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FIVE
Decima
I tooka deep breath and glanced across the car at Julius, who was poised behind the wheel. A van rumbled by in the parking lot we’d chosen for its central location in D.C. The leather seat felt stiff under my ass.
“Your honest opinion,” I said, holding my phone in my right hand and fidgeting with the hem of my shirt with my left. “Is this going to be worth it?”
The leader of the Chaos Crew didn’t respond immediately. His hands flexed against the wheel. Then he looked back at me steadily. “That’s impossible to judge when we don’t know who this person is or what they want.”
“It could have something to do with the people who kidnapped me.” The organization with the logo like a droplet with a line slicing diagonally through it. The people who’d stolen me from my family and tried to kill the men who’d helped me more than once. “Or the people who hired the crew to kill them.”
“Even if that’s the case, what this means depends on what answers are still important to you. Now that you have your family, how much does it matter to you to understand the rest of your past?”
Maybe it would have been better if I could have simply moved on and forgotten all that. But the urge to find out who’d controlled me so thoroughly for so much of my life nagged at me no matter how many visits I had with the Maliks.
I needed to know why. I needed to understand the reason my life had been rewritten. I needed to be sure the people involved wouldn’t hurt anyone close to me ever again.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever said anything truer than the words that tumbled from my mouth next. “It’s the most important thing to me.”
Julius gave me a quiet smile. “Then it’ll be worth it no matter what happens, just to know you tried.”
Blaze’s voice resonated through the headset I was wearing, identical to Julius’s. “My equipment is ready. As soon as this person picks up, I can start to triangulate their signal. Be sure to keep whoever it is talking as long as possible. That’ll give me the best chance of narrowing down his location.”
I nodded. “Got it.”
I tapped the number we’d gotten from the strange missed connections ad into my phone and brought it to my ear, easing off that side of the headset. The phone on the other end rang in what felt like slow motion. After the fourth ring, I wondered if anyone would pick up at all. Maybe it’d had nothing to do with me. Just a huge coincidence.
Then there was a click and a momentary silence. My heart jumped. “Hello?”
“Who am I speaking to?” a man’s voice asked. It was hoarse. Confident. I got the impression of a fair bit of age in the gravity of his tone.
I almost said “Dess” but caught myself just in time. “Rachel,” I said, giving the name he’d used in his ad. “I think you were expecting to hear from me.”
There was a faint rustling on the other end as if he’d shifted his position. Blaze’s voice carried into my other ear. “He’s in the south end of the city.” Julius, who was hearing the same report, started the ignition and drove out of the parking lot.
“I’m glad you found my message,” the man on the phone said. “You’re obviously a sharp one, Rachel Malik.”
He knew exactly who I was then, but that wasn’t a surprise.
“A friend who knew some of the details of recent events in my life noticed the post and pointed it out to me,” I said. I wanted to demand to know what it was about, what he wanted, but Blaze needed this conversation to be drawn out as long as possible. So I stopped there and waited.
The man gave a brief hum. “A friend, not family?”
“I said a friend, didn’t I?”
“What people say and what they mean aren’t always the same thing, as I’m sure you’ll become aware of soon if you haven’t already.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, a prickle of apprehension running down my spine.
“I saw you on the news with Damien Malik,” the man said, ignoring my question. “Back from the dead. I knew you deserved better than to go in blind. I had to reach out to you.”
“And you chose this way?”
He barked a laugh. “We have to be subtle in my line of business.”
I frowned. “And what exactly is that? Who are you?” I clamped down on all the other questions that wanted to fly from my mouth.
“I’ve been investigating the Malik family for some time,” he said, again not offering the specific information I’d asked for. “I’ve turned up some unsettling information. You shouldn’t trust them wholeheartedly.”
