Esmeralda, much to Sam's frustration, gave every impression of being asleep, as though she spent every other Thursday tied down to a table in a secret room beneath the school. Hell, for all he knew, she did. But he highly doubted it. She was a cool one, no doubt about that. He'd been unable to shake her, unable to extract any information she hadn't wanted to give him. And Lord, she knew how to push his buttons, with her cool eyes and blank expression.
And then, he thought, there was the guts factor. The girl sure had some guts, and no one could call her a wimp. It still gave him a moment's pause whenever he glanced over and saw her face all banged up and bruised, and early childhood lessons about never hitting a girl tried to surface and guilt him. But those lessons were forced back and replaced with training. But he had a feeling none of his training had ever prepared him for dealing with the likes of Esmeralda Medinas.
She was a puzzle all right, and one that, under different circumstances, he might've enjoyed solving. For as long as he could remember, it had been said that the mystical blood of the gypsies had run through The Ghost's veins, aiding their undetected journeys throughout the continents. And now, looking at her, he could see that rumor had some things right. There was certainly more than a little bit of gypsy in this girl, with her big, dark eyes and tanned skin, with her curling black hair and hypnotic voice. Her…He cut himself off abruptly, scowling as he paced the little room. He had no business thinking of her as anything more than a recruit, an object to be brought in. Thinking of her as a beautiful girl with smoky, exotic eyes and a mass of tumbling curls was highly unprofessional.
To distract himself, he flipped through the piles upon piles of pictures he'd found stored in boxes, searching idly through the various random objects placed throughout the room. There were strings of beads, rusted coins and bits of twine, marbles and what he thought might be a shrunken head. Pushing aside a small pile of tumbling stones, he raised a brow at the Raggedy Anne and Raggedy Andy dolls he found sitting side by side at the very back of a shelf, their stitched on smiles eerily out of place amidst the dark corners and cobwebs. Absently he reached out, ran a fingertip over Anne's straggly red hair, and imagined Esmeralda holding this, perhaps as a child, perhaps on a mission, holding it in her slim hands and grinning down at the cloth face.
Shaking his head, he turned to another shelf, drew down a stack of pictures that wasn't inside a box. Carrying them over to the chair he'd been sitting in, he sat, began to flip through them. He took pause, however, when he realized that, unlike in all the others, Esmeralda was actually shown in these, smiling for the camera. Frowning, he looked at them more carefully, and realized she was young, no older than eight or so, her eyes alight with laughter and humor. Here she was hanging upside down from a tree, her face filled with mischief, her upside down grin a mile wide. And there she was, caught up in the arms of a man who looked so much like her that he had to be her father. She had his eyes, he thought, his big, fascinating eyes. And another picture revealed the mother, and Sam saw where Esmeralda got her hair and also, he assumed as Esmeralda had yet to actually smile at him, her grin.
Though a part of him registered the cruelty of it, too much of his mind had been trained to find and make full use of any weakness one found in an enemy. And he'd yet to find a person who didn't have a weakness when it came to their family. With a determined gleam in his eye, his lips curved into a smirk, he stood up, stepped towards Esmeralda.
That step almost faltered when she opened her eyes, looked directly into his in that cool, blank way she had. Because she did, and because she didn't seem to be the least concerned, his smirk deepened, and he stopped right beside her, bending down so his face was inches from hers.
"You know, Zeldie, my love, I found the strangest picture while I was exploring your little play room. I was under the impression that Ghost Operatives weren't supposed to keep up any connections with relatives…especially parents." He held the picture in front of her face, feeling smugly superior when she raised a brow, studying the image.
"Now Zeldie, it sure would be unfortunate if anything were to happen to these two nice people, don't you think? You join up with us, and there's no doubt they'd be protected. Otherwise…Tragic accidents happen every day, you know." He said, his tone deliberately mocking, deliberately cold and calculating. She merely studied the picture for a moment more, shrugged, and then met his gaze directly.
"Well," She said slowly, in a weary, slightly annoyed voice that had him tasting victory. "It's pretty hard for a couple of dead people to die again in 'tragic accidents'. You're about five days too late to threaten me with that one. Nice try, though."
And just like that, victory was snatched away. Not only that, but for reasons he refused to dig in to, he felt like a complete asshole. This was not turning out at all the way it was supposed to.