So I wasn't lying when I said I was working on a new story many months ago in my last one shot. This one's an AU I just randomly thought up and it went on from there.
I know this chapter is short but it's just the prologue. I will be uploading the next two chapters in a few days to get the ball rolling and then updates will be weekly and most likely on Sundays.
I'd like to warn ahead of time that there will be a few small trigger warnings, especially in the next two chapters.
Nonetheless, thank you all for reading and giving this story a chance and thank you to all the followers who have read my previous stories.
Lastly thank you to my Beta for everything. I know I've been a pain to work with lately but you're amazing and this story wouldn't be what it is without you.
Okay, I don't own anything from R&I, I'm just using them. I think that's everything.
Enjoy and please, please review.
It's unbelievably crazy how fast life can change. How easily the world can throw a devastating blow.
Her entire life, all of it, was thrown away in a mere 24 hours.
She was forced to reinvent herself. Become someone new.
Maura Isles, that's her new name. Boston, Massachusetts, that's her new home.
Her once grand, mountaintop home with glass over looks and her infinity pool, that's probably destroyed. Blown up by the cartel, no doubt.
Now she lives in the shittiest, tiniest little studio apartment. The bathroom is in the closet for Christ's sake. She has to walk through what little of her designer wardrobe she was allowed to keep in order to get to her bathroom.
It's completely insane.
She didn't even get to keep her car, the one Jimmy bought her. It may have only been a Prius, but it was hers.
She remembers when he asked what she wanted. A Maserati? A Bugatti? Hell, he even offered her a Maybach! But she was different; she wasn't who you'd expect to be a part of this life. She wanted a Prius!
She was married to James Price, the head of an entire drug kingpin. He was a murderer and pusher and supplier of the largest shipments of drugs into and out of the country.
And she wanted a Prius.
You could say she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, that her entire life was a result of misplaced events. And it all started when she met James Price at a school she never wanted to go to.
And love led her astray.
She finished college. You'd be surprised to hear that if you met her after all of this mess. She got her Bachelors of Science in human biology at the University of Southern California.
She didn't want to go there. She wanted to go out of state, but not the state right next door to home. Yeah L.A. was a whole different world compared to Prescott, Arizona. But it wasn't prestigious like the schools she truly wanted to attend. She got into Yale and Boston Cambridge, her top two, but she couldn't afford them. How different would things have been had she risked the debt to go to those schools instead?
She was a few years older than James and they met his junior year when she was just starting med school. It was her first year and she hadn't selected a discipline yet.
He was a chemistry major, and a brilliant one at that. He just barely scraped by in his general education classes, but he got the highest scores in all of his chemistry classes.
By the second semester of his freshman year, he was already working in the lab under the tutelage of their premiere chemistry professor, researching clean energy chemistry.
Somehow in two years after meeting, he managed to sweep her off her feet, quit school and build a small drug business of his own methamphetamine cook.
She didn't know, until he begged her to drop out and move back home with him to Arizona.
She wanted to say no. It was wrong and she wanted to be a doctor, not the girlfriend of a drug lord.
But she loved him. He made her feel things she never knew she could feel.
She almost refused, until a frantically taken at home pregnancy test confirmed she was carrying his child. And then she was left with the decision that would haunt her for eternity.
She couldn't say no and be left pregnant and in debt while trying to finish medical school and then a residency.
No, it was her only option.
Had she known a month later after they were already married, that she would lose the baby, she might have stayed. She might have graduated and become some form of doctor. Her life would have been different yet again.
Her life had become a giant 'what if' at the hands of James Price.
Completely unpredictable and unhealthy.
And in the end, was this the price she had to pay for loving him?
She didn't know. But one thing she was sure of was that timing was never on her side.
In just five years, his product swept the markets all over the world.
He taught two of his closest friends the cook and that's all they did, for weeks at a time. Procure the necessary chemicals, cook, sell, vacation, and repeat.
He taught two more men, whom she did not trust, and he expanded again.
Soon he didn't have to have his hands directly in the operation. He was a certified drug lord and she was his wife.
She still loved him, even on nights when she cleaned his bloody knuckles or when she watched him clean his recently fired pistol.
She hated him too. She hated the man he was and the cruelties he'd performed.
But she couldn't leave him. She couldn't give it all up and she certainly couldn't break his heart.
Because under all of that toughness, and cunning, and just pure evil, he loved her.
And when things started to take a turn for the worse, he told her what to do if he ever didn't come home.
So when the last two men he brought into his lab to teach the cook turned on him and started cooking south of the border, she became so frightened for their lives.
Every day she kissed him like it could be her last.
And one day it was.
He texted her right before he died and that single text saved her life.
She called the number he gave her and spilled everything she knew to the DEA.
Within a couple of hours, her life was packed up and she was relocated to that shitty little apartment in Boston.
She had everything she never wanted, and this was the price to pay. Now her life was at the mercy of WITSEC.