“Maybe, she’s a good actress?” I reply, wanting to feel anger more than hurt, looking for reasons to drag that anger from beneath the pain and use it to put my shield back in fucking place where it belongs.
Thorne shakes her head. “She’s been kind to Jo Jo even when Jo Jo wasn’t kind to her.” She pulls the necklace out from her shirt and holds up the pendant. It’s the Star of David. “When she saw this, she didn’t bat an eyelash.”
“Why do you wear a Star of David if your Popop was in the clan?”
“It’s my girlfriend’s. She gave it to me. The point is that hate is an agenda. Those fuckers are preachy. Whatever reason she has for being a part of the Fourth Reich has nothing to do with hatred of others.”
Something occurs to me. “Not of the racist kind, anyway.”
“What are you thinking?” Nine asks. We’re interrupted when his phone rings. He picks it up, pacing the room. “Hold on, I’ll put you on speaker,” he says, clicking a button and setting the phone down on the counter. “Go ahead, King.”
“Whoever is after me sent my daughter’s crazy biological mother after my kid during the storm. Almost killed my wife and both of my daughters,” King grates. “We took down several of their hired guns but none of them talked before they died except to say your fucking name, Pike. This shit ends, and it ends now. Find out who is behind this, and why they want to take you down and everyone else around you, then give me a fucking name. No one involved in this is left breathing, you understand me?”
Thorne gnashes her teeth and slips into the back room, and I wish I could go with her.
Nine and I exchange looks. He raises his eyebrows silently asking, Are you going to tell him about her?
“Understood,” I say, my neck and shoulders tightening with tension and anger. I look to the stairs. “I’ve got a lead. I’ll let you know what comes of it.”
The line goes dead.
“I’ll tell him,” I say to Nine, rubbing my eyes, “when there’s something concrete to tell.”
Now that I know who Mickey really is, I realize the entire time she’s been playing a game with me, regardless of her reasons. A part of me wishes I never saw that mark, but I did and there’s no coming back from it. But there are two players in her game.
And I never lose.
She wants to play?
I’ll play. And I’ll fucking win.
“Call Darius Alban,” I tell Nine. “Arrange a trade. The girl for a truce.”
He tucks his phone in his pocket. “You really want a truce and not mass murder?”
“The trade is only the setting,” I crack my knuckles. “For the mass murder.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Pike
Nine follows me up the stairs, and I’m ready to do battle or worse when I smash open the door, but Mickey is in a heap on the floor, sobbing. She looks up at me with tear-filled eyes. My chest tightens at the site of her so sad, weak, vulnerable like I’ve never seen her before. What happened to the brave girl who was ready to take on whatever I was prepared to give?
I came up here ready for war and she’s already collateral damage.
I remind myself that she’s not my Mic anymore. She never really was. She’s a soldier of the Fourth fucking Reich.
Nine looks to me, but I can’t speak so he speaks for me. He tells Mickey everything King just said about his wife and children being in danger and about the woman the Fourth Reich sent after them.
She rises to her knees and wipes the hair from her eyes. There’s no need to threaten her because I see in the way her shoulders have slumped over that she’s already given up. Her eyes meet mine. “I’ll tell you everything. It’s time. I’m hurting people by not telling the truth. Not just you. Kids. I can’t…I can’t do this anymore.”
Nine sits on the dresser, and sets his gun beside him, keeping it within reach.
I lift Mickey off the floor and place her on the bed, but she instantly stands, shaking free of my grip. She walks to the window and I perch at the end of the bed, ready to hear what it is she has to say.
After a few seconds, she takes a deep breath and speaks to us while still looking out the window. “My dad wasn’t an affectionate man, but we never doubted that he loved us. He gave us everything he could to my sisters and my mother and me. He was never cruel. But he wasn’t an open book either. He was secretive. His praise and compliments were limited to our accomplishments and never given for our character. My sisters all succeeded in different areas. I think to some point it was to please him, because they saw all of the attention he gave me when I won an award or was the youngest person to receive a doctorate of science in my university. Although they got the praise, it was never like the kind he gave me. Maybe, it was because we were in the same field. But regardless, with any of us, it was never the kind of attention or pride that ended with an I love you. To the point where my sisters and I clung to every little endearment he offered as if it were the hugs we so desperately craved. But we loved him despite, and possibly in spite, of it.”
“Let’s jump forward a bit. Why the Fourth Reich? I mean, I’ve got a lot of reasons to hate a lot of people, but race isn’t one of them,” Nine remarks, jumping ahead in the story. “Basically, my question is, when did you become a hateful bitch and why?” He points at her. “And go.”
“I’m not a racist,” she insists. “I have the same hate in my heart that they do, but the only group of people I hate as whole are them.”
Nine raises his hand. “Uh, professor, I’m a little lost here. Can you please explain? Examples? Answer key? Anything?”
“Put your fucking hand down,” I mutter.
Mickey paces around the room, wringing her hands. “I’ve been training as a soldier in the army of the Fourth Reich for four years. Little did they know what they’ve been training me for.”
“What exactly is that?” Nine asks.
She spins around and I’m trapped in her gaze. “Justice. They were training me, and I was going to use that training on them and get much deserved much needed justice.”
“You mean revenge,” I argue.
She nods. “In this case, they are one in the same. Although justice makes it sound more superhero and less…”
“Like premeditated murder?” Nine finishes.
“I guess you can say that,” she replies, on a laugh, nervously shaking out her hands. “Because it’s true. No matter what words you use.”
I lean forward, resting my elbows on my knees. “Revenge for what?” I ask, because I need to fucking know.
“It’s a really long story,” she replies, her eyes glassy with unshed tears.
“We ain’t going nowhere. Tell us,” I probe, needing to understand her affiliation with the racist bastards. I look to Nine. “No interrupting. Let her fucking speak.”
She thinks for a few beats. “My father was in the same field of study that I’m in. Was in. He went undercover before I was born in the Fourth Reich. The took us, the whole family, to their gatherings. We all repeated the sick chants. Cheered at the propaganda. At night, when we were home, he’d tell us how successful his research was and that we were a big part of that success. All we had to do was keep playing our part, and we’d all be rewarded when his research landed him a guest spot on CNN and a book turned into a movie. His delusions of grandeur were so big it made him greedy. It made him stay long after he should have pulled out.”
I resist placing my hand on her thigh because as much as I want to comfort her, she doesn’t deserve my comfort, and I can’t risk what touching her again might do to my resolve to see this thing through. “What happened? What went wrong?” I ask.
She looks to the ceiling as if the answer is taped to it. “I don’t know the details, but they must have found out who my father really was and what he was doing there. Twenty years is a long time, and I don’t think they liked the idea that they were taken for fools for that long. I remember when my father came back to the beach house one day looking frazzled. Sc
ared. We had to leave really fast. We didn’t even pack. We just got in the van and took off.” She takes her eyes from the ceiling and looks to me.
“They caught up to us. There was gunfire. My sisters screamed. My mother’s face was the palest I’d ever seen. She was terrified. There was a noise like a crushing pop, and then my mother’s face was splattered with red.”
My father…he’d been shot in the head. He was dead. My mother tried to take hold of the wheel, but his foot was pressed up against the gas. There was nothing she could do.
We blew through the guardrail. There was so much screaming. The water was too fast. Too deep. I screamed for my mother, but she didn’t answer. My sisters…they were all contorted, and I don’t know if they were still alive, but they weren’t conscious. There were no more screams. I tried to feel for a pulse on my sister Mindy, but the water was up to my neck and then over her head, and I couldn’t feel anything.”
She smiles at me through her tears, and I want to fucking kill every single person whose ever caused her to cry. “You found me that night and took me home. I was delirious. It didn’t hit me––what happened––until they started shooting at us on the beach. I surrendered because I didn’t want you to die for the sins of my father.”
“What happened after they took you?” I ask, realizing now it wasn’t a rescue after all.
“Psychology happened. When Darius saw me, I knew he was ready to kill me. But the only reason he’d have for wanting me dead would be if I believed he was the villain, the man who killed my family.” She takes a deep breath to steady herself. “So, when I saw him for the first time, I wrapped my arms around him and cried to Uncle Darius that we were in a car accident because someone ran us off the road and shot at us and that I was so glad to see that he was okay because I feared whoever killed my family might’ve been after him, too. And I thanked him for rescuing me.”
“And he believed you?” Nine asks.
“I didn’t give him a reason not to believe me. I let him believe he was the savior in my story, and he, in turn, filled the role.”
I clench my fists, understanding and sympathy flooding past any fucking guard I’ve been trying to build between us. “Jesus Fucking Christ. You put yourself in a pen with the fucking wolves.”
She sits on the bed, and I can’t help myself. This time, I place my hand on her thigh and give it a squeeze. She doesn’t flinch although her eyes widen with surprise. You and me both, I silently tell her, feeling her muscle relax under my touch.
“No, I didn’t put myself in the pen with them,” she explains. “I became a wolf. At least, as far as they were concerned.”
“So, your plan was to kill them?” I ask.
She nods. “Each and every one of them, starting at the bottom and working my way up. It’s not a quick death. It’s more like a biological weapon. I wanted to kill them from the inside, slowly and painfully. The whole organization as a whole. I didn’t want to take their lives I wanted to take their trust in the Fourth Reich, their beliefs, everything that held them together, but first, I had to gain their trust. Follow their orders. Darius even went as far as to feed me a lie of who was really responsible for my parents’ death.”
“Who?” I ask, squeezing her thigh again.
She glances up at me. “You.”
I stand like I’ve been shot at. “That motherfucker!”
“It’s not like I believed him,” she assures me. “I knew it was Darius all along, and I know he has an agenda that has to do with destroying you that has nothing to do with how he destroyed my family. He was just feeding me a lie to fulfill that agenda so I let him think I believed him.”
“Percy,” I mutter. “The fucker thinks it’s me that got him locked up all those years ago.”
“That actually makes fucking sense,” Nine replies. “It’s not like we’ve ever done business with them. They’d have no other reason to hate us. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we’re white as fuck. Embarrassingly so.”
“I thought as much,” Mickey says with a sniffle. “But I know it wasn’t you who ratted on him.”
“How?” I ask, pausing my furious pace of the room.
“Because…it was me.”
Mickey
“Because it was me,” I say with both pride and regret filling my voice. “My father and Darius always pushed us Percy and me together in hopes that we’d be the new faces of the Reich. Of course, my father told me it was all part of his research, and I agreed to whatever he proposed, in the name of knowledge. His research was important. He was always so close to the end. To finding out what made the human brain hate.”
“He let you get close to a fucking monster,” Pike growls, his neck chording with anger. A vein in his forearm pulses under a tattoo of the name Greyson.
I nod. “He had me visit him in the detention center once, and while I was there, I was approached by the FBI. I was young and scared, and they threatened to put away my father, but the real reason I wore that wire is because it felt like the right thing to do. Now, looking back…” I can no longer help the tears that stream down my face. “It’s probably what led to Papa being found out, and my entire family being killed.”
Pike drops to his knees before me. “It wasn’t your fucking fault,” he says, grabbing my hands in his. “None of this was your fucking fault,” he says the words with so much passion and determination that I almost believe him, but being the logical person I am, facts are facts. My actions may have led to my father’s death.
Nine is typing furiously on his laptop. He finally looks up, and his expression is one of confusion. “You said your father was undercover? That’s what he told you?” Nine asks.
“Yeah, why?” I ask, hesitantly.
Pike rises to his feet but keeps my hand clasped in his.
Nine brings his laptop over and sets it down on the bed. “Because this says otherwise.” It’s an article. A newsletter rather. I recognize it as propaganda of the Fourth Reich. There’s a picture of a much younger Darius with another man whose eyes are the same grey shade as mine.
I gasp and feel my face pale. No, this can’t be true. It can’t be. I jerk my hand from Pike’s and walk over to the window.
“What?” Pike growls at Nine.
I can feel Pike’s eyes on me as Nine answers. “This is from over thirty years ago, not twenty. Mickey’s father wasn’t undercover in the Fourth Reich.” Nine taps on the screen. “He was a founding member.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mickey
I find Thorne in the office.
Pike and Nine are upstairs huddled together to make sense of this mess I made, and I couldn’t stand it any longer. I was choking on my own sadness and guilt.
I know they told Thorne everything because I’d heard them downstairs. The look Thorne gives me when I enter isn’t one of hatred or pity but sympathy.
“I’m curious,” she says. “How does that photographic memory thing of yours work?”
I’m grateful for the question, any question about anything other than about my current situation. I answer immediately. “Think of it this way: if you read a page in a book, you see black letters on a white page. I may know it’s black letters on a white page, but I interpret them as white letters surrounding them in black. It’s how my brain is able to process more than one thing at once.”
She shrugs. “Guess you never had to study much.”
I twist my lips and think. “Yes, and no. I can take a quick glance at the text book and memorize the answers, but to truly learn something and know it without having to revert to that particular memory, I have to read it a few times, just like everyone else, and in that way, yeah, I still have to study. There’s a big difference between knowing something and truly understanding the meaning behind it.”
“Is there a downside?” she asks.
Only remembering everything you never wanted to remember in vivid fucking detail. “Several. Sometimes, I have a hard time following conversation. Things ge
t cluttered in my brain. Let’s say my parents started talking about going back to a restaurant we went to last summer on our vacation. Well, my brain automatically opens the album under the file for that restaurant, and I lose the rest of what they’re saying because I’m too busy remembering how the waiter had a patch of hair under his ear by his jawline he missed while shaving, or how the awning has a tear on the left side under the letter A in the restaurant’s name, or how the bathroom stall had an advertisement on the door for an entirely different establishment selling the same kind of food, and then I’m reciting the phone number of the competition out loud, and when I’m done, I come to and my parents and sisters are all staring at me, waiting for me to come back to earth and out of my own junkyard of a brain.”
“How do you deal with it?” she asks, seemingly genuinely interested.
“How does anyone deal with anything?” I reply, looking to the fluorescent lights on the ceiling as the buzz to life.
“Generator must have kicked in,” Thorne says. “Keep going.”
“I don’t, really. I just live. I believe that it’s a gift for the most part and it makes me, well… me.”
For a moment, I wander around the office while Thorne works. This could be the last time I see her, and something about her has been marinating in my brain.
“When are you going to tell Pike?” I ask, shoving my hands into my back pockets.
“Tell him what?” She snaps her eyes to mine.
“That you’re his sister.”
Her jaw drops. “How…how did you know?” She rubs the birthmark behind her ear.
I smile. “You mean from besides the fact that you both make the same expression when you’re worried about something but trying not to look like you’re worried?” I ask. “Or the moon shaped birthmark you both have behind your left ears?”
She realizes what she’s doing and stops.
Pike: The Pawn Duet, Book One Page 17
