She pulled up the edges of her coat, kept talking. “The collarbone break. Those happened all the time at Richter. It was a badge of honor when it happened to you. It showed you went at a sparring match hard or ignored the kick of a gun that was too powerful for you. If Olivia remembers Richter, she’s a half a breath from who she really is.”
The more he learned about the military boarding school they’d gone to, the more he wanted to return and burn the place down. Although he’d been assured they’d changed their ways, that didn’t stop him from sending in one of his people from time to time to check.
“How does her remembering how she broke a bone equate to you and AJ sticking around?”
“I think we need all hands on deck. When her memory comes back, she’ll bolt. But will she be pissed that none of us tried to help her remember and come out swinging, or will she slip away?”
Neil had thought of how Olivia would disappear on many sleepless nights. “What does your gut say?”
Sasha shook her head. “Before coming here . . . she’d be like this fog. Here one minute, gone the next. Now? After Leo . . . after eating meals with the group and joking with the guys about seeing her in her underwear? She’s softer.”
“That was the objective,” Neil said.
“But . . .”
Neil glanced over his shoulder, waited for Sasha to continue.
“The feral look in her eyes when she thought she was threatened . . . the way she slammed into kill or be killed? That wasn’t Olivia. Maybe it’s who she’d become since we brought down Richter. I don’t know. How often did you see her?”
“I didn’t. We spoke over the phone. She refused to meet me in person. That didn’t mean I didn’t feel her watching me . . . us.”
“What do you think about who she had become?”
Neil collected his thoughts before he responded. “I think you’re right. Her voice grew colder, harder over the last year. But she was the one reaching out. She wanted the connection. She’ll remember that when she’s back with us.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
“We did what we had to. Eventually she’ll see that.”
“Eventually. But the gut reaction could be violent. And we’d do well to remember that.”
Neil had considered that, too. “She wouldn’t want to hurt any of us.”
“She might not be in control,” Sasha said. “That said, AJ and I aren’t going anywhere.”
Leo’s shift at the monitors was blissfully short, unlike the rest of the team, who sat down in the situation room six hours at a time. He volunteered for a dinner shift while the rest of the group sat around the dinner table upstairs.
He watched and he listened.
And he started a journal of his own.
In order to determine who Olivia really was, he needed to find clues in the people who knew her.
He started with Sasha, a mysterious woman herself. Leo compared the two.
Both women were fit. While Sasha hadn’t tried to fight her way out of a bathroom in her underwear, there was no mistaking the definition in the woman’s body when she wore black spandex.
Which she did all the time.
But neither woman resembled a bodybuilder. More like a yogi who could do a handstand using only two fingers.
Leo already knew Olivia was an operative for Neil.
But not really part of the team.
Why?
He wrote a question mark on the page where he wrote his notes.
It wasn’t for lack of the team wanting her. Look at what Neil was doing to keep the woman safe, the effort and time all of them were giving up.
Just watching them during dinner made Leo feel like he was watching a family.
Cut from the same cloth.
Neil, Isaac, and Lars . . . all retired military.
AJ . . . husband to Sasha, but how did he fit?
Of all the people in the house, AJ had been the most aloof. It helped that he and Sasha spent most of their time together. But Cooper had apologized after a reference to being facedown in a river. Sasha started talking in German.
Who had ended up facedown? Leo wrote the question and circled it several times.
Leo knew that Sasha and Claire had the same alma mater. Something elite in Germany, but that was the extent of what he knew. Claire accepted Sasha as an aunt, although he knew that was a self-proclaimed title and not given by blood. Claire was an orphan. Neil brought her in