“We could go during her slowest time,” Mack said. “I could engage her in conversation. Talk about my wife.”
“If you made one misstep with her, she would know. She’s looking for us now,” Javier pointed out.
“We’re GhostWalkers,” Mack said. “If we don’t want to be seen, no one sees us. We hide in plain sight.”
“But not from each other,” Jaimie reminded him. “Don’t be so arrogant. She’s a GhostWalker too. She may not remember, but she has all the instincts, doesn’t she?”
“I didn’t think so,” Javier said. “At least not at first. I followed her home from the bar a couple of times she was followed. I took care of it because she didn’t seem to notice. Now, I don’t know. Her lungs are shit. That’s for real. She couldn’t outrun anyone if she tried to. I don’t know how she is at self-defense, because I’ve never seen her in action.”
“She seems like a decent person,” Ethan said.
“You know I don’t like being around many people outside of”—Javier circled the group with his finger—“but Rory can be included in those I’m fond of now. She’s genuinely a good person. I spent a couple of weeks watching her before Gideon ever approached her. I didn’t want her hurting Gideon. I like her, and that’s saying something.”
“I knew Rory as Laurel when we were children growing up,” Rose volunteered. “Whitney despised her because she had trouble breathing. She had an amazing memory, and she was good with languages. She had skills when it came to weapons and hand-to-hand combat. That didn’t matter, because she didn’t have what Whitney called ‘staying power.’ He wanted her to run for hours. She couldn’t run. And she couldn’t hit the times he demanded of her. He made them impossible. The more she failed, the worse her punishments were.”
“What does that mean?” Ethan asked.
“He would make it so she really couldn’t breathe. He’d force her to wear a mask over her mouth and nose, and then send her out to run in the heat. He’d have two of his soldiers chase her. They weren’t kidding around either.”
“Meaning?” Marc Lands asked as he poured himself a cup of coffee.
“They would kill her if they could.”
The team members looked at one another with horror on their faces. “How old was she?”
Rose shrugged. “He started that kind of thing with a few of the girls when they were very young. Around seven or eight. The ones he didn’t like and thought were expendable. He believed she was useless and wanted to teach us all a lesson. None of us knew what that lesson was supposed to be.”
“But she survived,” Mack said.
Rose nodded. “She always came back. The soldiers didn’t. It was always hours later.”
“Did you ever ask her how she did it?” Kane asked. His hand slid up to Rose’s neck. He cradled his son’s little bottom in the crook of his other arm. Sebastian was listening intently, as if he understood every word being said.
Rose shook her head. “We were careful not to ask those kinds of questions of each other. We didn’t want Whitney to know any of our psychic abilities. By the time we were five, we understood he would use anything against us. We even tried to pretend we weren’t close, because he would use friendships against us. He tricked us all the time. We were young and wanted to believe him.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
“He rotated girls in and out of the facilities.” She rested her head against Kane’s arm. “I was about ten when Whitney gave us all puppies to take care of. Each of us got one. We were so happy. We had the responsibility of looking after them and training them ourselves. Laurel and a couple of the other girls were younger, but they still took care of their puppies. When the dogs were a year old, he took us all to the arena. He had fighting dogs brought in, and one by one, he put our puppies in with them. In front of us they were killed. He blamed us and told us we didn’t prepare them. We didn’t teach them survival skills.”
Rose pressed trembling fingers to her mouth. “You can’t imagine how horrible it was. Laurel couldn’t breathe. I remember she tried to get into the ring with those terrible animals to stop them,but one of the guards stopped her. I think Whitney would have let her. I think he hoped the dogs would turn on her. She fell to the floor and went into convulsions. There was a doctor there and he went to her. She was carried out. Whitney called her a disgrace. He said she wasn’t strong enough to be a soldier and never would be. He always talked about her like that.”
“If you were ten,” Mack said, “and she’s younger than you, she had to have been seven or eight.”
Rose nodded. “After that, he sent her on mission after mission. She was forced to sleep in an attic. It was horribly stuffy and dirty. We tried to go up there to clean it, but he had guards to keep her from getting out or us from getting in. After every assignment, he would force her to go into that place.”
“When did he give you the tattoos?” Rhianna asked.
“It was just a couple of weeks after he killed our puppies. None of us would cooperate with him. I think he thought he needed to do something that would turn everything around, and it did. We were all young enough to want to have a parent. He was all we had. Each one of us had artwork that was beautiful and specially designed just for us. We were very excited. Laurel loved her tattoo, but she wasn’t like a couple of the girls. She didn’t trust him. I don’t know if he had expected she would fall for his gift and fawn all over him, but when she didn’t, he went back to sending her out on as many assignments as possible. Then one day, she just wasn’t with us anymore. He never said where she went. Whether she was alive or dead.”
“Did Whitney act upset, as if she had escaped him? Or did you think he sent her away to another facility?” Mack asked.
Rose sat up straighter, obviously trying to remember. “It was a long time ago. He detested so many of us. None of us ever pleased him. He’d sent her out on a mission with two of us, and everything went wrong. We were trying to get away and Ivy was wounded. Itwas clear we couldn’t outrun the men following us. The terrain was sandy. The air was dry. There were these formations like dunes but made of rock, dirt, sand and grass. One had a bit of a hollowed-out area. Not much. You could see it plain as day, even though it was night.”
Sebastian, as if knowing his mother was reliving a bad experience, reached out with his little baby fingers and touched her face. She immediately took his hand and kissed it.
“I’m fine, honey,” she reassured him. “This happened when I was a little girl.” She took another deep breath. “Laurel indicated the ground swelling and told us to press tight against the wall of dirt and not to move or make a sound. Just to trust her. She was wheezing bad and trying not to cough. Then she went silent. I did what she said. To this day, I don’t know why. I thought it was crazy. Anyone should have been able to see us. We were right out in the open. She put her body in front of ours, especially in front of Ivy’s. The next thing I knew, I was looking through what appeared to be a gray veil. That’s the best way I could describe it.”
“A gray veil?” Javier echoed.
