Chapter Twenty-Six
Indie
“Yes,” King replied. “According to the files, you were trained to be a sleeper agent.”
My mouth hung open as I gaped at him. This had to be a joke. I wasn’t a fucking sleeper agent. I was twenty fucking years old. Sleeper agents were men in the military. Men who were trained to get in somewhere undetected, take someone out, and then leave.
I couldn’t even fucking tiptoe through my apartment without the son of a bitch downstairs banging on my floor to tell me I was too loud.
No, this was insane. Someone was playing a prank on me. They made all this shit up just so I would confess to who I really was. It was manipulation, pure and simple.
Except they didn’t tell you until after you confessed.
“Why are you doing this? What do you get out of playing these mind games?” I asked Mimic. “I already said I would fuck you. You don’t have to make shit up.”
“Indigo!” I turned at my growled name. Gunner sat in his chair glaring at me. “This isn’t a fucking game.”
I blinked my eyes, trying to focus on his words. “It has to be. This is too fucking ridiculous to fathom. It sounds like a fucking movie script.”
“It is,” Blade confirmed.
“What?”
“It doesn’t matter. The fact remains, the information we have on you and the others says that you are a sleeper agent. We need to know if it’s true.”
“How?” I asked.
The idea that I could kill someone was ridiculous in itself. But that I would do it with my bare hands? The hands that were splayed out flat on the table in front of me as I stared at them.
“There is a phrase.”
My head snapped up to King’s voice. “A phrase? And it what... turns me into a killer? Do you understand how crazy this sounds?”
“I do understand. Which is why we have to be sure. Indie, I know you have no reason to trust us—”
“Except for the fact that you saved me from being kidnapped and didn’t give me back to my psycho father.” I paused, looking around the table. “He knows, doesn’t he? Or at least suspects? That’s why he wants me back, isn’t it?”
“We think so, yes. The Death Dogs were in bed with Daniel Scott.”
“I knew he fucking sold me,” I whispered.
“What?” Mimic growled beside me.
I slumped back in my chair. There was no reason to hide anything anymore; they knew most of it already.
“Devlin Scott and his son used everything they could to break us. Some lasted longer than others. In the beginning, it was manipulation. We were all young. I was only four. Every night I cried for my mom. We all did. So, they told us lies about our mothers, hoping it would sever that bond, make us feel alone, abandoned, so that they could swoop in and comfort us, convince us to trust them. Rely on them because we had no one else to rely on. They told us our mothers didn’t want us; that they were the ones who sold us. ”
I felt the heat of Mimic’s body fall away as he sat back in his chair. He’d told me he had also been held prisoner. Not as long as I had, and not as young. But as I watched him shrink away, I wondered if his captors told him something similar.
“I never believed it, though I let them think I did. It was easier to give in. Safer.”
“Indie, I don’t want to interrupt, but I think maybe we should invite Haizley to sit in. Would that be okay with you?” King asked.
Did I want Haizley to know everything? Did I want her to look at me differently? The way everyone else was looking at me now?
Gunner stood from his seat and walked out.
“I guess I don’t get to choose.”
“You’re gonna need someone to talk to after. This way, you won’t have to go through it all a second time. Gunner will quickly fill Haizley in.”
I nodded. What else was there to do? My life had never really been my own, and it looked like it never would be.
“Will you use me?”
“What?” King asked, confusion marring his brow.
“Will you use me? If this is all true and not some fucked-up mind
game. Will you use my skills?”
King sat back in his chair as he studied me. I knew he was carefully choosing his next words.
“I’d be lying to you if I said the thought hadn’t crossed my mind.
But until we know what we’re dealing with, I can’t answer that question.
I will tell you this, though. I would never do it without talking to you first. Letting you decide if it was something you thought you could do. Something you could live with.”
“How would we know if it’s something I could live with until I’ve done it?”
“We don’t.”
I stared into his dark eyes. From across the table, I couldn’t tell what color they were. But his eyes told me everything he didn’t say out loud. He wanted to know what would happen. He wanted to see what I was capable of.
“Who?”
His grin said it all. I’d just agreed to a plan that had already been formed in his head. Before he could answer, if indeed he would, the door opened, and Haizley rushed in.
She sat at my side, in the chair Kytten had vacated. The chair that had brought her pain. I didn’t want Haizley to get hurt because of me.
She swung angry eyes to King. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Don’t start, Doc.”
“Next time, bring me in fucking sooner.”
King grinned at Haizley’s outburst, but she didn’t see it because she was already focused on me. “You should have come to me.”
“I couldn’t,” I whispered in shame.
“This is why you’ve been avoiding me since you found out what I did?”
I simply nodded, not wanting to confess she scared me. That her compassion and personality scared the shit out of me. I didn’t want her to confirm everything I had ever thought. Everything I knew.
“You know this wasn’t your fault.”
“I know.”
She shook her head as she grinned. “We will talk about this later. You aren’t off the hook.
As your friend, I am going to cuss you out for not trusting me.
But as your new therapist, I am going to work with you until you trust me completely and help get you through all of this shit. ” She turned to King. “Where are we?”
This was what I both loved about Haizley and what scared me the most. She took charge. She was confident in her role in the club, in town. In her whole fucking life.
When I first met Haizley, she was the scared girl who felt alone in the town she grew up in. The one who didn’t have the confidence that a man like Gunner could not only be interested in her but want her so much he stalked her to make sure she was safe and protected.
That was such a small part of who she was though. The real Haizley Walker was strong and confident. She was someone who inspired people to be better. Inspired them to grow and deal with their shit, even when they didn’t want to.
Like me.
“Indie was sharing her story with us,” King said, giving me the floor to continue.
“You think your father sold you?” Haizley asked, her soft eyes on my face. She had a way of being compassionate and sympathetic without it feeling like pity. Somehow, that felt worse.
I didn’t want understanding for what I had been through. I wanted anger. I wanted rage. I wanted someone to be on my side. To protect me, to go to war for me.
I reached over and took Mimic’s hand. He didn’t get to shrink away from me, not if he wanted me the way he said he did.
Looking around the table, I realized that maybe Kytten was right.
Maybe if I gave Mimic a chance, I could find a home here.
A place to belong. A family who would protect me, fight for me.
Someone willing to go to war for me.
“I’ve always suspected it was my father who sold me, despite what Devlin said. Now that I know my father was connected to him, it only makes it more likely.”
“Maybe he didn’t sell you,” Jingles said. “Maybe he loaned you out knowing what Devlin Scott was doing.”
“What do you mean?” Colt asked.
“Indie, you said Magyk rescued you when you were how old?”
“Fourteen,” I answered, curious what he was thinking.
“And how old are you now?” Gunner asked.
I bit my lip as I dropped my eyes. He’d been so great to me, and I couldn’t look him in the eye when I confessed I’d lied to him.
“I’m sorry, Gunner.”
“How old are you, Indie?”
“Twenty.”
“Son of a bitch!” Gunner cursed, and Haizley was quick to scold him. “Not the time, Gunner.”
“What if,” Jingles continued, ignoring Gunner’s outburst, “his plan all along was to go back for her when she was eighteen?”
“That son of a bitch let her be raped as a child so that she could become a weapon for him later.”
I stopped listening as the men argued all around me.
I knew they were enraged for my benefit, but it didn’t change what I was feeling deep inside my soul.
In the span of mere minutes, I’d learned that not only had my father most likely orchestrated my being taken away from my mother.
But he’d willingly given me to a man he knew would use me, a child, as a sex toy.
All so I could be trained to be a killing machine.
I’d been stolen away from the one person who loved me with everything she had.
“Nav?”
A hush settled around the table as I called out the brother who could finally get me the answers that I needed.
“Yeah, Indie?”
I looked up at him. His hair was a golden honey brown.
His eyes were blue sapphires, and his shoulders were wide.
He didn’t look like someone you would typically think of as a nerd, a computer whiz out of Silicon Valley.
He was every bit the biker he portrayed.
But he had knowledge. Knowledge I had put off seeking out.
Knowledge that I desperately needed right this second before I could make any further decisions.
“Can you tell me what happened to my mother?”
A sad smile slid over his face as he nodded and looked down at his computer. I waited anxiously as his fingers danced across the keys. My eyes were glued to his as he fixated on the screen in front of him, and I knew the moment his fingers froze.
The information I had been too afraid to look for because I knew. I knew when I was there, locked in that room every night as I begged for my mother to save me, that nothing short of death would stop her from coming for me.
I knew when we were rescued, and Magyk insisted we couldn’t go home because that was the first place they would look. That we would be putting our families’ lives at risk by letting them know where we were.
And we all agreed.
Our first night of freedom, huddled together in a hotel room, we all agreed we didn’t want our families to suffer. It had been ten years. That was a long time to hold out hope. A long time to still be searching.
We all knew the truth.
We didn’t need anyone to tell us.
We knew.
Our mothers didn’t come for us because they couldn’t.