Prologue

I never chose to be a professional killer. In fact, I was never given the choice to be anything, I didn't even know that people had such things as choices: at that time, it was an unknown concept to me and, in a way, it still is.
Killing people did not feel bad and it didn't feel good: I felt nothing. They meant nothing to me when they were alive and they would mean even less if I killed them. Guilt never affected me, or maybe I just could not think about it. Please don't blame me, I was trained to kill since I was a little girl and it never crossed my mind to give up my job, it never crossed my mind to go against the system, against my family, against the people I cared about. Against everything and anything I ever knew.
Until something happened and my world was turned upside down, until I understood that the problem was not killing someone, it was seeing the pain in the eyes of somebody who had lost a beloved one.
My name is Ariel Reed, at that time I was seventeen years old and worked for an assassin's league called Torment, which was not its real name, but it was the only one we were allowed to know.
This is my story. I decided to write it down, not only because it changed my life, but because it changed the lives of many others.
The funny thing is it all started with a simple trip to London.