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The guys were staring at me in silence. It was kind of unnerving. Even Garrison the Indifferent was gaping at me.
Unsurprisingly, Blaze lost the ability to contain himself first. “Are you hearing this?” he said, glancing around at the others with an awe I wouldn’t have expected from my sparse descriptions. He met my gaze again. “The man in the bathhouse—the sumo wrestler type—that would have been Akio Nakamura, the founder of Nakamura Tech. The Italian brothers must have been the co-founders of the aerospace center in Rome—a big source of political debate.”
Those… didn’t sound like the horrible criminals Noelle had made them out to be either. My stomach started to knot. “How can you be so sure?”
“It all makes so much more sense now. Holy crap.” Blaze clapped his hand against his knee. “You’re the Ghost.”
I stared at him. “The what? What are you talking about?”
Julius cuffed his younger associate lightly on the shoulder. “What Blaze is doing a very bad job of explaining is that the mercenary underworld has been tracking certain high profile and highly skilled kills for years, trying to figure out who’s pulling them off. People started referring to the mysterious assassin they assumed was responsible for most—if not all—of them as the Ghost, since the assassin never left a trace. The three hits you mentioned were all attributed to the Ghost.”
“Somehow I don’t think anyone would have predicted it was a teenage girl,” Talon remarked in his deep baritone. I couldn’t tell from his tone whether he was impressed or merely stating a fact.
“Everyone’s been incredibly impressed by your work—and curious as hell about who you are,” Blaze said, his eyes shining with unrestrained excitement. “Holy shit, we’ve had the Ghost staying in our apartment for days and we didn’t even know it.”
Garrison recovered from his shock enough to look me up and down with a skeptical expression. “From what I’ve seen during that time, I wouldn’t say you quite live up to the expectations we all built up.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “I’m sorry if I couldn’t immediately overpower four highly trained hitmen while on my own with no preparation and multiple injuries. Also, FYI, I probably could have killed you at least five times if that was what I really wanted to do, but I was waiting you all out to see what you knew about the murders at the household.”
“So, your excuse is that supposedly you were going easy on us?”
I shrugged, leaning forward on the bench. “You could try me right now. I think I’m ready to take off this brace.” I tapped the plastic structure around my arm that’d been shielding my previously sprained wrist. “One-on-one, let’s see who comes out on top.”
I didn’t really mean the challenge, but even Garrison of the many masks couldn’t stop uncertainty from flickering in his eyes as he looked me over again. Facing me—a woman with an immaculately deadly reputation—scared him in a way that he wouldn’t admit.
The entire crew was impressed by my kills and the reputation I’d built up with them—a reputation I’d had no idea about. The idea that mercenaries all around the world might have been discussing each of my hits and comparing notes and theories made me want to squirm. All I’d been doing was following orders.
With that thought, the knots in my stomach turned into a dull ache. “The people I mentioned,” I said tentatively. “And whoever else it seems like I killed, that you attributed to the ‘Ghost’… Were they involved in illegal activities as well as the legit businesses? Were they some kind of criminals?”
Julius sobered in an instant. “Some of them definitely had questionable ties,” he said quietly. “But many of them, as far as any of us knew, were sticking to at least the letter of the law. We assumed they were being taken down by competitors or people with a personal beef, not for any real crimes.”
I dragged my gaze away from him to stare off through the trees. Why had Noelle really ordered me to kill each of my targets, then?
I’d been surrounded by lies my entire life, so was it really a surprise if the people I’d killed weren’t as deserving of their horrible fates as I’d been told?
I’d been nothing but a tool for the household, a tool for their own selfish ends. They were the bad guys in this scenario, not the heroic underdogs they’d painted themselves as.
Nausea trickled through me, and I had the sudden urge to march right back to the mansion and kill them all over again.
Within a few seconds, the flare of rage faded into more queasiness. I rubbed my face. I’d learned so much, and all of it only made my life and the mission I’d given myself more complicated. Where the hell did I go from here?
And how was this crew of hitmen going to factor into it?
“What now?” I asked, focusing on Julius, since ultimately it’d be his decision. “You know who I am, I know who you are…”
He contemplated me for a moment. “That’s up to you. What do you want to do with everything you’ve discovered?”
I’d never heard those first four words before—never been given the freedom to do whatever I wanted. What did I want to do?
I felt my answer out slowly. “I want to know who I really am—or who I was before I was taken. I want to find out why the household took me and trained me, and why you were ordered to kill them. I need to understand where I fit in and why they want me back.”
Blaze was the first to speak. “We can help you with all of that.” He glanced at Julius for confirmation.
Julius nodded. “Whether you like it or not, we’re all tangled up in this mess together. After everything we put you through getting to this point, maybe we owe it to you to find you some answers. And frankly, I’d like to know what those answers are too.”
With his dark eyes on me, I couldn’t help wondering how much he was seeing me, the fully grown woman with fifteen years of kills under her belt, and how much the scared eleven-year-old girl who’d been briefly in over her head all that time ago. But I wasn’t going to argue against his decision, not when it benefitted me so much.
I couldn’t help checking Garrison’s expression. He didn’t exactly look thrilled, but he only scowled without a word in protest. Talon gave a brief dip of his head as if it didn’t matter much to him either way. I studied him next, searching for a sign of the man who’d turned so intense when we’d collided in the exercise room days ago.
