Page 81 of Beautiful Vengeance

He made a low sound that told her he was listening, so she kept going. It was all just so horrific. But what she’d just learned was the hardest to take. “Kiyomi told us she was supposedly Jane’s blueprint. We didn’t understand what that meant. But I do now.”

She shifted on his lap, a hard, heavy sadness sitting in the center of her chest as she looked into his warm brown eyes. “She wanted Kiyomi because she considered her to be the most perfect of us all.”

He tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear. “She’s a psychopath.”

“You have no idea.” She cuddled into him and laid her head on his shoulder, letting his embrace soothe her frayed edges. “Between what Rycroft sent earlier about the interrogations of her bodyguards and what I just read, it’s way worse than I ever imagined. I want to tell you and Megan so bad, but I feel like I need to tell Kiyomi before anyone else, and not while she’s in the hospital fresh out of surgery.”

“Maybe tell Marcus, and he can break the news when he feels she’s ready for it.”

She sighed. This was what Jesse excelled at. Cool, calm intellect in the face of any challenge. She was usually good at compartmentalizing and removing emotion from the equation, but not with this. It was way too personal. “Maybe.” She thought about it a moment. “Yeah, all right. Good idea.”

She slid off his lap and called Marcus on her cell. “Hey, is this a good time?” she said when he answered.

“Aye. Kiyomi’s sleeping. Nurse came in and put more pain meds in her line. She’ll be out for another few hours.” He paused. “Everything all right?”

A hot ball of tension formed in the pit of her stomach. She exhaled and started pacing the length of the room, unable to sit still. If Megan were here, all her fingers would be a bloody mess.

She could feel Jesse watching her from where he sat on the end of the bed she couldn’t wait to crawl into with him eventually. “I just found some things that I wanted to inform Kiyomi of before anyone else. I thought I could tell you, and then you can pass them on when you think the timing is right.”

A creak sounded in the background, as if he’d just sat down. That saved her the trouble of suggesting he do just that. “Aye, all right. Go on then.”

She rubbed at her forehead. There was no easy way to say this. “Rycroft’s team has been interrogating the surviving bodyguards. Trinity is there observing. They all have stylized tats on their hips, like the ones we ran into in Virginia did, but different designs.”

“So she did have her own private fighting force.”

“Yes. But there’s more.” She glanced up at Jesse, decided to hell with trying to be tactful. “I’ve been digging into her personal files through her phone, and a laptop recovered from one of the bodyguards. She’s good. Maybe even better than me with tech stuff, but I was able to find a back door into her server. Everything was encrypted. And do you wanna take a guess what her password was?”

“Kiyomi,” he said in a taut voice.

“Yeah.” Which brought her to the worst part. “There’s a reason she told Kiyomi she was the blueprint. It wasn’t just figurative, it was literal.”

“Literal how?” he asked, his tone growing darker.

“Jane was the original Valkyrie. She was a specialist in most of our fields, rather than only being an expert in one or two, and she chose to stay with the CIA. At some point after my parents were killed, she decided we might have the aptitude to be operatives as well. Even back then she was obsessed with genetics to the point where she was willing to shuttle us into the Program to see what became of us.”

She drew a breath before continuing, pushing past the pain. “She considered Kiyomi the pinnacle of the Program’s achievements. The most beautiful and also the deadliest. When the Program was exposed and subsequently shut down, she refused to accept it. Decided to start a different program on her own, funded by private donations and money she’d funneled away from various ops, just like we have.”

“How much money are we talking?”

“Hundreds of millions. She did it the same way I did, taking it from targets and other criminal organizations, then funneling it into various companies and offshore bank accounts as tax havens. She even paid for a private facility to be built for her new project, owned by one of her shell companies.”

“You’re saying she set this entire thing up, right from the time Megan came to me? All to get Kiyomi.”

“Yes. Because she intended to use Kiyomi to make a whole generation of the best female assassins the world has ever known.”

“Use her how?” he said in a taut voice.

“By…” Jesus, this was hard to say. It was sick. Next level, compared to what had been done to them in the past. “By harvesting her DNA and eggs—”

“JesusChrist—”

“And then doing in vitro fertilization using various surrogates she deemed worthy to carry the babies.” Yup. Aunt Jane had planned to make Kiyomi a human lab rat to harvest all the necessary genetic material she needed.

“She meant to use Kiyomi as a science experiment to make her own force of assassins out of what would have been Kiyomi’s children,” he finished angrily.

That about summed it up, and it revolted Amber. “Yes.” She stopped in front of Jesse, consciously relaxed her stomach muscles when he settled his hands on her hips and drew her closer. “I apologize. I know how hard that was to hear. Did I make the right call in telling you?”

“I’m… Aye.” He paused again. “You’re certain?”

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