Side by side || Emily Prentiss

20.

«I'm not always right.
However, I am never wrong.»

The next morning Daisy was suddenly awakened by the sound of the door opening abruptly. Another man, who she had not seen until then, armed to his neck, yanked her off the bed.

"Francis doesn't want you to say a word until he gives you permission." - said the new soldier

"Don't overdo it, she didn't do anything wrong. This girl is here to help us all." - Marcus told him

"Which side are you on?" - the other man asked him

Daisy listened to that conversation carefully and even though she had just woken up suddenly she had to follow it perfectly. She was sure that the ability to immediately go from sleep to lucid wakefulness was a gift of all the people who did her job.

"On the side where people don't keep dying, Caius." - Marcus told him, revealing the name of the new man to Daisy

"If she behaves as she should no one will die again." - Caius replied

The man took Daisy by one arm again and dragged her with him inside the building. Not blindfolding her was a particularly risky and wrong choice since Daisy was able to notice several things during that crossing: the other people they had met along the way were not surprised to see the weapons, nor did they seem to fear them, so they must have been used to them, probably the children were not left free to move around without the accompaniment of an adult, because Daisy saw few of them and all were accompanied and, finally, all the people she saw were malnourished, all except those who wore weapons.

Daisy was taken by Caius and Marcus to a lower floor, to a dark and narrow basement that reminded her of the anti-bombing tunnels of the Second World War. There the stench of death intensified greatly and only when her eyes got used to the sudden darkness she was able to realize that the room was full of stale bloodstains, but no body was visible.

The stench of corpses, however, was too much and was not possible that any corpses wasn't in the room, so Daisy assumed that they had been carefully hidden so that, from her angle, she could not see any of them, but she could only breathe in the stench.

"Good morning agent." - Francis told her as he entered the room shortly after

Daisy knew she couldn't answer so she just gave him a fake smile. The man looked at her from head to toe as if trying to understand whether she would give in to his imposition on her or not. The young agent, however, knew too well that she could not risk losing so stupidly.

"She hasn't spoken since you told her not to." - Marcus replied lying and that was the moment Daisy understood that the man was on her side

"Good job agent, I see you care about your life. Take these." - Francis told him, passing her a piece of paper and a flashlight to help her read what was written in the paper clearly

That piece of paper contained very precise instructions: Daisy and Francis had to fake a conversation in which the man would show her the life inside the sect and she, after having verified that everything was perfect and that no crime had been committed inside, would ask her FBI colleagues to leave because there was no danger to anyone.

She would have had to justify her stay within the cult by saying that she immediately resigned from her job because she had discovered pure faith in Christ and that was the place where she wanted to stay. She would have asked her colleagues to understand the situation and not to look for her further.

Francis, however, didn't know that there wasn't even a chance in a million that the team would believe that story, even if she tried to make it truly believable, but above all there was no way that Daisy would give in to getting herself and all the people present there killed.