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“My best guess is that your kidnapping wasn’t reported,” he said. “Possibly you were taken in a country with an incompetent police force.”
“Or she wasn’t kidnapped at all,” Talon said.
Blaze cocked his head at the other man, and I knit my brow. “What do you mean? The household obviously—”
“They were connected to human trafficking operations,” the former military man interrupted, firmly but more gently than I’d usually expect from him. “We found that out during our initial research. Kids who get trafficked aren’t always taken from unaware families. It’s possible you were sold.”
A chill washed over my skin and condensed in my chest. I’d had a vision in my mind since seeing the videos of me as a child—a vision of a happy family who’d loved me and tucked me into bed every night. I’d assumed that it was the only explanation. People didn’t just sell their children to random criminals, right? My parents wouldn’t have looked at me and decided that loving me wasn’t worth it.
But they could have done just that. Now that the possibility had been presented, I had to admit it was plausible, especially with the lack of a missing child report. I was coming to recognize that Noelle had been correct about one thing: the world was a dark, brutal place for anyone who didn’t have the means to defend themselves.
“It’s possible,” Blaze admitted, looking between me and Talon. I could tell that he didn’t want to admit it—not with me here. My heart dropped into my stomach, and he drummed his fingers on the table in front of him. “It’s more than possible. There’s no way to trace the connections if that’s the case, though. Even within the organization, any trail of records would be long-destroyed by now.”
I swallowed hard. What was the point in searching for my birth parents if they hadn’t cared enough to hold on to me to begin with? We didn’t know for sure, but did I really want to know if it was? I tried to push down the painful emotions rising through me, but a tendril of hopelessness twined around my gut.
Before I could dwell any longer on the thought of a family who’d purposefully given me over to be trained as a murdering machine, Blaze switched gears, clicking through to a different set of photos—these ones of Noelle. I recognized her emerging from an alley near the entrances to the sewer system where we’d met, and another of her through the windshield of a vehicle stopped at a red light, dressed in the same sleek clothes. A flash of anger burned through my momentary despair.
Whether my family had wanted me or not, the household still had to account for the way they’d treated me. The lies and the training I’d been forced into. The freedom they’d stolen from me. That mattered.
“I managed to get these screenshots from traffic and security camera footage from yesterday morning,” Blaze said. “They should be clear enough to run the facial recognition on. Since we can’t trace your origins, we can see what we can find out about the people who took you, and she’s our best lead.” He tapped on the touchpad, and the screen started flickering with its search.
I folded my arms over my chest. The idea of spying on Noelle brought out a kneejerk refusal that I tamped down on. The household didn’t get to decide what lines I shouldn’t cross now. But all the same—
“She’s dead. How much are we really going to learn this way?”
Blaze smiled at me and the men flanking me. “I’m hoping that we’ll turn up some other associates who are less dead. She’s probably had meetups in public places for various reasons. When you don’t trust anyone outside your own organization, that’s the way to go. And who knows what other connections she might have?” His smile widened. “Silly question. In a few hours, we’ll know.”
“How much can you even search?” I asked, watching the screen. Images streaked into new folders every few seconds, much faster than when he’d been running the search for my childhood face. Of course, most of them were probably loose matches that wouldn’t turn out to be Noelle at all.
“My software can crawl through all the still images and video footage that’s ever been uploaded onto the internet, from social media sites to news outlets,” Blaze announced, his voice warm with pride. “And it’ll peek into more private avenues too where I’ve opened up access. She might be dead, but she’ll still give us some answers. And this kind of interrogation is a lot less hassle than the bloody type.”
He paused and glanced up at me. “Is this bothering you? I know she was… important to you.”
That was probably the best way of putting it. I wasn’t sure Noelle had ever cared about me, at least not for anything other than how well I could carry out her assignments. And after finding out that and how thoroughly she’d programmed me to be her tool, I wasn’t sure I cared about her either. But her death and my discovery of her betrayal were still so fresh, maybe it made sense that my emotions were a little muddled.
An assassin couldn’t afford to focus on emotions. I needed a clear head and a steady hand. Noelle had been right about that too, no matter how many other ways she’d been wrong.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I want the answers too, as fast as we can get them.”
“It looks like we’ve already got a few exact matches. Let’s see what we’ve dug up…”
He opened a folder and clicked on the first file. A slightly grainy image filled the screen.
It was a selfie, a blond girl posing in front of an old stone statue with her mouth pursed into duck lips. She didn’t look remotely like Noelle. I was about to ask Blaze if his software needed a tune-up when my gaze caught on the figures in the background.
Just beyond the girl’s shoulder, a woman with dark brown hair was walking along a park path. I could only see her face in profile, but every nerve in my body jangled with recognition. It was Noelle.
And she wasn’t alone. She was talking next to a skinny man with graying hair whose mouth was open in animated conversation. I narrowed my eyes at him, straining my mind.
“Do you know him?” Julius asked.
I shook my head as I committed the details of his face to my memory. I would know him if I saw him again. “I didn’t usually interact with anyone other than Noelle and Anna within the household. There are probably all kinds of people they worked with who I’d have no idea about.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Blaze said, chipper as ever. “I’ll save him and send him through the scans later. Leave no stone unturned.”
The next one was a video clip. We had to watch it three times, me leaning closer to the screen with each iteration, before we picked out Noelle in the bottom of the frame at the left side. From the length of her hair, I could tell this footage was from at least a couple of years ago.
She’d briefly turned to glance at something behind her, but around her a mass of other people were gazing toward something up ahead. Several of them were waving signs and banners. I studied them all, not sure what to make of this. “What’s going on there?”
