23
Patrena
My eyes were fluttering behind my lids, but it was taking too much effort to open them. The sensation of being pinned inside a coffin had me fighting to see what was holding me in place. No sooner than I peeled one eye open did that white-coat-wearing bitch come into focus and memories of the day flooded my memory banks.
“Welcome back,” she greeted with that fucking teasing smirk on her face.
How long had I been out? There was no window or clock to help me measure time. The woman nodded in the direction of the men before fixing her gaze back on me. They were about to torture me for information I probably didn’t know. The only positive I had in my corner was that my past training involved torture. I’d experienced being tased and water-boarded. My feet had been caned, and I’d had finger and toe nails removed. I had suffered a whole spectrum of aches and pain without understanding what I was being prepared for until now.
The three of them stepped closer, ogling me like I had a magnetic pull that drew them in. When they reached out, I bit into my bottom lip, preparing myself for whatever would come next.
Instead of the pain I had expected, it was tapping hands and odd fondling that made me feel dirty. They were searching my body at first with their hands and eyes, and after hours of not finding whatever they were hunting for, they used handheld magnifying glasses.
An involuntary shiver shot through me when the woman began to push her fingers into my breast. What was she looking for? I was barely out of a B-cup so I knew she wasn’t checking to see if I had implants. My face creased into a tight knot of confusion.
What the fuck?
“What the hell are you searching for? I’m not bugged,” I spat at them.
My voice didn’t have the desired force of anger I felt because the drug still had me feeling heavy. I was itching to knock their hands away, but the thick black straps were doing a good job of making sure my behavior would be less violent and more subdued. They hadn’t removed any of my clothing, but if they didn’t find what they were searching for on my few exposed areas soon, a strip search was certainly coming next.
“We know you aren’t bugged. It would have been detected the moment you entered the building. However, we believe you have valuable information embedded somewhere on your body. If not on your body, then someplace you know but may not be fully aware of yet. Your mother was a clever woman,” the woman said, running the magnifying glass down my arm at a leisurely pace.
“What do you know about my mother?” My voice sounded funny coming off of my heavy tongue, but my mind was back up and running smoothly and the woman’s comment had spiked my interest. I wanted to know why they were dragging my mother into this.
“Dear sweet girl, your mother was the best, a legend before she was thirty. Many have attempted to emulate her legendary status, but they’ve never come anywhere close to accomplishing what she’d had the ability to do.”
“What the hell are you talking about? What was she able to do?”
Did these body-searching whack jobs know my mother or was talking about her their way of distracting me? Were they playing mind games as a way to get me to talk?
“Black Death was her code name. She had the unbelievable ability to infiltrate any organization, any size, and any place on this planet. By the time she was thirty, she’d taken down over forty organizations with a spotless record. It wasn’t until Operation Chess Piece did her M.O. change. That’s when we believe she got pregnant with you and decided to go off the grid. You, my dear, are the reason why one of the best black ops government agents in the business lost her way and ended up dead.”
“Government agent,” I muttered under my breath. My mother was a spy for the government? That would explain a lot, but I couldn’t trust these crooks.
“Operation Slow Death, the Benitez Cartel belonged to her. Operation Tree Top that led to one of the biggest drug raids in U.S. history was hers. The Tango Loco Crew, the Alpha-4 Alliance, the Brankovic Syndicate were all notches on her belt. I can go on for hours naming organizations she single-handedly infiltrated for information or took down if that was the government’s objective.”
They had my attention now. They were divulging specific details that suggested they believed what they were saying was true. The pride in their tone insinuated that they were fans of my mother’s work.
“Since you’re not federal government, why do you have an interest in any of this? How would the details of my mother’s career benefit you in any way?”
They all paused, stopped pawing at my arm, foot, and hair and glanced up like I had cursed them.
“Astonishing,” the woman whispered. “She managed to find a way to hide you from your own past and hers.”
“We all were federal agents at some point in our lives. We left, formed our own organization. Let’s call it a para-federal society that extracts and bids out information, namely valuable secrets. We do what the government does, but only we are not particular about who our buyers are.”
They were a group of rogue agents who sold secrets. What secrets did they believe I had that they could sell? They wouldn’t go through this much trouble unless it was something that was worth their while.
“She was sent in to take down the Ferali Syndicate. It was a bold move by the government to aim for a target that big when they could have used them for so much more, but they have a set of agendas that we’ll never understand,” the taller man said, adding to the woman’s statement.
If my mother was a federal agent and these people weren’t, did that mean I had landed in the hands of my mother’s enemy? Were these the people she’d been protecting me from?
“Eighteen months in and all of a sudden, the famous Parris Davis goes black for five years,” the smaller of the two men added to the conversation.
The sound of my mother’s name spoken out loud hit me in the chest like a fast-moving baseball. The ache in my chest spread, and I shut my eyes against the tingling burn that was pouring into them.
My mother had been all that I’d had and whatever I’d needed. A hug, a kiss, someone to push me on the swing, someone to lay in bed with me until I fell asleep, she was there. Most little girls met their best friend in school, but I had named my mother as mine and could still hear the fading hints of her laughter when I’d told her so. My throat constricted from the hard swallows I was taking to break up the heavy tightness there.