Define Normal

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

Reed’s thin lips stretched into a wide smile and his arms encircled me in a brief but tight hug. “It’s good to see you, Jaded.”

I rolled my eyes at the nickname. He was a big Aerosmith fan so he’d been calling me Jaded ever since the song had come out. “Though it is nice to see you, Reed, I have a bad feeling about the circumstances of your visit.”

He nodded gravely as he pulled back from me. “There is something important that you need to know about your mother and I need to tell you before your two boyfriends find us.”

I opened my mouth to protest the boyfriends part but snapped it shut when I saw the urgency in his eyes. “Okay.”

He nodded. “Your mother was in the business from the time she was 17. She had a rough life and you need to understand that her upbringing was unconventional to say the least. She didn’t view things the way that other people did and her emotions rarely got involved in the decisions she made. Which was probably why, when she was approached about an experiment involving a child, she agreed, seeing the science in the plan rather than the emotions.”

A bad feeling was curling in my stomach as he spoke. “What are you talking about, Reed?”

“She was 25 when a man named Crenshaw Lemon asked her if she would be willing to have a child and raise it as an assassin from the moment it was born.”

The world stopped spinning for a second and I felt like I’d received a blow to the chest as his words registered. “I was an experiment?” I choked out, hoping I was wrong but knowing I wasn’t.

Reed nodded. “She was allowed to select her own partner because it was part of the experiment to see if the genetic make-up of the child had anything to do with the progress the child made. She met your father on a mission and I think maybe had things been different, they would’ve been together for real. As it was, your mother decided that he would be the one to father her child and nine months later you were born.

“That’s when things started to change for her. She began to see that the world had more than just cool calculation, that there were emotions too and she started to realize what love was.” His gaze was sympathetic as he looked down at me. I tried to keep my expression stoic but Reed had always been able to see right through me. “She came to me when you were just 4 years old. She didn’t want to work for Lemon anymore and I took both of you in.” His eyes clouded and his expression became one of guilt. “I’m not going to lie to you and say that she completely forgot about the experiment because obviously she didn’t. Part of her knew that the only reason Lemon hadn’t killed her when she left him was because he still expected you to be raised as an assassin. So she trained you and she would periodically send Lemon updates about your progress while she worked for me. When you turned seventeen, Lemon started pursuing the idea of having you work for him and your mother started taking missions that were further away and lower profile but eventually Lemon’s men caught up with you and as you know, your mother didn’t make it.”

“Oh my god,” I whispered, feeling the weight of shock settle in my gut at all that had been hidden from me in the past.

“The contract against you is a dead or alive contract. I’ve been informed that Lemon prefers to have you delivered to him alive but you’re too much of a liability to have wandering around on your own because he believes that you already knew everything about the circumstances of your birth and childhood.” I heard a sound behind me and watched as Reed’s gaze settled on something over my shoulder. “Your boyfriends are here,” he whispered, reaching his hand out and patting my shoulder. I felt a small prick of pain before he took his hand away and a feeling of dread settled on me.