Valor | Marcel Gerard

Chapter 1

September 12, 2011

Even mercenaries deserved a night off.

She repeated the sentence to herself as she looked down at the paper in her hands, announcing a charity event hosted by the infamous Marcel Gerard— a Masquerade Gala.

She knew all about him. And all about his old friends, the Originals. Before arriving in the city, she researched its history thoroughly. Despite having received life there, she knew nothing about it. Perhaps because she saw it for the first time about two hundred years before Klaus Mikaelson even set foot on it. And since then, she hadn't returned.

Keeping informed was a great strength when one worked as a jack-of-all-trades, a mercenary, a bounty hunter, a private investigator, and all sorts of other odd jobs that may no longer exist in the time she'd appeared in.

A lot had changed since she last saw the world in 1812. And there was much to learn.

The internet fascinated her. Simultaneously, computers scared her. She had vanished off the face of the Earth before typewriters were even invented. She had no idea how to search for what she wanted. An older woman at the library had helped explain to her that she needed to press the buttons with letters and use the space bar to form sentences.

That sure beat writing with a quill and ink.

Phones were even more complicated. The screens were small, and the keyboards could be encompassed by three fingers, which made pressing individual letter buttons hard, at first. She hadn't been around to see Graham Bell's first telephone, which meant phone calls weren't much easier for her to wrap her mind around (though she did prefer them to texts).

But even as someone who had once been an expert tracker for three centuries when there was no technology to use to her advantage, she still couldn't find the person she was looking for.

The only one who could get her out of the job she'd been assigned.

Kill the tribrid.

She knew who her victim was meant to be. Still in utero, a child that would be born to Hayley Marshall and Klaus Mikaelson. Conceived in a drunken one-night-stand. Miraculously still alive despite both parents wishing to terminate the pregnancy. It would have made her job easier if they'd just gotten rid of it themselves.

But if they'd done that, she wouldn't have been released. She'd have spent perhaps another two hundred years suffering in darkness. Alone with her thoughts. Screaming her lungs out only for no one to hear her.

Well, her father heard her. But considering she'd committed treason in his eyes, he never felt an ounce of pity for her.

He didn't feel anything. He was just a monster.

"One more try before I go," she mumbled as she sat herself in front of the library computer, already wearing her dress, heels, and makeup for the event.

She cracked her fingers and typed slowly the name of the man she wanted to find.

Nothing. He was a ghost.

Or maybe the world forgot about him, too. Maybe he was suffering the same fate she'd endured for two centuries. And the only reason she remembered him was because she'd been in the pit.

"Please," she whispered, clasping her hands together and resting her forehead on them. "Please give me a sign that he's alive. I'm begging you, someone, anyone, I have to know, I have to see him again."

No one answered. Which was probably a good thing.

She wondered if anyone was watching. Her father didn't exactly have lieutenants, but two centuries ago, a cult dedicated to him helped him enact his punishment for what she and her brother had tried to do. Maybe that cult still existed. Maybe they were spying on her right at that moment.