Everybody's got a past.
But Anna Lewis doesn't remember a thing about hers.
One moment she was at home with her husband and baby, the next one she found herself in a dark motel room with a metal-limbed man who tells her she's a lethal assassin. Tha...
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December 21st, 2000
It was 1:35 in the morning and no one was sleeping when the baby started crying. Anna took more than a minute to notice the weeping because she was way too focused on her studying. It wasn't until her husband called her that she redirected her attention away from her notes and small lettered textbooks.
"Honey! Can you hush her, please?!"
Greg was also awake. He had just got a position at the Queens Laboratory for Scientific Research and stayed up almost every night to make sure he did a good job. Nights had been like that ever since they moved into their small apartment, right after they got married just over a year ago. Even though he might have seemed absent, Anna had to admit that he was good to her. She could tell he really tried to make it work. He treated her like a princess, worked his ass off to maintain their little family and supported her in every way. He almost made her feel bad for being so hesitant to marry him in the first place. She didn't think the marriage was going to last long, but still, she did it because she had to.
Anna stood up from the living room table, leaving her notes and books, and went into their bedroom. There she found the little human being, laying in her crib, weeping and driving the both of them crazy.
"C'mon, Jess..." She said as she took her in her arms. "Don't cry, baby."
She checked her diapers. It wasn't that. She just had dinner, so it couldn't be that she was hungry either. Maybe it was gas or she'd simply had a bad dream. She rocked her baby girl to try and calm her down.
Anna couldn't believe a year had almost gone by since she'd had her. In only two days she'd be one year old. She'd loved her ever since she held her in her arms for the first time and whenever her daughter smiled at her, she forgot about everything she had lost.
She got pregnant in her junior year of college, after dating Greg for a few months. Unfortunately, she had to stay home taking care of Jessica during her senior year and hence didn't graduate in time. On the bright side, Greg didn't turn his back at her and took full responsibility for the baby. He insisted on getting married and raising their daughter as a family.
"Shh... What's wrong, sweetheart?" She asked the baby girl when she saw she kept crying. "You don't want me to study for my finals, do you?"
She was trying to finish her degree in nursing a year later. Studying and raising her child was hard, sure, but she was putting all her efforts into making it work.
"That's it. It's okay..." Jessica finally seemed to be getting sleepy.
She put her down on her crib, carefully. Anna couldn't lift much weight with her arms ever since she was involved in a car wreck. She was 16 and was coming back to New York from a road trip with her friends. It was in the middle of December and the roads were icy. Anna woke up from a coma six months after. Luckily, nobody died, but Anna broke both of her radius and her right ulna. She had to get prosthetics in her forearms and even if it had been 9 years, she would still feel them hurt from time to time, especially on cold days.
Suddenly, the phone rang. Anna knew Greg wasn't going to pick it up. If he had been busy to take care of their daughter, he was definitely not going to answer the phone. She glanced at baby Jessica one last time before making her way back to the living room.
"Yes?" She asked, but nobody answered. At least not immediately. She heard a deep male voice on the other end of the line talking in a language she didn't understand. It sounded Russian but she couldn't know for sure.
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"Who is this?" She demanded as the man on the phone kept talking. It didn't even sound like he was saying full sentences. It was more like he was listing words. "Hello?"
Greg could hear the whole conversation from his office, although it wasn't actually an office, it was rather a closet where he stored a desk. He decided to leave his work and check on his wife when he hadn't heard her talk any further.
He stepped into the living room and found the woman with the phone in her hand, gripping it so hard her knuckles were white. She stood still with her gaze fixed in front of her despite the fact that there was nothing to look at.
"Anna?"
A voice coming from the phone was prominent. Greg picked up what it was saying, what he didn't know was why. It kept asking something like 'Soldat? Soldat?', louder each time. He looked at Anna, who still didn't move. And before he could step closer to her, she finally reacted.
"Ready to comply."
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a/n: So, that's the prologue for this book :) It's quite short, but the other chapters are longer, don't worry. Also — only the prologue will be in a 3rd POV. The rest of the book will be from Anna's perspective.
