Toy Soldiers (Helford #1)

(32) Double

I’m living two lives.

I have always been living a life that isn’t mine. It was created by the company upstairs, by Helford. I was a girl who watched her parents die and was shipped off to an orphanage and lived there until I continued to get letters inviting me for a free scholarship to a school on the California coast. I would never forget the day that I stepped off of the plane and headed to a man holding a board with my name on it, and how I had slipped into the limo at the same time a bag had been shoved onto my head. They tied my hands and shoved a cloth in my mouth to keep me from screaming. But I didn’t scream. I doubted anyone would hear me anyway.

I was perfectly normal until that moment. I liked to listen to music and I read books in my free time because they took me to a place that wasn’t here. I was a girl who was living in the clouds.

Helford brought me back down. They taught me how to look someone in the eye and shoot them in the head. They taught me how to take down a man twice my size in less than thirty seconds. I ceased to be a person, and I became another one of their drones. I thought like them and I acted like them. And I have ever since.

But now I’ve gotten to thinking that something is wrong. Something is not right.

I was starting to think for myself. And I didn’t like who I had become.

I am living two lives, two real lives, two that I can’t pick between for so many different reasons. They are two separate forms of reality that I have forged for myself.

One of them was a happy life. I lived in my own little world where I got up and went to school every day, and when I walked through the door I was swept into the arms of someone that I loved. I lived that life with Jonathon holding onto my hand and guiding me on, guiding me away from the other life. He made me smile and made my heart skip a beat when he smiled at me. It was everything I had ever wanted, just shy of being a princess living with her prince in her castle. I was an ordinary girl in France with a boy who lived in a big house and would give me whatever I wanted, no questions asked, as long as it made me smile.

The other is less happy and more troubling. Conflicting. I lived in reality, knowing all about the monsters that went bump in the night—I lived as one of them. I had a flat in France but it wasn’t permanent, and my partner and roommate looked at me like he loved me, and if I wasn’t so shaken I would be able to look him in the eye and see if he was telling the truth about it or not. But I was terrified of him. I was terrified because this was too real, nothing like the life I had with Jonathon, where everything was sunshine and rainbows and unicorns. Life with Rian was raw, real.

I wanted to live in fantasy, but I was trained to understand reality, and how losing myself in a fantasy world was more dangerous than losing myself in reality.

I knew that, if I really cared about either of them, I wouldn’t share feelings for both. It didn’t feel like it, though—it felt like there was two of me, two of my world, two of my heart. It wasn’t me. It was Caitie Alastair and Caitie Foerst.

I didn’t know who I wanted to be anymore. Neither life seemed like I deserved to be there.