Notes: This is a story that has been in the works for several months, possibly longer if you count my brainstorming sessions that I never actually saved onto the computer. Although, honestly, I first started working on the idea after reading Pick Your Poison for the first time. Which means, of course, that this story is pretty massively AU from the end of that book. Be warned, this will not follow canon very closely at all.

Really quickly, I'd like to thank the following people:

R for letting me bounce all of the initial ideas off her even though she doesn't know this fandom, helping me with architecture research, and generally prodding me when I wasn't getting writing done. Annie, who also has no idea what this fandom is, but made suitably encouraging and excited noises when she saw my wordcount and told me that I was probably doing a good job so I should keep going. And of course, my amazing beta, goldstarsforall on Tumblr, who put up with a great deal of things when I asked her to help me edit this - including but not limited to: me dumping two-thirds of the story on top of her in less than an hour, some really ridiculous spelling mistakes, my complete lack of knowledge of how tea actually works, and my unfortunate habit of double-dashing. And she helped me pull this all together from a second draft to what you see before you today, so! Behold.

I'm gonna post another short prologue-like chapter tomorrow, and then updates will be on Mondays and Fridays until it's all over.

I really hope you enjoy this! :D I poured most of my soul into it and I'm definitely not gettin' that back anytime soon.

- Kitty

Taken

The girl's parents didn't notice that she was missing until it was far too late.

The kidnapping in itself had been quite sudden. It was a simple snatch, with the kidnapper plucking the child – who couldn't have been more than a few years old – from her stroller when her mother's back was turned. Nobody paid the would-be snatcher any attention at all as they walked out of the shopping centre with a soundly sleeping baby cradled in their arms like she was always meant to be there.

Almost exactly five minutes after the actual kidnapping took place, the child's mother tore herself away from the display of exotic dresses in the shop window that she had been looking at, and noticed that her daughter was nowhere to be seen. Within a matter of seconds, the alarm had been raised and the shopping centre was placed on lockdown. This, of course, did absolutely nothing to stop the kidnapper and their steal – both of whom had vacated the premises long before it would have done any good.

The girl's mother was hysterical – screaming and sobbing – not even the calming words of her husband could distract her from the fact that her daughter was gone – gone, and she would perhaps never see her ever again.

After searching the shopping centre top-to-bottom, the police turned their attention to the rest of the town, without success. Initially, it appeared that the child had become yet another sad statistic – the victim of a child predator or trafficker who had chosen her for some depressingly arbitrary reason. Even after a single day of searching, the police seemed to have fallen into the mindset that it was inevitable, that they would never find her and she might never be heard from again. And that probably would have been true, if it weren't for another child – only slightly older than the missing girl – who had been playing out the front of the mansion that served as his home, and had decided to explore in the bushes nearby. It was in those bushes that the boy found the girl – smudges of dirt on her face and arms, her short hair dishevelled and maybe slightly hungry too, but ultimately, perfectly fine.

The two of them, content to play and murmur to each other in some incomprehensible language, were discovered a short while later by the boy's father, who proceeded to contact the local police. The police in turn contacted the previously-missing girl's family, and it was with much relief and happiness that she was reunited with her family – although the child was so young that she had absolutely no idea what all the fuss had been about.

It was concluded that she must have simply wriggled out of her stroller when nobody was looking, and somehow had managed to make her way halfway across town. Her parents didn't question this twist of fate too closely, simply glad to have their daughter back with them again. Nobody would ever know that she had, in fact, escaped from her captors, rather than a simple stroller- although it was through a rather extraordinary series of never-to-be-documented coincidences that she had actually managed that at all.

Nevertheless, the girl's parents kept such a close eye on her from that point on that the would-be kidnapper never got a chance to try again.

The girl, of course, remembered nothing of this- not that her parents would have ever reminded her.