Ken had the good grace to look away, then finally turned and walked out of the room. Rand glanced back at Dmitry and Adam, and both men lowered their gazes.
Feeling as if the weight of the world hung on his shoulders, Rand made his way back to her room. He closed the door and disrobed, the need to be wrapped around her beating at him. She turned on her side, and he settled in behind her, nearly hissing when their skin met. She moaned and rearranged until her head rested on his arm, and she relaxed into the curve of his body.
Sleep refused to come, so instead he breathed her in and waited for her wake up. He needed everything she had to give. Because Ken was right; Trident had begun as a way to bring Lily and Anna’s killers to justice. But it had become much more over the course of the last two weeks because of the red-headed siren resting so peacefully against his body.
“I don’t remember a lot about the day I was taken. I was maybe four and half years old? Maybe a little younger. But I remember the day everything began for me.” Her voice was quiet in the early morning. She gazed out of the window as she lay on his chest. He played with her hair, the silky tresses were a delight for his hands. Everything about this woman was a senses-feast.
So much pain in those few words. A lifetime of it. Rand’s heart clenched, but he kept touching her, trying somehow to ease this telling. He’d not been sure she’d share, but when his eyes opened, she’d been awake watching him.
A queer light had fired in the depths of her gaze, and she’d nodded, then settled down on his chest, her own hands stroking over his skin as she spoke.
“From everything I’ve been able to discover, my father was an ambassador for France to the United States. His job also included running military surveillance for France. Joseph had my parents killed, but he kept me.” There was only silence as she breathed in and out, her hands always moving, digging into his skin periodically, then soothing the sting.
Rand stayed still except for his hands in her hair. He needed that contact more than her, he thought. He
kept
her? Son of a bitch.
“I was taken to Arequipa, and there I was housed with four other girls, all the same age as me but from different backgrounds. We each came to Arequipa with our given names but were stripped of them in the Silent Time.” Another deep breath and a single tear tracked down her cheek.
Rand cursed silently, the hot moisture as it fell on his chest a brand of sorts. She was lost to the recollection now though, and he wouldn’t pull her from it. Maybe there was peace in the purging.
“What started out as five, ended as only four one morning, and that is the day the bond between those of us left solidified. Tell me, Mr. Beckett, have you ever felt so connected to another soul that when they breathed, you felt your lungs expand?”
“Rand. My name is Rand,” he reminded her gently. “I haven’t until—”
Until when? Do not walk that path.
“I haven’t.”
She didn’t look at him or question his bizarre hiccup. “It is a singularly defining experience to realize you are that connected with another. Yet this is what lies between my sisters and I. A bond forged in hell cannot help but become the strongest bond,
vraiment
?”
“We became a unit that day on the mountain. Through loss, we became the only family the other would need. We trained together, suffered together, ate for one another, and took each other’s beatings. When one was weak, the others stepped in to protect. We taught each other how to lie, how to steal, how to live, and how to kill, how to be silent, and when to speak.” She laughed then, the sound painful, hollow. “We became exactly what Joseph Bombardier wanted. We became his First Team. A team of female killers so well-versed in various disciplines of death-dealing that even Joseph is afraid of what he’s wrought.
“I made my first kill at the age of five. I pulled the gun from a holster at Joseph’s hip and shot a man directly between the eyes. He fell, and my heart pounded in joy that I’d killed the one who had hurt my friend. But he’d done more than hurt her, and I should have acted sooner. It was my fear that had allowed him to kill her. My hesitance to do what I’d been born to do prevented her from ever seeing the blue, blue sky again.”
Rand tightened his hand on her head, her far-away tone digging into his mind and twisting it with painful pressure. “Look at me,” he urged. When she did, he gasped. “You were five fucking years old. You weren’t responsible for anything.”
She shrugged, and it broke his heart.
“I had been training for what seemed like an eternity, but looking back must have realistically only been four or five months. I remember my parents and sister being gunned down in front of me. I was taken then and held in an empty cell for a long time, until the man with the black eyes, Joseph, opened the door and taunted me with a piece of chocolate.
“My father was a master marksman in the French Special Forces. Joseph figured surely some of the father lived on in the daughter. I had to make a shot that day. He loaded the bullet in the gun and handed it to me, and I had to shoot at the target of a man. ‘It’s your father’s murderer,’ he whispered to me. ‘Kill him.’ I remember I shot and hit the target directly in the heart. ‘Good, good, child, but next time aim for the head,’ he said and then threw a piece of chocolate at me. I fell to the ground but couldn’t find it, and he laughed and laughed and laughed at me.
“I was so hungry, and he’d wasted food on the floor! I cried, and he slapped me, told me to cease my whining. He had me cleaned up and dressed, and then he sat me at the table and brought in the other girls. They were as tiny as me, one Asian, one Middle Eastern, one white with pale blonde hair, another with darker skin and dirty blonde hair, and then me.”
“Who were they?” Rand asked in the quiet left behind her statement. He could only assume the white one with pale blonde hair was the one Ken had brought here . . . Blade, she’d called her.
“They were us. Bone, Blade, Arrow, and me, Bullet.” She continued to gaze out the window, mind lost to the past.
“You said there were five,” he reminded her gently.
“There was a fifth, but she was never us.” Her cryptic statement made him want to weep. What had she suffered under Joseph? Sweet God in Heaven, what had she suffered?
“Who was she, Bullet? Who was the fifth one?” he asked her gently. Gooseflesh broke out on his skin, and her agony reached into him.
“She was Ninka of the blue, blue sky. She was everything kind and gentle, and easily broken. She never obeyed the silence. She talked and talked and talked. She was the weakest of us all, unable to carry her weight in training, and unable to kill. But we loved her so much. She was everything we were not—all that was good and pure. I think her mind broke before her body. She would crawl onto my cot with me at night and tuck her hands like this. . ." She folded her hands together, and Rand almost lost it. The child had been
praying
. “But she never said the words to the one Bone calls God. I would always ask her why she did that, and she would say, ‘My hands are cold, Gretchen. Help me warm them.
“Joseph gave us all names for the weapons we were being raised to emulate. But she always called us by the names our family had given us. Bone would get furious with her and so would Arrow, but they each squirreled away rations to help feed her extra. She was so tiny, so fragile. Even at five I recognized she wouldn’t make it. But we tried.” Her gaze met his and he wanted to weep. “We tried to save her.”
“I know you did. Goddamn baby, I know you did,” Rand said in an agonized whisper as he pulled her head to his chest, needing the contact probably more than she did.
This was so much worse than he’d ever thought. It was one thing to train grown women to kill, something else entirely to hone babies into killers.
She lifted her head and went back to the telling, the words a tidal wave that wouldn’t be stopped.
“Joseph had what he called a Silent Time. During these times, we weren’t to speak or make any kind of sound. If our stomachs growled, we were punished. If we were caught whispering, or if even our breathing sounded, we were punished. For me, that meant the water pit.”
Rand almost vomited. He sat up and placed his feet on the floor, tried to control his gagging. He wanted to beat his own fucking ass. What had he done to her?
And still she kept on, and he listened. He deserved for her words to batter him.
“I was offered bitter chocolate when I did good and the water pit when I didn’t. My hatred of water began there. I cannot tell you how many times I was placed in the pit and left for days. I had to hope that bugs and worms found their way to me. I would stuff them in my mouth and swallow them whole. I learned how to dig a shelf in the side of the hole without having the hole collapse around me. I would pull myself up and out of the water for long periods just to stay alive. Joseph would come up every now and then. . ." She glanced at Rand. “ . . . much like you did that night, and ask me ‘Have you broken yet?’”
There it was. The final lash on his soul. Tears welled in his eyes and spilled over, but he faced away from her. This wasn’t about Rand, this was about Gretchen, aka Bullet.
“There were times when I wanted to beg him to let me out, but I knew if I did, he’d kill me. There were times when I wanted to kill him so badly it was a taste in my mouth, but he always made sure he wasn’t ever present when I trained. As I grew older, he would taunt me with an opportunity, but I always knew there was a scope on me, waiting to blow my head off should I make that move.”
She sighed and sat back against the headboard. Her chin lifted, and Rand moved to the chair beside the bed. He wanted to grab her, hold her to him, and never let her go. He wanted to kiss her, make love to her until all the past dissolved away under the demands of his body. It was irrational, but it simply was.
“He brought us up to kill and began sending each of us out on individual missions at the age of ten. My first mission was an African warlord in Somalia. He had crossed Joseph and closed off a key drug shipping lane across the country. I think even then my sense of right and wrong was skewed a bit.”
Rand wanted to deny this, force her to see the wrongness of the statement, but let it play out. Her voice rocked him, distant and so dull it was almost lifeless. It spoke of a lifetime of pushing down deep the things she’d seen and done.
“I traveled with a handler then, a woman, one of Joseph’s lovers. We flew into Mogadishu, and I remember being afraid of flying. Crazy, isn’t it, that when I had the warlord in my crosshairs, there was no fear, but flying on a plane made me sweat. I took him between the eyes before he had a chance to rape the little girl he’d sent for. My luck, I guess, that he wasn’t a good man.
“The woman, my handler, calmly dismantled the rifle, we went back to the airport, and then we left. It was simple. I took a life and got extra rations. I failed and got the water pit. As I got older, the inference was made that if I didn’t take certain assignments, my sisters would be on the hook. In my youthful arrogance, I didn’t believe him, and then one night he took Blade. . ."
She cleared her throat and stared at the opposite wall. The sun was beginning to fade so he turned on the lamp beside the bed. He needed to see her eyes as she spoke.
“Anyway, I never threatened him directly. He made it clear to all of us in varying ways what would happen should we fail or make a move against him. During those years after my first official mission in Somalia, I had an average of five jobs a year. I alone am responsible for eliminating over thirty men and women over the course of a six-year period. When I reached the age of seventeen, it was lowered to one, maybe two jobs a year, and they were all high-profile opponents of Joseph. My sisters and I were allowed to turn down one job per year.” She looked at him then, blue eyes cleaving him in two.
“On my twentieth birthday, I was called to Arequipa from an assignment in China. Joseph had a big job for me and smiled as he tossed a folder on the desk.” She was telling him something for the life of him he didn’t know—wait, she was twenty-seven now. Twenty would have been seven years ago . . . oh, God, no.
She nodded. “Yes, it was you. My birthday gift that year was you.”
She gave him time to process that. He couldn’t look away from her. She sighed deeply, brow furrowed under her heavy recollections.
“I turned down the job. You see, I saw your picture and couldn’t do it. Your eyes spoke to me even from the picture, Mr. Beckett. I turned him down, and he laughed at me because he saw something on my face that I should have hidden better.”
“What did he see, Gretchen?”
She cried in earnest now, big tears coming one after the other, bleeding into him as he sat there and watched this woman who’d been punished from childhood.
“Yearning. I yearned for you.” Her words dropped him off a cliff, and he fell right into her.
Rand stood then and opened his arms, hoping with everything in him she would come to him for comfort. Absolution for what he’d done was a breath away, and as she got off the bed and stepped into the circle of his arms, he cried with her, knowing he didn’t deserve this from her, but thanking God he was receiving it. He sat down and settled her on his lap, hand stroking her back and soothing her through her sobs. She mumbled something that sounded like “I never cry” but he let the lie pass. It was irrelevant.
She pulled away and stared up at him, cheeks red, hair sticking in her tears. “In your eyes lay all of my hope. I had no dreams, still have no dreams, but I had hope then that there would be an end. As I read your file and realized what you had done to Joseph, I laughed inside that you were brave enough to take on a conglomerate of evil and punish them where it really hurt—their pockets.”
“You couldn’t have known if I was a good man though, Gretchen,” he murmured as he stared right back at her.
“He told me. He said, ‘This man is a good man who thinks he can stop me! I want him killed, and you will do it.’ But he’d damned himself when he allowed each of us to earn the right of a single refusal each year. I refused and took my first and only pass. He was incensed, but I left and returned to China, completed that mission. By the time I returned, I learned too late that he’d sent another in my place, and that he’d moved the target to your wife and child.