"I found the safe," a healthy male voice whispered so softly. Those four words were enough for Lexi to know whose voice was recorded in the played audio.
Even after five years of intense training at the organization, she could not ease that sudden race of her heart and breathlessness.
It has been more than five years since her brother disappeared without a trace.
She clenched her hands clasped on the black polished table of the highest conference room in the organization and continued to remain calm outwardly.
That calmness as she met the gaze of the middle-aged man sitting at the end of the table more than four meters away from her, was a result of those five years of intense training under the organization.
"Do you recognize that voice?"
She nodded, "Yes sir." That was her brother's voice. She waited patiently for an explanation despite how much she wanted to jump over the four meters that kept that man away from her.
She could almost see herself gripping him by the collar of his neatly ironed suit and shaking him until he tells her why he was playing this audio and where her brother was.
"We found your brother's killer," the man announced monotonously.
She swallowed and remained just as expressionless as she was before. That woman she was trained to hide in the organization was crying. No, she thought there was still hope that her brother will be found alive.
He should not have died. He promised her that he will be back before leaving for that mission. She could still remember the softness in his voice that the organization had tried so hard to harden.
That was the first time he spoke to her softly since he began working. She felt that painful tightness in her chest that she has learned to ignore and she continued to look at her boss waiting for him to speak according to the rules of the organization.
(You only get to speak when asked to as a subordinate.)
"And we have your brother's killer," her boss continued to take his time to tell the poor lady about her brother's death like he was talking about the weather; with so much ease.
"What are you looking for?" came a question she soon realized was from the audio clip.
Silence followed and she waited patiently for the audio to continue but it never did.
"The voice you just heard, belongs to this man," a younger man began a presentation. She was too overwhelmed to know when that man stepped in front of the large screen in the room and she had spaced out to know when the screen brightened up.
She has been taught to identify different types of dangerous people and the man on the screen dressed in a black tailored suit was the most dangerous person she has seen.
He looked calm and expressionless as he spoke wisely but she could feel stiffened as she watched his slow calculated movements.
He was talking about what she was too occupied to take note of in front of a large lit-up screen. Without jumping to a conclusion, she waited for the man presenting to tell her all she needed to know about the man.
The organization viewed him as a threat. He looked so calm in the video like a minefield before being ventured into.
The man presenting emphasized the fact that those they had sent to him never returned including her brother. Two women among a few others she could still remember were sent after her brother disappeared and they never returned.
Dangerous or not, if he killed her brother, she will take up the role of a lioness and lunge forward on him when she gets the smallest chance to.
A night five years ago when her brother had been gone for more than a month, she received a set of visitors in their small home and despite how scared she was of them and on the verge of calling the police, she still listened as they told her she had lost the only person in her life.
That day, after they had gone leaving a card on the coffee table, she had cried. She hated her brother for working for a secret organization when he had lied to her that he was an engineer.
She hated the fact that he lied to her for so long and died without getting the opportunity to tell her the truth.
It took her two weeks of thinking hard, to pick up that black and gold card they left on the coffee table and that marked a turning point in her life.
That little girl who enjoyed being pampered by her brother had been reborn and took up a whole new path never knowing that a greater rebirth awaited her.
She was no longer the girl who dreamed of becoming a model but a girl who killed a man when she was only nineteen years old.
She was told after her first kill that her brother might still be alive and she realized that she only needed to work harder for them to give her more information.
She had just returned from a mission that required skydiving, and chemical weapons and they gave her a gift. They were finally ready to give her what she worked hard for this long to her.
As much as that was not the well-being of her brother, it was the head of the man who took her brother's life. When those men told her that her brother was gone forever, she swore to change that statement.
She needed the power to find her brother and the organization would be that power shield she needed to kill her brother's killer.
With the mission she was assigned, she was given a new name. She was no longer agent L but hunter X. She has become a hunter which was a triple promotion that only a handful of agents are lucky to attain.
She walked into her quarters and dropped down on the bed and closed her eyes with a tired sigh she would never do outside the metal door of her room.
Her hands shook as she brought them to her face and rubbed her face. She rubbed against a scar she got when she turned twenty.
She stiffened when her finger touched the scar. The scar was the reason she would be unable to move very close to the man she wanted dead so badly. It was an ugly two inches scar that ran from below her right eye slanting sideways.
She could still remember how she coldly stabbed the man behind the scar even with the blood that flowed down her cheeks.
Her boss had called it a messy job afterward and rated it a one-star job but she still somehow got a promotion at the end of the year and she never let anyone give her another scar, they always died before they could get close enough.