was seated in. His erratic movements, begging eyes, and the strained groans he released were followed up by pleading words that fell on deaf ears.
I released one final breath, allowing my lungs to expel most of the oxygen before I squeezed the metal trigger and observed the impact of the damage caused by my split-second decision.
His head exploded, the front intact, with a small hole while most of the cerebral content splattered all over the target paper attached to a flat wooden panel behind him. He was staged in one of the outside shooting ranges where I trained. I had been firing off rounds at him for hours, refreshing my training while my keepers gave me pointers.
My task now that the test was completed was to amble closer to the target in order to check my stats without allowing my emotions of the deed to interfere with my concentration. The loud drips of blood and brain matter tapped out a steady beat as it fell in thick clumps to the ground. His body jerked involuntarily, revealing the pulses of energy trapped inside were not fully extinguished.
“You did well girl,” Malin encouraged, patting my head like I was a puppy. Malin was the tougher of the two women who rarely called me by my name. It was always, “girl.” Reika was the nicer of the two women. She gave me hugs, helped with my homework, and reassured me with care and concern when I needed it.
I stood in place, staring at the body, and letting the sight of what I had done to the monster settle into me. I didn’t have to let the knowledge of the ten girls who had brutally died at his hands swallow my guilt because oddly, I didn’t feel any. My keepers had been preparing me for this task for months. There would be no turning back after crossing this line, the one that had allowed me to take life, reconcile it with reason, and not feel guilt.
I lifted my gaze from the fallen monster I had banished from this world and took in the women who peered down at me with pride-filled gazes. My keepers were fierce and possessed a wealth of knowledge about death that made me speculate what their jobs had been before they had taken the roles to foster and train me.
They were always tight-lipped about giving me the history on how they had known my mother, but I had picked up bits and pieces of conversations that revealed that Malin and Reika had grown up in the same orphanage as my mother.
“Your final test is complete. Now, you graduate to the next level,” Reika, the brunette and shorter of the two told me. She managed a caring glint and ran a reassuring hand down my back despite the horror in front of us.
“This is how you protect yourself if your life is ever threatened by members of the Ferali Syndicate or federal law enforcement agents,” Malin added.
I nodded, hoping I would never meet members of either group if death was the only way to protect myself from them. At twelve years old, I had committed my first murder and knew more would follow.
My eyes trembled under my lids, flirting with the idea of opening to the darkness filling my bedroom. Now, sixteen years after my first kill, my lessons were still as fresh as if I had learned them yesterday.
The women who trained me presented themselves as convincing foster parents to the outside world, but they’d taught me a lot more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. After they were gone and I was left to fend for myself, I hadn’t been confronted by the forces they had been training me to protect myself against.
Until now.
What the hell was I going to do now that the two women I considered family, Desiree and Mecca Evans, were marrying members of an organization I had been trained to kill?