“My name is Paige Winters.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Paige Winters.” The corners of his mouth curved into a sexy smile. “Tell me about yourself.”
“What do you want to know?” I asked.
“Where did you grow up?”
“I’m from Virginia.”
“Do your parents still live there?” His finger softly stroked my arm.
“My parents were killed when I was twelve years old in a car accident.”
If I were going to do this, I needed to tell him everything. It’ll be okay, I kept telling myself.
“I’m sorry for your loss. That must have been hard.”
“It wasn’t until I found out the truth,” I said.
“What do you mean?” His brows furrowed.
“After the crash, I woke up in a facility called Hearthstone. The doctors wore white coats and spoke in hushed tones. They told me I was in the car with my grandparents, not my parents, when the crash happened, and that my brain injury made me the perfect candidate.”
“The perfect candidate for what?” he asked.
“For their experiment.” I turned my wrist and showed him the small scar. “They implanted neural transmitters, rewired my brain receptors, and enhanced my reflexes. They called it cognitive restructuring. The doctors told me they didn’t have a choice, or I would have died. I had memories of my life before the accident. Memories that weren’t real and implanted into my brain. Only I didn’t know that at the time. I believed I was Victoria Pollack, and I lived with my parents, Geneva and Harold Pollack. But it never felt right. I didn’t feel anything toward them.
Three days a week, a black SUV with tinted windows would pull up to the house to take me to Hearthstone. The two men in dark suits would escort me down the hallway, lit by fluorescent lights, to a playroom with one-way glass. It started out by assembling puzzles blindfolded. I can still hear Dr. Moretti’s voice inside my head. ‘Subject shows remarkable progress.’ Then he’d squeeze my shoulder and tell me that my brain was healing beautifully.”
“My God, Paige.”
“After a while, they stepped up their training. They’d have me solve impossible puzzles, memorize faces and floor plans, and assemble and disassemble firearms in record time. ‘You’re not like the others, Victoria. What you can do—it’s a gift,’ Dr. Moretti would say. Then the physical training started once my body was fully healed from the accident. Various forms of martial arts, every morning starting at four a.m. I’d train until eight o’clock, eat breakfast, and then attend school for six hoursat the dining room table with Geneva as my homeschool teacher. It wasn’t your typical middle school experience. While other kids were at public school learning mathematics and biology and taking cooking classes, I was studying cartel hierarchies and memorizing the structures of terrorist cells. Harold and Geneva called it ‘practical education.’ They said the world wasn’t all sunshine and unicorns. They wanted me to understand and learn the world’s darkest corners. By the time I was fifteen, I could spot a potential security threat in a crowded room in seconds. I could tell you who was a threat, which exits to take, and who was hiding weapons under their clothes. When I turned sixteen, they put all my training to the test.”
“How do you mean?” he asked.
“I was sent to Colombia to take out a well-known cartel that was secretly selling arms to the Russian government.”
“Who sent you?”
“Hearthstone.”
“What and who exactly is Hearthstone?” Parker asked.
“They’re a top-secret high-level black ops security division working outside of the CIA.”
“You’re CIA?” he asked.
“Ex-CIA. As far as they're concerned, they succeeded in killing Victoria Pollack.”
“They think you’re dead?”
“Yeah. And it needs to stay that way until I get every single one of them at the top for what they’ve done.”
“How long have you supposedly been dead?”
“Three years.”
“Why the hell would they want to kill you after what they did to you?” He sat up, his back resting against the headboard.