°~ Prologue ~°

▪ALESSANDRO▪

• I hate cops.

• I really, really do. Especially around here. You never know whose payroll they’re actually on. Dealing with them over the last six months has done nothing to improve my image of them.

•  Fucking cops.

•  They won’t give me the time of day. When I filed the missing person’s report, they barely even glanced at the details. Follow ups? Nonexistent. Now every time they see me at the station they’re rolling their frigging eyes. They don’t give two shits about some missing woman with a questionable reputation. Just like thousands of others in this country, she’s been sucked into a black hole never to be seen or heard from again. Their families and friends are left at the mercy of a system that divies up investigative hours based on who looks the prettiest on print or who shouts the loudest to the media. Adelina has nobody shouting for her. Only me. And that means it’s up to me to find out what happened to her.

•  It was the same story with my dad. Forget that he was brutally murdered. He deserved it because he was a nobody boxer fighting in the underground. He associated with bad people, and therefore he got his just penance. That’s how the cops deal with things in this city. That’s how they dealt with my father’s death and the thirteen-year-old kid he left behind. Sweep it under the rug and file it away under cases that actually matter.

•  I was a kid then, so I had no say. But I’m all grown up now-at the ripe old age of twenty-two- and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let this happen again. The last nine years have forged a woman with a heart of steel. I’m not backing down this time. Whatever it takes to find her, I will do it. This is more personal to me than it’ll ever be to any of these office monkeys.

• Which is why I’m now sitting in said office of some poor schlep who works for the FBI. Really, all these robots are just overpaid cops too. Still, I feel bad for this lady sitting across from me. Agent Cameron is her name- as evidenced by the name plate and various other propaganda strewn across her desk. There are always clues about people’s inner workings if you look close enough. And what Ms. Cameron’s office tells me about her is that she wants to feel important. She’s probably dedicated her best years to the job. But she’s stuck in an office shuffling papers and that frigging nameplate is all she has to show for her career.

• The lines of bitterness are etched into her overtired face. She doesn’t look like she’s had a day of fun in her whole life. But then again, have I? Maybe that’s what bothers me about her. I see a bit of myself reflected in her eyes. A desolate future of nothingness and only my cats to go home to at the end of the day .

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