My fingers stilled on the keyboard.
The same year as the raid on the underground fighting ring. The raid that had saved me and the others.
I switched back and forth between the official file and Grey’s file. They looked pretty much identical. Both contained surveillance photos—grainy at first, thenprogressively clearer—of two young girls with dark hair pulled into pigtails in school uniforms. Isabella and Mirabella, unmistakably. One picture showed only one of them, sitting cross-legged on a library floor, surrounded by books far beyond her age level. Another captured her at a computer terminal, face illuminated by the screen’s glow. Was it her performance in school that had gotten her on the radar?
My stomach clenched. The Paraskia Syndicate had extensive documentation on a lot of people, but I’d never encountered someone who had been under surveillance since they were a child.
Until her.
They had been watching Isabella long before she became Iset. Long before she should’ve been on anyone’s radar—beyond a side note in her family’s file.
Or had it only been Grey watching her—which was somehow way creepier. I cross-referenced with her official file, and sure enough, even though there were way fewer details about her childhood years in there, she’d officially been on the Paraskia Syndicate’s radar all her life.
I moved back to Grey’s file and scrolled farther, finding detailed assessments of her academic performance, psychological evaluations conducted without her knowledge, and notes about her “exceptional pattern recognition and problem-solving abilities.” One report highlighted her testing in the 99.9th percentile for mathematical reasoning at age nine.
But it was the next section that made my blood run cold. A series of “intervention recommendations” dating back years. Someone had been subtly manipulating her environment—arranging for certain teachers to be assigned to her classes, monitoring her internet usage, even influencing which summer programs she attended.
“Subject shows natural aptitude for complex logical and strategic thinking,” read one note from when she was eleven. “Recommend continued observation without direct contact. Potential future asset.”
They’d been grooming her. Watching. Waiting.
I noticed a pattern of seemingly random events in her life—a scholarship that was awarded to her, a mentor who suddenly moved away, a computer club that lost its funding—all carefully orchestrated to direct her path. To shape her development in ways she never realized.
Why would anyone invest so many resources in monitoring a child? Unless they knew something about her potential. Unless Grey had known all along what she would become. But how could he?
And obviously, he’d never made the connection between Isabella and Iset until recently.
So how did she get on the Paraskia’s and Grey’s radar?
I switched back to the official file, but there was nothing in there.
Back to Grey’s file. I scrolled backward, worked my way to the very beginning of her file.
Before everything else, there were two numbers: an internal case number and another number. I didn’t give it much attention at first, but maybe it was important.
I searched for the case number in the official database and froze. It was our case, the case of when the Paraskia Syndicatetook out an underground fighting ring in Moscow and found a bunch of children who were forced to fight and held in basements like animals.
I searched for the other number from Isabella’s file. It led to an image of a file that had been heavily redacted, but one section remained intact: “Anonymous tip received from juvenile informant, age estimated 8-10 years old, in a park in NYC.”
How could I not have known this detail? My heart rate accelerated. I clicked on the following image.
A photograph appeared—a small scrap of paper with a URL scrawled in uneven, childish handwriting. Below it, a simple message: “Bad men hurt children here.”
I stared at the handwriting, and suddenly, everything clicked into place.
My hands moved mechanically, pulling up the picture of a handwritten birthday card from Isabella Salvini’s official file.
I put both images side by side. The looping Es, the way the Ds tilted slightly to the left, the distinctive way she crossed her Ts—there might be a couple of years in between both images, but it was a very close match.
Isabella Salvini had been the child who reported the fighting rings.
The realization hit me like a physical blow. That was the reason why they started tracking her. She was the reason for the raid. The reason I had been rescued, the reason Grey and the Paraskia had found us.
The images came rushing back with brutal clarity. The underground bunker with its dirt floors and concrete walls. The makeshift cage marked with dried blood. The stench of sweat, fear, and disinfectant that never quite masked the underlying rot. The memory of my fourteen-year-old self, standing barefoot in the center of that ring for the first time, knuckles split and bleeding, facing another child with the same hollow eyes.
“Face the room. Fight or starve,” they’d told us.
The room. My stomach clenched at the memory—a windowless closet where they’d locked us up for days. I’d been in there twice. By the third fight, I’d learned to become someone else when I stepped into that ring. Someone without mercy. Someone who survived years in that basement. Who fought for his life on a regular basis. Someone who was barely more than a wild animal when they found us.
