Given-Taken

Ave

The first lesson my father taught me was simple:

Survival isn't a matter of luck. It's a matter of will.

I was fourteen when I understood what that meant.

I watched him shoot a man in the chest across our dining table, the porcelain plates still warm with dinner. Blood sprayed across the white tablecloth, bright as roses. My father didn't flinch. He wiped his hands clean and finished his glass of wine.

Afterward, he made me sit across from the body. He told me to look into the dead man's eyes and memorize the emptiness.

"Someday," he said, "someone will put you on your knees. When that happens, you have a choice: break or become something they can't crush."

I thought I understood him.

I didn't.

Not until the night everything was taken.

I remember the gunshots-three sharp cracks that split the dark. The shouting. The smell of smoke and burning skin. I remember my father dragging me into his office, shoving something cold and metallic into my hand.

"Keep it safe," he rasped, voice raw with pain. "Don't let them have it. No matter what they do."

I opened my fingers and looked down. A USB drive. Nothing but plastic and data.

A fortune in information. Enough to buy enemies or bury them.

He pressed his bloody palm to my cheek, eyes wild. And then he left me there, locked behind the steel door while the rest of the house burned.

I waited in the dark, clutching that drive. I counted every scream. Every shot.

When the door finally opened, it wasn't my father standing there.

It was a man I didn't know, dressed in black, his gun still smoking. He looked at me the way you look at something half broken-curious whether it's worth finishing off.

He didn't pull the trigger.

Later, I wished he had.

Because surviving was worse.

Because surviving meant becoming everything my father promised: something that could never be crushed.

Years later, they still call me ruthless. A liar. A thief.

They don't understand.

I am nothing more than what the world made me.