Her life's been a mess of bad breaks and harsh survival. And she was just eleven when it all started.A baby.
Her parents took her and her younger sister on vacation to some no-name Mexican hotel, the kind of cheap, run-down place families go when they can’t afford better but desperatelyneed a break from their daily life—a place on the wrong side of the tracks.
They’d been there for a week-long vacation that seemed to have gone well, but on their last night, a fight broke out in the room next door.
Her parents—probably trying to do the right thing like some stupid, naïve do-gooders—stepped out to see what was happening and got shot in the head for their troubles.
Just like that, they were gone, rendering their kids orphans in a foreign country.
How could they just leave their children alone to interfere in a fight that had nothing to do with them?Stupid fuckers.My grip tightens on the folder until my knuckles go white, irrational anger at the dead couple coursing through my veins.
According to the report, Katie and her sister Kayla heard the shots. They heard their parents die. Katie went to peek out the door—just a little girl trying to understand what the loud noises meant—and saw her parents’ bodies on the floor, their heads splattered across the floor, blood pooling around them.
Instead of panicking and screaming or crying like any normal kid would, she grabbed her five-year-old sister and shoved them both into an air vent right before their parents’ killers could break into their room.
I try to picture it—two little girls crawling through darkness and dust, terrified but quiet, desperate to escape without being seen. The folder crinkles in my hands, and I force myself to relax my grip as I flip to the next page.
When they finally made it out of the building, Katie took her sister straight to the police station, walked right up to a couple of grown men, and looked them dead in the eye while she told them what happened.
She was so fucking brave.
The cops shipped the girls back to the States. But the bodiesstayed behind in Mexico, locked up as evidence in some half-assed investigation that never went anywhere and probably never will.
Then, once they were back on American soil, the system did what it always does to vulnerable orphaned children—it split them up. Different foster homes, no regard whatsoever for what they’d been through together or the fact that they only had each other left in the world.
Katie fought them on it. Fought hard, according to the notes. She finally broke down in tantrums and tears, even threw out a few threats about being uncooperative with her foster parents, about running away, about making everyone’s lives hell. But at the end of the day, she was only eleven, so her wishes didn’t matter. The adults had already separated them.
Kayla was gone, placed somewhere else, and Katie spent years trying to find her. A desperate, fruitless search that eventually led to her being recruited by Stacey Rodriguez as soon as she aged out of the foster system. And Stacey, that manipulative bitch, then spent the next few years controlling Katie by holding Kayla over her head.
A strange, uncomfortable pressure settles in my chest, and my fingers tighten around the edges of the folder until the thin sheets inside crinkle under my grip again.
I can see it so clearly now—the direct line connecting that stoic eleven-year-old girl who must have felt so utterly alone in the world to the twenty-six-year-old woman I know now, the one who stares me down with that same unwavering fire, who refuses to break even when she should.
She’s still fighting. Probably still searching for her sister after all these years.
Damn it.
She’s my problem.
A threat to my family.
I shouldn’t forget that.
But knowing all this makes it nearly impossible to keep my anger at her sharp and focused, to see her as just another enemy that needs to be eliminated. It doesn't change what I know I might have to do if her actions ever put Elira or Afrim in danger, but hell if it doesn’t make me respect her more. And soften towards her—just a little.
I close the manila folder and shove it deep into my desk drawer, feeling like something fundamental has shifted inside me. Like I’m a different man I was an hour ago.
Then I try again to banish Katie Pierce from my mind. A hard task when she was just the hot enemy I wanted to fuck. Damn near impossible now that I know the girl she was, the crucible of trauma and survival that forged her into the woman she is today.
When I’m finally able to immerse myself in work without my thoughts straying to Katie for longer than a few seconds, my office door is suddenly jerked open without so much as a courtesy knock. I glance up with a scowl, irritation flaring hot at yet another interruption.
“What is it?” I growl at Dhimitër, who appears undeterred by my obvious annoyance.
“What crawled up your ass and died?” He lifts a hand before I can formulate an appropriately scathing response. “Wait, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.”
“What. Do you. Want?”
“I have good news and bad news.” He forms fists with both hands and raises each one as he speaks, like he’s weighing them on an invisible scale. “Which do you want first?”
