I didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
And that’s how it began.
Lesley trained me like a soldier.
At first, I struggled. My hands shook when I held a gun. My punches barely landed right. But she was ruthless. She didn’t go easy on me just because I was a woman who had suffered. If anything, she was harder on me.
“You can cry later,” she snapped one day when I failed to disarm her. “Right now, you fight.”
So I fought.
I pushed myself past the pain, past the exhaustion. I learned how to fire a gun without flinching, how to strike with precision, how to endure pain without breaking. Lesley taught me how to disappear, how to manipulate identities. She turned me into a ghost.
During those months, I let go of who I was. The weak, broken Zoey died.
And the woman left in her place?
She was ready to kill.
One evening, as Lesley and I sat in her office, finalizing the details of my new identity, something unexpected happened.
A notification popped up on Lesley’s laptop.
She frowned, clicking on it. A video file loaded. The screen flickered to life, and my breath caught in my throat.
It was Kate.
She was sitting in an expensive hotel suite, phone pressed to her ear.
Her voice was clear, cold, and unmistakable.