Hi fandom! This story is basically about three futures Raven could have had.
1. If she hadn't been taken in by the Furan's in the first place
2. If she had escaped from the glass house.
3. If she had gone through with the mission she was given at the end of aftershock and killed Nero.
They will go in that order and they will be called: 1-free 2-escaped 3-assassin
Hope you enjoy this peeps, I know it's a bit depressing to start with but it will lighten up and become more exciting. Oh and all the characters belong to mark walden except the ones I may make up along the way ;) i don't know yet. The first bit is taken straight from book so if you know it well you might want to skim read it. PLEASE REVIEW!
Natalya climbed up a fire escape on the side of a disused factory building leading to the roof. she dropped down through one of the dirty skylights and onto the floor of the long-abandoned attic that was her current bolt hole. She headed over to a table on the far side and lit the oil lantern that stood on it. In the small pool of yellow light she examined the contents of the stolen bag.
"how many times have I got to tell you," a voice said from the shadows, "you don't work on my turf." Natalya spun round as four boys in their late teens emerged from the darkness at the other end of the room. "What? Did you think I wouldn't be able find you? You thieve on my patch and I will always know where you are. Now we're going to have to teach you a lesson, you know, just to make sure you understand the rules," the leader said as he walked towards her.
"I'm sorry, Boris,' Natalya said as the boys moved to surround her. "I'll give you a cut of my take. Hey, you can have it all if you want. I don't want any trouble."
"Too late for that - you had your chance. In fact, I think I will be the one giving you the cut, yes?" he said, pulling a knife from his pocket and holding it up in front of him.
One of the other boys lunged for Natalya but she quickly dodged sideways and punched him in the mouth. He staggered sideways clutching at his mouth, blood oozing between his fingers. Boris watched as the other two uninjured boys ran at Natalya and she dropped low, her foot lashing out at one of the boys' ankles and sending him flying. As he hit the ground with a thud the other boy grabbed the Natalya's arm and she spun round, driving her fist straight into his nose and knocking him backwards. She turned back towards Boris just in time to see him coming before he slammed into her and knocked her to the ground. He pinned her down and held the knife in front of her face, the light from the lantern glinting on it's blade.
"And now I'm going to make an example of you,' he said, bringing the knife to within a couple of millimetres of her eye. Natalya's heart was pounding right out of her chest, her vision was unable to focus on anything despite the blade coming ever closer to her eyeball. Using the last of her strength she managed to get her foot up and deliver a powerful kick to Boris's gut. He spun back but she had misjudged the direction he would move. He had instinctively lashed out with the knife carving a deep cut into Natalya's cheek. Blood streamed down one side of her face but she knew she had only a few moments before Boris would attack again. The knife had spun out of his hand when he had hit the floor and Natalya scrambled to get it. Knife in hand she approached Boris who was starting to recover from his fall. Without thinking she plunged the knife deep into his chest then recoiled back in horror at what she done.
Natalya had never killed anyone before, she moved quickly to his side and was haunted by the expression in his eyes. There was less blood that you'd expect but it was still pooling steadily onto the floor boards. Boris made a horrible sort of strangled choking sound, then his whole body went limp. It felt like a bomb had exploded in her brain and it took several seconds for it to tick over. She pressed her back against the wall and felt cold inside. After a while she realised she'd have to dispose of the bodies. The light was starting to dim and she planned to dump the bodies in the river when it was dark waited in her attic for an hour or so until the sky had darkened sufficiently to work as cover. Natalya used the time to tend to her cheek, using the needle and thread she carried in her pocket to haphazardly stitch up the cut on her face.
Natalya heaved Boris' heavy frame onto her shoulders and made her way out of the warehouse, trying to ignore the incessant dripping of the boys blood onto her shoulder. She made her way through a mess of alleyways and backstreets inhabited only by cutthroats and the like. After a while she reached her destination, it was the only spot where there was access to the river but all the houses where facing away. Natalya waded through a huge pile of rubbish and set Boris down on the edge of the river. His head was lolling, his eyes wide open and glassy, Natalya could hardly bear to look at him. She had heard the rumours of the people who dumped bodies in the river and they said 'a dead body always surfaces eventually'. She realised she was going to have to fill his pockets with stones. Natalya scrambled about the rubbish and piles of dirt until she found enough suitably sized stones. As quickly as she could, she didn't like the idea of coming into contact with a dead body, she filled his pockets with stones and flung him out into the river. He sank almost immediately a few bubbles arising from the water's surface before the disturbance settled.
She dragged the other unconscious gang members one by one to different places around the town so they were separate from each other. When they awoke they would remember where she was so she would have to move in the morning.
Natalya made her way back to the attic and relit the mercifully undamaged gas lamp. In the corner she found the mess of grubby blankets where she slept. The woman's handbag was lying near it but Natalya realised she couldn't touch anything inside it without invoking bad memories. She pulled herself up so her elbow were outside of the skylight and chucked the bag down the side of the alleyway where one of the gangs would pick it up. Natalya picked up the gas lantern from the table and carried it carefully to the corner where she slept. She curled up among the blankets swaddling them round her for warmth. She ended up in a foetal position surrounded by cloth and bathed in the light from the lantern. The hard wood of the floorboards pressed into her shoulder, the blankets were thin and stiff, but she had learned to tolerate this and she knew that in a day this was as close as she got to comfort. She cleared her head, focusing on the light and nothing else; and then, when her eyelids were drooping she leaned up and blew out the lamp.
Natalya's night was plagued with nightmares, Boris taking a starring role. But at the back of her mind there was something else, faces she had never seen before. A man with a buzz cut and a hand gun, and a woman with straight dark hair and a suit. The pair lingered in the back of every dream, punctuating each nightmare with the sense that something was not as it should be. She awoke every so often, mostly from the cold wind that whistled through the cracks in the skylights. She felt a strange sense of helplessness, like she was coming to the end of a line, something was wrong, and someone was out there to put it right.