"Bro."
"Yeah."
On the way home after leaving the police station, Betty blinked and asked, "Is that Anna really an assassin?"
Lake glanced at Betty. "I know what you're thinking. No!"
Betty's eyes widened. "I haven't even said anything."
Lake snorted.
Did Betty really need to say it? If all these years of knowing her still hadn't been enough for Lake to figure out what she was thinking, he wouldn't have had the nerve to call himself a detective with the NYPD.
Betty was simply thinking that if Anna really was an assassin—and the top female assassin from the story Lake had told her, who had toyed with the Red Room and Langley—then her skills had to be incredible, and her marksmanship had to be second to none.
Without a doubt.
Betty was wondering whether she could take Anna as her teacher.
"She's an assassin."
"So?"
"She's not suitable for you."
"Why?"
"Think about it yourself."
"..."
Whether it was the Red Room or Langley, their training of female agents and assassins centered on eradicating their sense of shame. They searched the world for orphans to train, then created one bizarre and incomprehensible program after another, conditioning those orphans from childhood until their sense of shame had been completely erased.
That was no exaggeration.
If a severely brainwashed Red Room female agent were told to expose herself in New York's main square, she would strip off her clothes without the slightest hesitation.
Of course.
Lake didn't discriminate against them. At the very least, they had broken free of their brainwashing. They were victims too. But all Lake did was refrain from discriminating against them. There was no way he would let Betty undergo training under Anna, who had been subjected to that kind of conditioning.
No way.
Lake dared guarantee