Toy Soldiers (Helford #1)

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The deeper and deeper I began to delve into Jonathon’s world, the more I noticed the inconsistencies with the information I had been given in writing, information that I checked religiously and memorized. The actions of Alexander didn’t add up to a reasonable number, and the thought of my mother knowing Jonathon’s haunted me in the back of my mind with every passing day until it got to the point that I couldn’t push it onto the backburner anymore. My instincts were something I had come to trust with my life, and they were telling me that something was very wrong. I believed them.

Something didn’t feel right.

I just didn’t know where to begin. There was so much information, so many files that could hold the answer. I got my hands on all of the ones I could without seeming suspicious, but even then I wasn’t quite sure where to start.

After a long and careful deliberation, I pulled my mother’s personal file to the front, pulling it onto my lap. I glanced up at my door—still locked. I had checked for bugs and cameras and I had closed the curtains so firmly that my room was completely absent of all sunlight. I bit down on my lip, concentrating on the silence of the apartment.

Rian wasn’t home. That made it slightly easier; I would have felt a little bit paranoid knowing I was defying all of my orders with him less than a hundred feet away.

I took a deep breath.

And I opened the file.

My mother’s picture was tacked onto the front page, along with all of her other standard information. I read through it slowly, my heart heavy as I read the number issue of her weapon, her dominant hand, how tall she was. The people who work for the company never have any outlying characteristics like tattoos or birthmarks—even any scars or prominent injuries we receive are fixed on an operation table. They change everything about what we look like and they make us as good as ghosts. My mother was no different. I looked between the two provided pictures of her before the surgery and after, and I wondered with a shock if, were my mother alive, would she even be able to recognize me?

My fingers shook terribly as I kept turning the page, going through mission after mission. Her graduation. Her marriage to my father. I took notice of the large chunks cut out of the page, censored and shoved into a file with much more security, the eyes necessary of so much more clearance than even my own. My frustration grew as I turned the page.

That was when my life began.

The report filled out was the announcement of my mother’s pregnancy, and later her birth to me at ten-thirty-one in the evening at a quiet hospital on the outskirts of Des Moines. October thirty-first. Just another ghost on Halloween night.

I read through her reports on the beginning of my life. Her missions picked up a little more once I reached three months old, but pages upon pages were missing, a secret. The more I read, the more I realized that I had looked in the right place. My blood raced in my ears because I knew all of the information that was missing was missing for a reason.

I pursed my lips.

Pieces of my life were missing, and I didn’t have a clue as to why.

I hesitated on a page that had a picture of my father and me on the top, secured to it with only a paperclip. I took it from the clip and held it a little closer—I didn’t remember my father to the extent that I remembered my mother, and I always wondered if it was only because I had watched her die. I remember my father vaguely; I remember him teaching me how to ride a bike and taking me to a baseball game. I remember when he took me on a mission once and kept telling me to look away, again and again, his sentences running together, and his face had been so ashamed that I had, even if I hadn’t wanted to. My father had a good heart but he had been roped into the wrong fate, tangled in a web of conspiracy that he should have been able to sidestep.