"What were you doing out so late, Isabella?" My mother stood next to the lamp she had just turned on, arms crossed menacingly.

Shit. I had made too much noise coming in through my bedroom window. I decided to try and play it off.

"I was out with friends. I was just trying not to wake you up by coming in this way."

She stepped towards me. "Your curfew is still ten o'clock on school nights, young lady. Or it will be, in a month when you're not grounded anymore."

"Mom!"

"Don't even try that with me, Isabella Christina Diavolos. This is the third time I've caught you sneaking in in the past two weeks. And I don't know who you're out with, since all your old friends tell me you've stopped speaking to them. Are you running with a bad crowd? Doing drugs?"

"Of course not!" I protested hotly. "If you think so badly of me, you should just drug test me already."

"Make no mistake: Next time I will." She turned and swept out of the room, leaving me stunned. I couldn't believe my own mother had so little faith in me, but I suppose I had brought it on myself. I wasn't exactly allowed to tell her about the Brotherhood. An Assassin should be discreet, and my mother would never keep the secret. More importantly, enemies of the Brotherhood couldn't extract any information from her.

I knew I was young to be an Assassin at only seventeen. The others averaged between twenty-five and thirty years old, and the youngest in the organization, other than myself, was twenty-two. My age had proved to be a tactical advantage, however; Templars never seemed to suspect the smaller-than-average high school girl.

I sighed and punched my pillow in frustration, all thoughts of sleep long banished by the confrontation. I wanted to tell her why I had become so secretive, I really did. It just wasn't possible.

I strode forcefully into my adjoining bathroom, stopping to examine my reflection for a moment. I was a scarce 4'11", which had resulted in infinite teasing until the past couple of years when my classmates matured a little bit. I was very thin, but had pleasing curves. My hair was straight, thick, and a glossy black, sweeping down to my hips like a crow's wing. The bones of my face were naturally delicate and angular, with full rosy lips and bright blue eyes. My skin was a clear, almost translucent ivory, the veins underneath standing out as a stark blueish contrast. The only thing that seemed out of place was the dark raised scar on the left side of my face, forming a thick crescent shape which began about an inch above the middle of my eyebrow and wrapped around the edge of my face to end half an inch above my jaw, halfway to my mouth. My father had given it to me two years ago.

My father had always been somewhat abusive for as long as I could remember, addicted to alcohol and drugs. When I turned twelve, he… changed. He stopped hitting my mom, and shifted his focus to me. A very different form of abuse began.

It was my greatest shame and worst regret that I didn't do anything to stop him when he came to my room after Mom was asleep. He told me that he'd hurt her if I said anything, but I still should have tried to resist. I should have done something, anything, to prevent his violation of my young body and soul. But I didn't.

If I hoped he would grow bored of me, I was wrong. On the contrary, he visited more and more often, then started slipping sleeping pills into my mother's food so that she wouldn't wake up while he was raping me. I suspect this was partly because he had become more violent, and I was unable to keep myself from screaming anymore. It hurt. God, it hurt. There was no part of me he didn't brand with his filth.

On my fifteenth birthday, he tried to rape me with a large aluminum baseball bat, but I was waiting with a painstakingly sharpened kitchen knife. I managed to land a shallow slash across his chest, but he wrestled the knife away from me and carved into my face, laughing at my agonized shrieks. Unexpectedly, my mother walked into the room, roused from her drug-addled sleep by some protective maternal instinct. My father turned on her, and in that moment, I swore I saw the devil in him. He leapt on her and started choking the life from her.

I blacked out. The next thing I remember was standing over my father's corpse, covered in blood, holding the knife. He was viciously slashed open dozens of times, and my mother told the police in her statement that I had done all of the damage. To keep me from being committed to an institution, she also told the cops that he was still fighting to the end, so I was acting in self-defense, as well as protecting her. After the hospital turned in my rape kit results, no one was interested in pressing charges against me.

The Assassins came to visit me while I was in the hospital. They offered me a mission, a purpose. I gratefully accepted, and started my training the day I was released by the doctor.

My mother had been told about the signs of long-term sexual abuse all over my body, but I don't think she wanted to face that reality. She turned to work, alcohol, and partying with a vengeance, anything that could make her forget. So until about three months previously, she hadn't really noticed my secret extracurricular activities. I supposed she was trying to make up for her lack of parenting earlier in my life by cracking down on me all of a sudden.

I couldn't have given up my place in the Brotherhood, regardless. The past two years would have killed me if I hadn't been an Assassin; the whispers of whore and murderer, the judgmental stares, bathroom wall writings, and outright propositions, the teachers and guidance counselors who kept asking me to talk about it. I didn't want to talk, I wanted to act, and I had found the one place where I could. I discovered myself in the long hours of grueling training, learning how to gracefully and effectively free-run, climb, and use my environment to my advantage, disappearing under the enemy's very nose. I learned how to fight and kill with almost every weapon imaginable, from the traditional hidden blade to modern firearms. I'd be hard-pressed to find a weapon I wasn't familiar with. I had taken down half a dozen targets by myself already, inspiring jealousy and grudging respect in my older counterparts.

This was getting me nowhere, I decided. I was going back out again, and my mother couldn't stop me. I turned and slipped out the window, dropping to the ground below in a crouch. I did look back at my second-story window once, a bit guiltily, but what I was doing was for the greater good. Mommy dearest just didn't understand.