She looked around to see where the bag of clothes was, her search coming up empty. Nothing. There wasn’t a bag.
Her eyes went up to him, fire flooding her veins. He was playing with her again. Why? What satisfaction did he get from inciting her reactions, toying with her emotions?
One corner of his mouth slashed up in a half-smirk. He knew she had come to rely on him bringing her clothes, clothes she wore back to the complex, clothes she washed and kept safe because they were the nicest she owned that were only hers. She didn’t know if she was just easy to read and no one had tried it before, or if it was his special skill at deciphering her, but he knew her thought patterns and she absolutely hated that.
Without another word, he left the bathroom, closing the door behind himself, and Lyla got up, wrapping a towel around her body. She was mad at him, mad at herself, mad at the world. And she knew she only had five more minutes to be mad before she had to be docile again, before she would give up on her anger, and that just made her angrier.
Marching out of the bathroom, she came to a sudden stop at seeing a plain paper bag on the bed. Ignoring the corpse on the side of the room, she rushed to the bag and saw a pair of black jeans, a white sleeveless top, a pair of nude cotton bra and panties that looked comfortable. Taking the tags off, she quickly donned the pieces, yet again questioning how he knew her exact sizes for everything. It was a perfect fit. And he had been testing her to see her reaction.
Hair still wet from the bath, she towel dried it as something on the table beside the bed caught her eye.
A phone.
She stared at it for a long minute, a gaping hole in her chest. Someone else could have stolen it and asked for help. She couldn’t. She didn’t have anyone she could call. And calling the police was out of the question. With the kind of people she knew were involved in these operations, she would either end up dead by an organizational assassination or dead by a police encounter. There was nowhere for her to go, not until she got what she needed from the one man who refused to give her answers.
Turning away from the phone, she looked at herself in the mirror. A short, petite frame with ripe breasts, as her handler had told her. Hair so red and wavy, falling to her waist, surrounding a circular face with softness, light freckles on her nose, naturally arched red brows over bright green eyes that looked almost blue in some lights. She was beautiful; she had been told many times. But when she looked at the mirror, it wasn’t her beauty she saw. She saw her only tie to her past, and she saw questions. Did her genetics come from her parents or grandparents? Were they alive or dead? Did they have eyes like hers or another color?
As she continued to dry her hair with the towel, she imagined all the scenarios, and none of them brought her any comfort at all. But her mind rarely, if ever, did bring her comfort.
The sound of the door opening had her throwing the towel to the side as she sat down on the bed, doing her best to appear meek, her hands folded in her lap, her head bent as she watched from under her eyelashes.
Two security guys came in, armed to the teeth, and looked at the dead body before eyeing her.
“What the fuck happened?”
What always happened.
He’d told her to tell them, but these guards were new and she didn’t want to risk their extra attention. So, she said what she always said. “I don’t know. I was in the bathroom.”
They believed her, not that they had any reason not to.
One of the guys, a dark-haired man who looked scary in his seriousness, nodded at her. “Grab your stuff. We have to get you back.”
Taking the bag the clothes had come in, she went to the bathroom to grab the rose and the small bottles of free toiletries. She always took those. The small bottles were pretty and, more often than not, they smelled amazing.
Roving an eye around the bedroom to see if anything else was worth taking, she followed the guys out within minutes. They took her down the elevator straight into the parking lot, and then straight into the unmarked sedan. Within minutes, she was locked in and they pulled out into the city.
“So,” the driver began. “What exactly happened up there?”
His skeptic tone wasn’t lost on her. But she didn’t know him, and there was no way she was talking. She’d learned early on that talking to outsiders got her punishment and nothing more.
“Exactly what I said.”
The guy stayed silent for a second. Something was off about him. She didn’t know what it was. She didn’t say anything else, just looked out the window and watched the city pass as they headed to the outskirts.