She doesn’t answer me, just walks.

We get back to the snow machine and she stops and waits for me to get on. I scoot back on the seat and nod my head, indicating she should climb on the front. She’s tiny and I’m huge. I can reach around her and drive no problem. I don’t trust her to sit behind me.

But she doesn’t climb on. She stares at me. “What?” I ask.

“It’s a seed.” She holds up the acorn. “This little thing will grow into a huge tree if all goes well. If it has enough water and sunlight. And good soil.”

“Get the fuck on the snow machine.” I do not have time for existential musings right now.

“But I’ve had this acorn for—” She stops, looking up at something, like she’s thinking. “Ten years?” And then she smiles. It catches me off guard. I’ve been watching this girl for eight of those ten years and not once do I ever think I’ve seen her smile.

I smile with her.

“I picked it up the day Garrett came into my life.” Her smile drops and so does mine. “A seed.” She looks at it. This is when I notice she has no glove on. Her hand is a very pale white.

“Jesus, Sydney. Your hand.” There’s a glove poking out of her pocket, so I grab it and hold it open so she can slip her hand inside. She fists the acorn, never opening up her fingers, but it’s good enough. The hand is definitely on its way towards frostbite and it needs to be warmed up immediately. “I gave you gloves for a reason. You know better than to take them off in this kind of weather.”

She stares down at her newly gloved hand and then looks up at me for a moment. But it’s like she missed everything I just said. The confused look on her face softens and then she looks away, switching gears. “I needed to feel that acorn.”

That’s her explanation for risking amputation?

“It has so much potential. I had so much potential. That’s what Garrett said. And if I would just…” She smiles again. But this time there are tears in her eyes. One rolls down her face, freezing in the cold wind before it can complete its journey. “Just trust him, right? If I just gave into what he was asking, I’d become the oak tree. He was making me the oak tree, Case. But this?” She pokes herself in the chest. “I’m just dead wood, that’s all I am. Dead wood.”

I can’t move. I’m fixated on her. Her sadness runs so deep. Her confession is more of a surrender than an admission.

“Do you know what he did to me?” she asks, slipping her hand out of the glove and dropping it on the ground so she can see the acorn.

I pick up the glove and tug it back over her blanched skin. “I know.”

“All of it?”

“Most of it. I wasn’t there ten years ago, obviously. So I missed that acorn shit. But I watched you after the cabin. For two years. On and off,” I add quickly. “I wasn’t there all the time. Just between jobs.”

She nods and steps forward, lifting her leg to straddle the machine and take a seat in front of me. “It was always you, Case.”

I’m about to start the machine, but I stop myself. “What was?”

“The person in my head who told me to keep going.”

I have nothing to say to that. I talked to this girl once before I took her the night before her wedding. At that cabin eight years ago on Christmas Eve. I punched her in her sixteen-year-old face and threatened to kill her. Told her I owned her and I’d be back to finish the job. I’m not proud of this. I don’t get off on hurting girls. But it was a fucked-up job. My whole life changed that night. Sasha’s whole life changed that night. Hell, I can probably count two or three dozen people whose lives changed that night because of Sydney and her fucking boyfriend. And if she thinks that was me being affectionate and encouraging, she’s more insane than I thought.

“I know what they did to Sasha.”

I freeze as her words sink in.

“I know what they did. Because they did it to me too.” And then she twists her body and gives me a glance over her shoulder. Her tears almost break me. They frost her eyelashes and freeze on her cheeks. It’s started to snow in the last few minutes, only I just now notice it because her dark hair is dotted with flakes that sparkle in the moonlight. She looks like sadness. She looks like a sad, winter princess. “It’s not over, Case. And if you help me, I’ll help you.”

“Kindness is a weapon— use it like a knife, or a gun, or a lie.”

– Case

I think about this offer all the way back to the house. I know what they did, because they did it to me too.

Did they? Did they really? I don’t know. I only met Sasha a couple times before that night Garrett and his crew killed her father. But her father was a good man. She loved him. He loved her. Did they really get him to go along with brainwashing his only daughter?

And then there’s the fact that her mother was dead. Didn’t I hear that the mothers were the key to the future of the girls born into the Company? Sasha’s mother was dead, that means she refused the deal that the Company offers each mother when she gives birth to a girl child. Sell her to them—allow the Company to use the girl as they see fit. Or give up her own life for a promise. A promise that the girl will be taken care of and married off to an appropriate partner when she comes of age.

Sasha’s mother gave up her own life for the promise. And Sasha’s father trained her the same way James was trained. He raised her to be as ruthless and cunning as the Company assassins. She might’ve only been thirteen when we took out the Company, but she held up her end of the game. Hell, there were times when she held up my end of the game too. Her father gave her skills. There is no way that Sasha and this Sydney girl are anything alike.

But. There is always a but.

How can I be sure? How do I know there is no trigger for Sasha? James had one. I’m pretty sure, after hearing Harper’s tale of how that shit all went down when she escaped, that she had one too.

But James dissociated right into his own world in the end. A world where he was king and no more orders got through. And Harper? They did it all wrong with Harper. Raised her up on a megayacht. Pampered her. Spoiled her. Loved her. Even her father loved her. And she always had her twin, Nick, at her side.

No. Brainwashing on this scale doesn’t grow out of love. And yet Harper killed a lot of people when she was triggered. A lot of people.

And Sasha is a hundred times more deadly than Harper. Sasha has real skills. Sasha is smart and worldly. Sasha has no fear. Harper was a bundle of fear and anxiety.

But Sasha. She is brave.

And that makes her the perfect sleeper assassin, doesn’t it?

I need to know more about Sydney’s life growing up. If her mother gave up her life for the promise and it didn’t protect her, then how can I be sure it protected Sasha?

The garage light is off when I pull in, but the motion sensor triggers and it flashes on, blinding me for a moment. “Hop off,” I say, when Sydney doesn’t move.

She swings her leg over and I do the same. I give her a push and she starts walking. I close the garage as we leave and we trudge through the blowing snow to the house. The warm air blasts us when we get inside and I start taking off my coat.

Sydney stands there, looking at that acorn. Her glove is gone again. Dropped somewhere outside along the trail, I bet. “You know, it’s pretty stupid to hurt yourself like that.” I nod down to her hand when she looks up.

“Who cares?”

“Go upstairs, to the third floor. I’ll throw some wood on the stove and meet you up there. It’s the warmest room in the house and I do care.” She squints her eyes at me. “I’m not cutting your fingers off and I’m not taking you to a hospital because you can’t drive your truck out of here. So go the fuck upstairs and wait for me.”