Chapter One
I wasn't always like this. I used to be weak,naive,hopeful.. my name is Megan Grayson
and if you’re reading this they’ll soon be folding a flag for me...I could take you back to the beginning and start from there but, that's time and patience I don't have so, let me paraphrase it for you.
My parents were war heroes, met in the service -- part of the seal team that took Bin Laden down.
According to my grandparents - My mother was the good girl who fell in love with the bad boy. My father was the rebel without a cause…. Cold exterior with a heart of gold.
They were perfect for each other and planning on getting married in the fall. Mom was ambitious and had her
whole life planned out while dad just kinda fell into things that he was good at and ran with it.
They never made it back to the states. Or so we were told - ambushed last minute by Osama's son. I was taken in along with my younger brother by my uncle on my father's side.
He was a celebrity in Philly; Owned a local restaurant. He made the best Cheesesteaks/pizzas/subs/ calzone and anything of the like around - well, anywhere for that matter. Critically acclaimed.His face was printed in local newspapers, then onto Foodie magazines. Etc. They loved him. We were young when it happened. I was thirteen, my brother nine.
It wasn't a huge tragedy. We never met our dad and our mom shipped out when I was four. I used to get so frustrated with his over-the-top fantasies of them & By the time he was twenty three I had wished all his childhood fantasies were our reality.
I remember waking up to gunshots. My uncle and brother in the doorway then out the window down the fire escape I remembered thinking that we'd probably narrowly escaped some lunatic with a gun just to get killed in a wreck.
Hell. Eric must've been driving as fast as that beat up
p.o.s. would go. Gambling debts. That's why we wound up in Zurich with a new life under different aliases. To civilians, Chase was now Cameron and I was Alyssa.We were to call Eric by the name of James. Ha! I can still see my expression in the bathroom mirror; 'james'? I smirked…. He glared at me with a stern seriousness. "Nothing about this is funny, if you slip it could be your life."
"All of this over a gambling debt?" Yeah, right.
I let it slide saying nothing, thinking only of Chase's well-being and our new lives began.
We weren't sent into public schools, instead we studied at home. But, not the basic curriculums and definitely not by your run-of-the-mill teachers. Eric seemed to know people who knew more than what friends of an ordinary restaurant connoisseur would…
We had moved to Zurich so 'James' could carry out our late Aunt's will... she wanted him to be a trauma surgeon in the field.
I started piecing it together when the bastard knew his
way around a chest cavity in the middle of downtown when a man had been stabbed. Supposedly no prior training in medical at all but, he saved a man from suffocating on his own blood.
It was then I started asking questions only to be shut down time and again with excuses that would've made sense except My intuition wouldn't rest.
we were taught four major studies:
Medical - everything from basics to war zone.
Intel (security) - Hacking into governmental systems - worldwide.
Stealth- mission impossible with a hint of John Wick. self defense- kill or be killed style.
At sixteen I could hack into any database.
On my eighteenth birthday I had 'secured' the identity of a crooked bank CEO's wife and drained every dime from all his accounts, even his private nonexistent ones..
He'd been screwing his Secretary ( and others on the side) causing 'Rebecca Lynn Stratford ' to file for divorce.
I felt guilty doing it, even though it was a necessary evil. To be fair though. I wired it back to her account after the proceedings were final and he couldn't touch it. Mr. Stratford’s reach was impressive, but. Certain irrefutable evidence turned up that insured his not so comfortable mainstay in a federal prison.
By the time I was legal drinking age I had been drunk to nearly passing out and killed thirteen in ten minutes. (Simulations made to prepare me for what I didn't know my life would become)
Back then it was fun. Exciting. Chase & I were privy to some seriously under
ground black box type of Intel, and we lived for righting the wrongs and watching the false prophets burn.