Then there was Six. For weeks I’d studied him, tried to figure him out—my Mr. Mysterious. The best guess I had was that he was on the upper side of thirty-five.
All in all, I was rooming with a scary bunch of people, whose combined body count was probably in the hundreds. They were all cold and calculating, but there was something in Six, a detachment, that seemed to make him the bigger threat of them all. Then again, I knew him the best. I hadn’t seen the rest in action.
And I thought being in a room with two of them was bad.
Four was bound to be an adventure.
For almost half an hour, they’d been spinning theories. It started after Five returned with dinner. Most of it I didn’t understand, code words and super-secret spy things.
So, I sat there, listening, perking up at a name I recognized.
“What about Jason?” Five asked.
Three deadly heads stopped talking and turned to look at him.
“Jason?” One’s eyes were wide. “Impossible.”
“Why?” Five asked as he shoveled another fry into his mouth.
Nearly every meal since we met him involved fries. He was a fry-aholic. They were offset with vegetables and meat, but there was almost always fries.
“No.” One shook her head. “He knows everything about us.”
Six nodded. “Exactly. He’d be the last person we’d suspect.”
“Or the first,” Nine said. “It could be that Home is just using him as a mouthpiece. He could be sending us to our deaths and not even know it.”
“Why now, though?”
Six shrugged. “Disbanding us could be costly.”
“How so?” Nine asked.
Five threw his empty fry sack on the table. “Too much information.”
“Meaning we could never retire? Go freelance?” One asked. “I don’t want to be a henchman my whole life. If I wanted that, I would have gone to work for the mafia.”
“I think we need to make a go at Langley,” Five said.
“What good would that do?” Nine asked. “No one knows who we are. We have no identification.”
Six leaned back and folded his arms. “Wolesley is still there.”
Five shook his head. “That assnugget wouldn’t know us from his own secretary.” He let out a sigh. “Face it, we’re exactly what they wanted. Invisible. There are probably three people besides Jason who know about us.”
“We have no forms of identification. Not CIA or even our real names, if we can even remember them.”
My brow scrunched. “Remember them?”
Four deadly sets of eyes turned to me, one set in particular spitting venom.
Nine took a sip of water and passed it to One. “It’s been a long time since we’ve used our real names.”
“But it’s your name.” The whole conversation seemed impossible. Even if the prior five or so years had been spent under a multitude of identities, how would it erase thirty some years of the name they were born with?
Five patted my head. “Doesn’t matter, buttercup. Even that fades after a while.”
I shook my head, unbelieving the possibility of what they were saying. “I can’t even imagine that.”
“Can’t you?” Six quirked a brow at me. “When you talk to yourself, what name do you say in your head?”
“Paisley.”
“Your name is Paisley?” One asked in a snarky tone before letting out a demented cackle.
Fuck, I hated the bitch.
Six ignored her. “I say Six. It’s more my name now than any other. My only constant title.”
I stared at him, stunned. “Are all of you like that?”
They all nodded.
Badass enough to have a code name, not able to live enough to remember their real names.
They returned back to the topic and I lay down, staring up at the celling, lulled to sleep by their conversation.
My eyes snapped open what felt like seconds later, but by the dark room, was probably actually hours later. Six climbed into bed, startling me awake. He let out a sigh as he settled in behind me, sliding his arm under me and pulling me close.
I turned and for reasons unknown, slipped my arm around him and nuzzled his chest.
Maybe it was just that some way, somehow, in the company of killers, he was my safety.
My captor. My killer. My security.
When did my executioner become my lifeline?
Life with One was not fun.
Less than forty-eight hours in and I wanted to smack her, but that would be unwise. Even the bottom of the Killing Corps scale probably had more killing capability than a hundred soldiers.
Maybe it was an exaggeration, maybe not.
“Are you really going to keep her around?” Nine asked Six as they sat at a table overlooking some paperwork.
My head popped up to look at them from where I sat at the edge of the bed, Five next to me. I was holding the barrel of his own rifle while he adjusted something.
The muscle in Six’s jaw jumped. “I thought we talked about this.”
Nine’s brown eyes—his natural color—locked with Six’s similar. They both had strong profiles, similar shaped noses, and strong jawlines.
Why were all of them ruggedly handsome? Should they have been a little more average?