DEVIANT [H.S.]

1 - Introductions

I hate birthdays. Especially today, since it's my birthday.

More importantly, it's my seventeenth birthday.

And Jeriah Vaughn, the man who raised me and also the director of the Protector Core, has decided to give me, guess what?

A Protector. Bet you couldn't figure that one out.

But I'm not the only girl who is getting one for her birthday. All the girls in England get a Protector on their birthday when they turn seventeen. I bet you're thinking why teenage girls need a "protector". Well, there's a story behind the Protector Core. One I'm about to tell you.

One stormy night in London back in 2014, a young woman was walking home from the market running errands for her mum. She passed by a bar and some drunkard began to follow her. He grabbed her, pulled her into an alley, and had her way with her. Her screams were shut out by the hand over her mouth and her face against wet asphalt.

He left her there in the cold.

Now this young woman was in a relationship with another man. Another man who loved her dearly. Both of them attended the same college, he a few years ahead of her. She was only in her second year. And on that stormy night in London, when this man began to worry that his girlfriend was somewhere other than home, he went out to look for her.

And he found her in the alley. Shaking. Three weeks later, she found she was pregnant. At age seventeen.

This young woman was my mother.

When Jeriah found that my mum was pregnant, he claimed that he was not angry. Though I know he was. He was angry that he wasn't the biological father, he was angry at that random drunk, and he was angry that I came so soon. I was a reminder of what he could've had. He wanted me dead.

My mother refused. She loved me too much to let me die. So she gave birth to me. And died that same night.

That's the story that I've been raised with my whole life.

I know Jeriah didn't want to take the authority to raise me. But he took it upon himself to bring me up in a way that involved no violence and no harm from the outside world.

Which resulted in the Protector Core.

After my mother passed, he grew into a billionaire after he graduated college. He came up with some new formula that the government wanted for themselves, something involving raising human senses and thought to a new level. They gave him 12.5 billion in return, and he invested almost half of that into the Protector Core.

The Protector Core is a system where young ladies at age seventeen receive funds to house and take care of a male or female who is the same age or older and equipped with special skills.

The skills that the government inherited from Jeriah Vaughn's formula.

The formula is crafted and individualized for each recruit, and these Protectors have the ability to hear, see, feel, taste, and smell better than the average human. They are trained for a year in defensive and martial arts, then prompted for the family they are going to be sent to.

Jeriah oversees all of this and spends most of his time in his office on the phone.

But for once, he's sitting at the dining table with me reading the paper and watching me eat breakfast.

That still doesn't give me clearance to call him my father.

"Today is a big day, Serena..." He says, taking a sip of coffee from his mug.

"Hm." I mumble, my mouth full of food. He can't seriously expect me to reply with an actual response while I'm eating.

He glances at me from over the paper and sets it flat on the table. "It's your birthday. Aren't you happy?"