I used to have dreams, once.

My problems used to be light ones, things that would be trivial now in comparison. I'd always dreamed of being a lawyer, and I had worked toward that dream since before I hit high school. I was guilty of being a bit naïve, too, thinking that if I were a lawyer, I could help people. I was raised by my grandparents after my mother died giving birth to me. My father left my family before I was born, and I had no other family.

I was good at making friends, though. I was sociable, not quite the life of the party but I attended plenty of them when my grandparents allowed me to, from the time I was in high school. I was self-conscious about my looks, but guys seemed to like me well enough, and I lost my virginity at the tender age of sixteen.

Life had been so simple. I achieved what I set my mind to, and I made it into the school of my dreams. I might have grown a little wilder in college, but I never lost sight of my focus.

It all came crashing down on me, that day I went to visit my grandparents. It was my birthday, and I was dropping in unexpectedly. I always wondered, afterward, if I had just called ahead instead of trying to surprise them, would they ever have told me? I'd like to think so, but it was colored by heavy doubt.

So, I got home to find strangers in my grandparents' house, and they suddenly had these guilty expressions. An older couple, and three other people, two males and a female, both younger, and none of them familiar.

"What’s going on," I'd murmured, feeling confused.

Then my grandmother was there, leading me to a seat with grandfather taking his single seat, the guests seating around the room, my eyes on the older couple sitting across from me looking back at me with teary, determined faces.

I'd thought it was odd, how the woman's face, though aged, looked like the single photo of the woman who was supposed to be my mother, how the man had her eyes.

"Baby, we need to talk," grandmother had said gently, and stumbled her way through the whole story.

I was startled by a sudden, sharp sound, my hand reaching automatically for the phone. It was a message, and I opened the notification.

Nothing yet. I'll keep you posted.

Dammit. I sighed and ducked my head for a moment, then erased the message and put the phone back down.

I looked around, blinking at the room I found myself in, still thinking about that night. The room was tiny, cramped, with poor lighting, but it was a clean place to stay with a bed and I could pay for my stay in cash. I didn’t plan to stay long, already impatience clawed at me.

Again, I blinked at my surroundings, finally waking out of my daydreams; reminded myself of where I was.

I was back in Italy, still smarting after that failed mission, but I knew all I had to do was wait for a different opportunity. In the meantime, I trained some more, kept my ears, even the virtual and borrowed ones, open for any news that would give me a new lead.

Besides that, I was trying to figure out Luke.

I'd searched around for him, and found nothing. There was an existing record, I'd been surprised to find, but it was British and the man pictured may have been close to Luke's specs, but the face wasn’t similar, beyond the beard. The name was obviously an alias, and it pretty much cemented everything for me.

I wondered if Luke was even his real name.

More than that, I wondered about him. I'd guessed he was Irish, and he hadn't refuted it. I wondered about where he grew up, how he ended up where he did working for Greco of all people. He was an Italian mafia boss, I was sure there was Irish mafia in the US and he could have easily found a group to work for. Unless he was running from something, something he didn’t want people he shared an ancestry with knowing.

But there was no way for me to find out about any of it. Maybe a picture would have gotten me something, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be handing out pictures of him, anyway. Not only was it dangerous for me, it could potentially drag me into whatever he was escaping, but it felt like a betrayal just thinking of it.

Those thoughts were muddy and complicated because they kept running over each other with broken theories. What I knew I needed, was money. I had enough to get by, but I always needed more, especially with the traveling I was doing. Since I really had only one devotion left in life, getting the cash wasn’t so simple. I worked a couple of jobs to save something, but nothing that would take over my schedule. I needed the money so I could get next to Greco, beyond that, it didn’t really hold much meaning for me, not for the moment.

At some point, I would have to build some life for myself after my vendetta was taken care of. But until then, I was going to keep my focus. The mission came above everything; I'd been working toward it for the past four years after all, instead of completing my college education. When I was a young girl, at twenty-one, trying to go to my classes, then finding out a lot of harsh truths about my family, my past, was more than I could imagine or handle.

That was when the fire that lit within me after I digested it all, and the vow I made.