The smell of burnt offerings and stale tears hung heavy in the air, a fitting perfume for a mass funeral. I stood among the faceless crowd, a lone wolf in a sea of manufactured grief, at the cemetery for the L.A.C.P. bombing victims. My mother was one of them, a casualty of a war I barely understood, sparked by a ghost I thought I’d laid to rest. The sun, mocking my inner turmoil, beat down mercilessly, a stark contrast to the storm raging within me.

I was Sarah Killian, a Professional Serial Killer for the now-defunct T.H.E.M., and I was here to bury a woman I barely knew, feeling a guilt that burrowed deeper than any grave. The preacher droned on, his words meaningless to me, just another hollow echo in a life already too full of them. All I could think of was my meeting with Zeke, the man who’d owned my life for years, a meeting that would decide if I’d trade one prison for another: the streets or a federal cell.