Child of Recklessness (Trials of Strength Book 2) (17 page)

Or are you just selfish?
This is all about your father, you just want revenge.

I pushed the traitor voice from my
mind and swallowed.

‘
Leave the boy alone,’ Paul
growled into the silence. ‘At least he’s doing fucking
something!’

Chris rounded on him, the cold fury in
his eyes terrifying.

‘
If we’d waited,’ Chris
whispered, ‘if we’d looked through those notes more carefully, we’d
have had some idea of what we would have walked into. The layout,
what it was used for! Instead, Lucas showed how idiotic he is and
charged in!’

Chris then turned to me.

‘
Your father doesn’t have to
budge a finger!’ he growled. ‘You’re doing all the running around
for him. Think about it, Lucas! It was the same in Greystone. We’re
being played. We were led to that information, easily if you
remember, which means he wanted us to have it, and he
knew
you would charge in
without even thinking!’

I cast my eyes down. He was right of
course.

‘
The warehouse is like Greystone
2.0,’ Brian informed us once Chris was done. ‘Your Dad made it for
your sister, Lucas. Straight after Greystone, he recreated a
similar experiment to see if it was a fluke or just you. It’s all
in his notes. He wants us to know what he’s up to. Plus, it tells
us about Anna’s brother, he’s been gone for around a week, when
those trials at the warehouses started.’

It felt like molten lava was being
poured into my brain. Did I truly have a twin sister? What the hell
was my father’s endgame!? I would have known all of the information
had I waited, and I had to refrain from lifting my arm to cover the
pain that bloomed in my stomach. What made it worse was I knew I
would do it again. I knew that as soon as we found my Dad I would
commit the same idiocy Chris had spoken of. I needed to.

Brian was about to continue, but Chris
saw the gears turning in my head, he knew what I planned, and he
cut Brian off. I slouched over to one of the empty couches and sank
onto it. I had to put all that aside for the time being, Anna was
likely giving birth right then, and we had no idea if she was
alright.

Please God. I’m begging
you, from the bottom of my heart. Please, keep Anna and my child
safe.

Bring them home.

*

Grueling hours passed, and night gave way
to morning. I showered and changed, noting the bruises on my check
and stomach, souvenirs from the stronger than normal creatures we’d
faced. All of us took turns pacing and fidgeting. There had been no
word, no phone call and all of us had almost given in to the rising
panic. Had Jessica been planning it all along? Was her word worth
nothing? She was an assassin, paid to plan, track and kill for
money, and I’d let her blast away from me with Anna in the middle
of labour.

Or maybe they’d been caught by the
police on their way to the hospital. Maybe they’d made it, and been
grabbed at the hospital. Nightmares plagued my mind, conscious
horrors. I would never forgive myself if anything happened, and I
would never forgive Jessica, the woman whose past was a mystery,
but had convinced us that something had happened enough for her to
not harm children.

I was ready for leaving and hunting them
down, even though I had no clue on how I would, when my ears picked
up the downward slide of the elevator. Someone had called it, they
were coming up. I told Chris, who’d been standing in the kitchen, a
cold coffee he hadn’t touched in his hands. Brian and Paul were at
the bank of computers; their blank expressions stared at the same
page of files they had started hours ago.

We raced into the corridor.
O
ur feet
pounded on the rich carpet lining the floor, dust bursting into the
air when our feet landed, and we waited for the elevator to rise.
My heart almost broke through my chest with its erratic beats, and
I gasped at the air. The time we waited felt like a millennia and
the box riding up the shaft made a crawl through the
floors.

Please.

The doors opened, and tears
burst from my eyes. I sank to the floor, the rush of emotions
overwhelming and I laughed. There was Jessica, a bright smile on
her face, one of sincere joy and genuine warmth, and there was
Anna, a baby clasped to her shoulder in a mother’s loving embrace.
Tears were gathered in her eyes, and she looked drained and
fatigue
d. It
took me a second to realise the wig attached to her head, an almost
white blonde. Her usual electric-blue eyes were a dark brown, and
she smiled as she walked from the elevator.

I bounced to my feet and enfolded both her
and my child into my arms, and we stood there, racked with happy
sobs and warmth.

‘
Lucas,’ Anna whispered
into my ear, ‘I’d like you to meet our son. We had a
boy.’

I cried even harder.

The Addict

Jessica filled us in on what had
happened once they’d left me. Before reaching the hospital, Jess
had put the wig on a screaming Anna, and inserted contact lenses,
all to make her harder to identify. They had then reached the
hospital, and thankfully, the doctors were more concerned over
helping birth the baby safely than they were with their names.
Although after the birth they had become very interested, and
before they could start tests on our son, Anna and Jessica had
slipped out. The connection would be made eventually, the
government would know we’d had a baby, and that only made our
situation worse.

We were all crowded round the crib Jessica
had bought and brought with her, inside the bedroom Anna and I
slept in, my sleeping boy bundled up inside. All of us were quiet,
and all of us just stared, completely mesmerised by how innocent
and beautiful my son was. He had inherited his mother’s vivid blue
eyes, but the little blond tufts of hair were from me.

I couldn’t thank Jessica enough, and I’d
even grabbed her into a hug that she’d had to wriggle from once I’d
halted her air supply.

‘
He’s beautiful,’ Brian
smiled.

‘
Yeah, he is,’ Chris
whispered.

‘
We need to talk,’ Paul
said.

I turned to look at him and saw he was
in the doorway, a strange expression on his face. His eyes looked
everywhere bar the crib with the baby, but his demeanor was calm
and his body was still. My eyes met Chris’s and he nodded. I stared
back at my little boy and I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay
by his side and protect him from the horrors of the world,
terrified that if I left the room something bad would
happen.

‘
I’ll stay with him,’
Jessica whispered to Anna.

Anna had the same worried look I did, but
duty called. I dragged myself from my hunch over the crib and slid
my hand into Anna’s. Then, all of us bar Jess left the room and
softly closed the door. Paul had the floor, and we arranged
ourselves around him. Brian took up his revolving chair, Anna and I
the couch, and Chris opted to stand with his arms
crossed.

‘
We should tell them what
we know now,’ Paul said directly to Chris.

‘
Why?’ Chris replied with
his eyebrows furrowed.

‘
Tell us what?’ Anna
asked.

Anna and I looked between both Chris
and Paul. Both of them were in a silent battle with their
eyes.

‘
We came across everything
we’ve been looking for in those files,’ Paul started, and Chris
growled.

‘
They don’t need to hear it
right now,’ he said.

‘
Just tell us,’ I broke
in.

Chris shot me a glance, one that said,
‘Are we really going to go through this again?’

Anna caught it too.

‘
You take those eyes off of him,
Chris,’ she spat. ‘I ran off too, I wasn’t forced into anything, I
made the same decision Lucas did with the information we had. And
you know what? I’d make it again.’

‘
Listen, sweetheart,’ Chris
growled, ‘what’s done is done, everyone’s mostly alright, but
neither of you have learned from it. So forgive me for not wanting
to share.’

Another bout of silence.

‘
Tell us,’ I said, ‘and I
promise to think carefully about it.’

Chris still didn’t look convinced, but
Paul barrelled on anyway.

‘
Brian, bring it up,’ Paul said
without so much of a glance in his son’s direction. ‘Show
them.’

Brian’s eyes shot to Chris, but he spun
round to his desk, and got to work. An image came up on one of the
screens. It was a woman, and I gasped. It was almost like looking
into a mirror. The woman had dirty-blonde hair like mine, and vivid
green eyes. If her hair was short, and her face more masculine, she
would be me. I stood slowly and let my mouth hang open. On the
screen was proof. Proof that my Dad hadn’t lied when he’d told me I
had a twin sister.

I had to help her!

But first I had to take a breath; Chris
scrutinised my face.

‘
What do we know?’ I asked
Brian, but it was Chris who answered.

‘
Hazel Bishop is your fraternal
twin sister,’ he said. ‘From your Dad’s notes, he had had Greystone
planned for a while, but it was only planned for one:
You.’

My father had told me as much. Only
where had my sister been all that time? Richard Bishop had been
firmly planted in Greystone, readying his big experiment for when
the inevitable sacking by his bosses occurred. Who had been raising
her? What was she like?

‘
A separate one was put
aside for her. If Greystone was a success, they would need more
information. Was it a fluke? What makes you special? But Greystone
2.0 was a failure. Your sister didn’t overcome the drug, and we
have no idea what happened to her after that, only that she’s with
your father.’

‘
And this time,’ Paul
chimed, ‘we have a pretty good idea of where he is.’

‘
Where?’ I
gasped.

‘
You remember Digilock?’
Chris asked. ‘Well, thanks to Jessica’s more complete files, we
found out that Digilock is actually a front. It’s owned by your
Dad. It was set up as a cover for their experiments when they still
worked for the government, and now it does the same
thing.’

‘
It funds your Dad,’ Paul
continued. ‘He has an almost unlimited supply of money coming in
thanks to the company, and a place where he can store information
that’s safe.’

‘
So that’s how the building
we broke into was different?’ I asked. ‘He’d made it easy for us to
get in?’

‘
Looks like,’ Chris said.
‘I bet he didn’t count on Jessica though ruining the computer. He
probably had no idea she was there. Luckily it didn’t matter, she
already had the information.’

I rubbed my temples vigorously. I
wished they hadn’t told me. I wanted to march off to my father’s
location, find my sister. Plans and times flashed through my head,
and I had to force them out.

‘
Where is he?’ Anna spoke
up.

Chris laughed mirthlessly, but not at
Anna.

‘
Where he’s always been,’
Chris spat. ‘He’s at Digilock, the very same one we broke into.
Tell him.’

Brian spun back around to face
us.

‘
Floors ten, eleven and twelve of
Digilock aren’t actually rented by anyone,’ Brian said. ‘I went
back over that list I pulled and checked out the so called
companies for those floors. They’re bogus, they don’t
exist.’

‘
Your Dad wanted us to
break in, but didn’t want us to find him,’ Chris explained, he’d
obviously given it a lot of thought. ‘The timeline would fit; he
wanted the results from your sister’s experiment first. So we
jumped in, took his notes, notes that have redacted video files,
and we flew to Anna’s brother.’

‘
Why?’ I asked.

Chris shrugged. He hadn’t figured that
far. The answers we needed could only be given by the man himself.
We’d been caught up, and Chris was visibly worried about my
reaction. I promised to sleep on it, to think through it, and then
we could all come up with a plan. He nodded, and Anna and I
relieved Jessica. Once she’d left, we took up her position beside
the crib.

The sun rose through the glass, and I
could sense Anna’s fatigue. She went for a shower and I stayed with
our child.

‘
I promise you,’ I
whispered and stroked his cheek, ‘I won’t let anything happen to
you or your Mum. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll make this world
safe for you.’

I swallowed the lump in my throat, and
waited for Anna to return.

‘
I think he needs a name,’
she said as she exited the bathroom. Her wig was gone, and her
contacts removed. ‘What do you think?’

I had absolutely no idea.

‘
What about Alex?’ Anna prompted.
‘My Papa was called Alex.’

I mulled the name over, running it
over my tongue. I liked it, and smiled at Anna.

‘
Alex is good,’ I replied.
‘What about Anthony too?’

‘
Alex Anthony Bishop,’ Anna
whispered as she stared lovingly at her boy. ‘I think that might be
his name.’