Playing God (Helford #2)

(17) Crumbling

Parker thankfully called everyone into the living room of the safe house to have the meeting before Jonathon could singularly get hold of Valerie, to which I was eternally grateful; waiting wouldn't do any good, and would probably actually result in the opposite, but it eased my nerves for now. Giving Valerie some time to cool down and get in the zone instead of being annoyed at my ignorance wasn't the worst idea in the world, either.

I was thankful that this meeting was occurring before Jonathon's, but I knew by the look on Valerie's face when she sat down that I wasn't going to like much of what I was about to hear. Maybe it would have been a little better if I would have gone through some more time thinking everything was okay, because I could tell by the look in her eyes that nothing was going to be okay for a long time now.

I think the others noticed her grave expression, too, because no one spoke a word. We all looking at Valerie, waiting to start.

She said, "Shawn Masterson is a ghost.

"I've been working for Helford for a while, and I know him-I know him through both reputation and personally." Her lip twitched when she said personally. I thought of the dark scars across her back, ones so deep that they may never fade, and my hand tightened into a fist. "He's not a good person-the things he has done are things I never thought another human being, even a trained murderer, would do. He is a sociopath in the perfect textbook definition, faking all of the right human emotions but lacking them all, tricking everyone into doing what he wants with nothing but his intelligence. He did a lot of terrible things, and then Caitie Alastair got a good kill shot and-nothing. He disappeared underground without a trace, still training, but I couldn't place an actual location. I still can't. They call Caitie the ghost, but I think Shawn is the one that haunts Helford.

"Shawn's the most dangerous of them all. I had to do a lot of digging, and this has been for a long time now, and I have managed to uncover some things. First is that Shawn is losing his mind. He sees what he wants-control of Helford-coming closer, and he is going to do whatever he can to get it, no matter what the cost is. Secondly is that Shawn is dangerous, more than he ever has been, because he has trained the assassins at his disposal to be loyal to no one in Helford but himself. This is purely from a behavioral standpoint in studying the agents' reactions and interactions, but I have gathered that he had conditioned them into being so loyal that he might be able to turn them into his own personal army to use to get what he wants.

"Shawn is controlling and crazy, but what most people don't like to mention is how incredibly resourceful and intelligent this man is, and that is the part where he is almost the most dangerous. He has made agents in the past worship him, but they eventually saw the light and jumped ship. Now we are facing a new super breed of assassins who think that his word is divine, and they would do anything that he asked of them. He has robbed them of all emotion."

"No," I said, my voice angry. "He didn't rob them of emotions-he only picked the ones that didn't have them in the first place."

His appeal to me had been that way-I always had thought that, even before I had turned against him and saw that the world he wanted wasn't the kind of world I wanted to live in. Through the trials, I hadn't shown anything on my face, because I knew what I wanted, and I knew that what I wanted was to survive. I didn't want to be the weakest one, or even in the middle. I wanted the others to keep their distance from me, to see me as someone too dangerous to even want to compete with. I didn't even make a face when Shawn burnt me, and that was why. He didn't want the best of the crop-he wanted the ones that didn't show emotion. Because, if they didn't show emotion, it was because they didn't have any.

And that was where I had fooled him. In my hope to protect myself from danger, I had fooled him into thinking that I was just as much of a sociopath as him. He would have never thought that something as petty as my first love would have torn me away from him, and that was why I was always the prodigy that went wrong.