Toy Soldiers (Helford #1)

(34) Truth

Innocents, even targets, don’t have files like this.

Not this big.

We don’t have that much information.

There was only one reason.

I lost myself in that room. I didn’t care that Woodburn was sitting there, watching me. I didn’t care that I was probably on camera and someone was watching me, weighing my reactions and seeing this moment where I was taken so completely off guard. I couldn’t bring myself to care because I felt sick to my very core, and I didn’t know what to think about anything anymore.

Not when Jonathon’s mother was one of us.

The story begins with a little girl who grew up in France, who went to a school called Saint Nicolas and got perfect grades, had a perfect best friend named Alexander, and she seemed to love life. She played three different sports and she was the apple of her parents’ eye. She was the youngest of three kids but she outshined them all without meaning to. She had a big heart and volunteered to help the homeless at any chance that she could get. She was invited into the company at age thirteen, and she was shipped off to the United States with dreams of a school that would catapult her into the Ivy League.

That wasn’t what she found at Helford Academy.

They cut her ties with her family and they gave her a new name. She became a girl named Rebekkah Oleander, and they had to torture her to get her to understand that she was going nowhere, that she couldn’t help her victims. She had a big heart but she couldn’t let it get ahead of her, and it took a long time before she got that into her head. She didn’t graduate but she had a roommate at Helford named Naomi that did, and the two of them were closer than Helford wanted them to be. Rebekkah changed from being a kindhearted little girl who fed the homeless into a girl her own parents wouldn’t recognize as their star. She was different.

She had Jonathon’s dirty blonde hair before they changed her. Before they dyed it dark and changed her eye color and stained the freckles on her skin to the point they almost couldn’t be seen. She and Jonathon had the same eye shape. It made me sick to realize that this is the mother that he missed. That she was no better than me.

Rebekkah went on a mission to Romania one time. She had the same job as I did, and seducing rich and powerful men was all she ever seemed to be doing. It was there with the newest man, richer and powerful than many of the others she had ever dealt with, high priority, that it happened. He was a politician. She went to a presentation and she watched the man speaking there.

He was French, and he was achingly familiar.

His name was Alexander DuPont, and a long time ago, she had a crush on him—her best friend.

She couldn’t help it.

After the presentation, after most all of the politicians had gone to sleep, she was out and walking the hallways, nervously pacing from all of the memories that had rushed back into her brain, unwanted and unneeded. She was walking around when she saw Alexander in the halls, doing exactly the same thing.