Page 82 of Help Me Remember

“Well, I know you, or at least who you were before,” she said, folding her hands in front of her. “So let me tell you some of the things I know. You joined the Bureau eleven years ago, at the age of twenty. You started at the bottom and were moved around to find the right fit. It took a few years, but eventually, you landed in our department, mainly dealing with crime families and…undercover work.”

“I…joined at twenty?” I asked with a frown, shaking my head. “There’s no way.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” she said, pulling a small stack of papers from the bottom of the pile and sliding them over to me. “It sounded wild to everyone when we heard you supposedly had memory issues, but my hunch told me to grab what parts of your file I was allowed. It’s not much, but in our line of work, it’s very good that your information isn’t easy to get ahold of.”

Eyeing her warily, I pulled the pages toward me, blinking at the photo, staring into my own face. There was my name, Dylan Levin, born to Deborah and Noah Levin, and I had, in fact, joined when I was twenty, with only an associate’s degree in psychology under my belt. What little was left on the page showed some of the departments I had worked for and the various training I’d gone through.

I looked over the list of specialized training and snorted. “I liked to fight…I guess that explains some things over the past few days.”

“You told me you thought you would end up in the FBI version of SWAT, so I figured you might as well be ready. That is until I spotted you and took an interest. That’s when I realized I wasn’t seeing a warrior. I was seeing something else entirely, something…more.”

I grimaced as a fragment bubbled up in my mind. “You called me a predator.”

She cocked her head. “You remember?”

“I remember you saying I was a predator and then you laughed when I stopped talking…you’re senior in rank,” I added in sudden realization. “So I couldn’t tell you to go fuck yourself.”

Ivy chuckled, nodding. “Not with your words, but your eyes told me enough. And maybe predator isn’t the right word, but it felt right at the time, and it’s what we needed. From the start, you had good instincts, even untrained. You had a good idea what was and wasn’t a good decision. You were the only new team member that made it through the self-extraction test on the first try.”

“Self-extraction?” I asked in confusion.

“We drop you into a random city somewhere in North America with limited supplies and a time limit. The whole time trained agents are hunting you down, trying to bring you in.”

“Wow, way to make me sound like a badass,” I said dryly. “Anything else to pad my ego?”

She shook her head. “You misunderstand. Some people were better at being quiet than you, at blending in, and even a couple who made some inspired choices with phones and computers. You were the only one who not only consistently made smart choices, but you did it fast, and…you never hesitated. Or held back.”

“Held back? In a training exercise?”

“You were told not to treat it as one. Everyone else did. You were the only one, which led to some interesting results.”

I thought back to the past few days and sighed. “Oh boy.”

“The agent you left drugged and knocked out cold in some backroom supply closet where no one thought to look. He was quite pissed until a passing homeless person heard his pounding and helped him…twelve hours after he’d woken up. Then there were the two you led into an ambush because you had the first one’s radio. Only a mild concussion for one of them and a sprained wrist for the other. That was perhaps the only time I think you held back.”

“Well, it’s nice to know my enthusiasm wasn’t dimmed before I lost my memory,” I grumbled.

“Point is, you did exactly what you were ordered. You got your shit together, you got out of that city, and you didn’t treat it like an exercise. You were exactly what I was looking for. All I needed to know was how you handled learning how to act and new languages,” she said, tapping the table thoughtfully.

“Which is where the Russian Mafia comes in,” I said slowly. “And why I know Russian so fluently…but Portuguese?”

“You infiltrated as a sort of merc for the family,” Ivy explained. “We had enough influence to get you noticed and in a good way. After that, you started getting things done for them that put you in higher regard. They figured out pretty quickly you had a good head on your shoulders, that you knew how to take care of yourself, but you knew how to deal with a situation without always needing to kill someone or maim them.”

“I did, though, didn’t I?” I asked, feeling a cold trickle of dread and self-hatred running down my spine. “I did hurt people…and killed them.”

“I’ll assume you aren’t referring to people like Officer Patterson,” she said with an arch of her brow.

“Not in the slightest,” I growled.

She smiled at that. “Cute.”

“Right, I’m fucking adorable.”

“You always kept things close to your chest. It was another reason I thought you’d be good for this. But you mentioned Eric a few times before you went in so deep that you were exclusively living a second life. I always wondered about this person you mentioned, but now I think I understand better.”

“We’re not talking about him, not right now,” I said, jabbing my finger at the folder.

“You learned Portuguese in your spare time, and when you started going deeper, you decided to be more cautious. You left notes and information for us to find at designated places,” Ivy explained, shifting the pages around and looking over them. “You devised the code for it and managed to get it to us so we could decode the information. That was before the head of the family, Dmitri, started taking personal notice of you.”

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