A/N: Hello and welcome! Just for a reference in this first chapter (which is like a prologue), Leo, Raph, and Donnie are 11 years old, and Mikey is 4.

Now buckle up, and let's see where this thing goes. I hope you enjoy!

A small town in Italy

Mikey was crying from the bathtub Saturday morning, and it was starting to get on 11-year-old Donnie's nerves as he tried to read. He tried not to flinch as his four-year-old brother crescendoed to another wail from the bathroom that connected off their parents' bedroom.

Over the noise, he could hear his brothers Leo and Raph trying to console him.

"Per favore, Mikey," Leo was saying as he washed the shampoo out of Mikey's hair. "You're almost all the way clean, it's not that bad."

"Yeah, stop cryin'," Raph huffed, not unkindly, from where he was kneeling over the tub. "Mom's busy right now, she can't be here. You know that."

But as Mikey's hiccuping sobs showed no sign of stopping, Raph threw his head back, and peered out the open bathroom door.

"Hey Don, help a brother out here, yeah?"

Donnie lifted his head from his science textbook. He was about to say no, but over Raph's shoulder, he caught sight of Leo giving him a steady gaze. Trapped. He could fight with Raph, sure, but not with his other triplet brother. Donnie suspected it was because Leo was the oldest, beating Raph by three minutes and himself by eight.

Repressing a groan, Donnie closed his book and slipped off their parents' bed, leaving wrinkles in the silk sheets where he'd been sitting. The housekeeping staff hired by their parents would have to fix it when they came on Monday, as they always did.

"What can I do?" Donnie asked painstakingly, coming to a stop at the open doorway. "You're better with him."

Raph shot him a look. The front of his shirt was thoroughly doused from how many times Mikey had splashed away all the bathtub toys in rejection.

"Does it look like we're doing better with him?" Raph grumbled.

As if on cue, Mikey chucked a rubber duck at his head. It made a comical squeak on contact before plopping back in the water. Raph continued to glare at Donnie, but his left eye twitched.

Biting back a laugh, Donnie surveyed the scene. He had to admit, normally bath time wasn't such a disaster. A majority of bath water had not stayed in the tub. Mikey was red-faced and miserable. So was Raph. Even Leo was looking spent.

This was why their mother usually took care of bath time, but today she'd left the three of them in charge while she and their father met with some people downstairs in the parlor. Which Donnie had translated to Leo and Raph being in charge of their youngest brother, and him being able to read a science book in peace, like he usually did whenever they were assigned babysitting duty. It wasn't that he loved Mikey any less, he just didn't know know what Mikey needed half the time. There was no textbook on little brothers; he'd been to the library to check.

Donnie pushed up his round glasses. "All the roles that could have been helpful are taken," he said. "Leo is doing the scrubbing and rinsing, and you're proving the entertainment, Raph."

"Funny," Raph drawled.

"There's nothing I can do ," Donnie insisted. "Why is he crying so much, anyway?"

"Down, Mikey," Leo said suddenly. "You're still all soapy!"

Donnie looked over, catching Mikey in the process of pulling the strings of Leo's hoodie in an attempt to climb out. His little feet were as close to the rounded bottom edge of the tub as they could get. After realizing that Leo wasn't letting him go anywhere, their baby brother broke into fresh tears and buried his face into Leo's shoulder. As Mikey sobbed, Leo washed the last of the soap suds off his back, looking like the picturesque definition of weary.

"I don't know what's wrong," Leo responded as Mikey clung onto him. "He's never cried this much during bath time."

"Isn't it just because Mom's not here to wash him?" Raph asked.

"I thought that too, at first," Leo admitted. "But we've been in charge before, he's never been this, er, cranky ."

Donnie could attest to that, given the state the bathroom was in.

"So his unusual mood today indicates that something is amiss," he reasoned, mostly to himself. "But what could it be?"

Raph cast him a dull look. "Can you ever talk normal?"

"I do talk normal! This is normal!"

"No, you don't, and it isn't, you dork!"

Donnie felt a pulse of rage run through him. Maybe Mikey's tantrum was contagious. "How's this for normal: shut up! "

"Hey, how about you two stop fighting for two seconds and be useful?" Leo asked. "Raph, drain the tub. Donnie, I need Mikey's towel."

Donnie turned to the towel rack, where all their towels were usually folded neatly and hung up by the housekeeping staff. He spotted his, Raph's, and Leo's towels, purple, red and blue respectively, but there was no fluffy orange towel for Mikey.

"Leo? It's not here."

"What? Oh, wait, I think I put it over the, um," Leo paused, and Donnie could hear realization in his voice. "Oh ."

Over by the tub, on the soapy floor, lay Mikey's towel, sopping wet. Completely unusable. The triplets just stared at it for a moment, the only sound being Mikey's hiccuping breath.

"I had it on the side of the tub," Leo said first, quietly.

"I think he might have pushed it over," Donnie murmured.

"No, he definitely pushed it over," Raph mused.

Donnie snapped his fingers. "I'll go get another one," he decided, and Leo gave him a grateful look.

They all had multiple towels, so he'd just pick up a spare from Mikey's room. He left the bathroom, leaving the sound of the water gurgling down the drain and his brothers behind him.

The hallway that led from their parents' bedroom to theirs was more of a second-floor bridge that stretched over the grand foyer, wooden rails on either side. Donnie crossed the bridge, turned down the hallway and slipped into Mikey's bright orange room. The floor was littered with his toys and colorful picture books, but finding a fresh towel was easy enough, right on the top drawer of his turtle-themed dresser, next to the framed picture of their entire family, smiling at the camera. It had been taken on Christmas, with Mikey laughing in their mother's arms, and their father hugging him, Raph, and Leo all at once.

Donnie picked up the towel and made his way out of the room. As he crossed the second-floor bridge again, he could hear voices coming from the first floor, from the living room where the meeting was taking place.

He knew little about their guests today, but it wasn't unusual for his parents to have some over. With how much land they owned under the family name, meetings to discuss finance and management were common. Donnie was about to walk by, but his father's words reached his ears.

"I know you were in prison for a long time, Hunter, but I've not the same man you once knew."

Donnie slowed to a stop on the bridge, his heart rate picking up at the tone in his father's voice. He wasn't speaking in Italian, but English. They were fluent in English, thanks to their international tutors and Leo's love for the old American show Space Heroes , but it was rare to hear his father switch to their second language.

And what was he talking about? Prison? Who exactly was his father talking to? Not one of their workers, surely…

"Clearly," a gravelly voice responded. "Dragon Face told me everything. About your little romance, how you left, everything. A little persuasion, and he even told me your street address. Isn't that nice?"

A few chortles from the other guests followed.

The man's words were simple, albeit a bit confusing, but something clamped down in Donnie's gut. He had always prided himself on relying on facts before jumping to conclusions like Raph ( Hothead, their parents sometimes fondly called him), but something was undeniable about the atmosphere here. Something felt off.

His sixth sense was warning him.

Donnie gripped the wooden railing tighter when he heard his mother's speak. Her voice was firm when she asked, "What do you want from us?"

"Quiet, Delucci, " a girl's voice snapped. "No one was, like, even talking to you."

Donnie felt a sudden surge of anger rise up in defense for his mother. If Raph had heard, he'd have been barreling down the stairs by now, all punches. But Donnie wanted to hear more, to understand more. Quietly, he moved himself off the side of the bridge, to the staircase that led down.

"Don't speak to my wife that way," he heard his father say back. "You are only a visitor under our roof. An unwelcome one, at that."

"Wow, I'm so scared," the girl said dryly.

"You have to forgive Angel," the man with the gravelly voice said. "She's got a bit of a tongue."

"I see you've started recruiting children now," Donnie heard his father retort. "And here I thought coming to my home to threaten me was a new low."

"Threaten? Why, I'm offended," the man said. "You know what we want, just two signatures from a Mr. and Mrs. Delucci right here."

Signatures? Donnie's brain began to catch up to the speed of his heart. He stood on the middle of the stairs, closer to the living room entrance, his ears pricked up to maximum eavesdropping mode.

"And if we say no?" his mother asked, her voice colder and harder than Donnie had ever heard it.

"I don't know, I'm pretty good at persuasion," the man said, and Donnie could practically hear the gross, toothy smile in his next words. "How many kids do you have again? One? Two?"

"Four ," the girl responded. "Triplets, and then a little tiny one."

Donnie felt something step on his heart at the sound of that. Someone knew who they were. Before the fact had any time to sink in, the man's exploded into a hair-raising laugh. Donnie's nails dug into the palm of a fist he hadn't known he was making.

"Triplets! Congratulations. You've really settled in, haven't you?"

"Hunter, " his father said, his voice low and dangerous. "You are not to lay a hand on my family."

"Oh, I won't, rest assured," the man said. "All you have to do is sign. And don't think about the calling for help. Your normal security guards are a little… erm, how should I say, dead at the moment?"

Donnie's stomach dropped. Dead? Like, as in, not alive anymore dead? This was crazy. He stared across the foyer, hardly daring to believe his ears. These people in their living room had to be kidding, had to mean something else by that-

"You heathens ," Donnie heard his mother hiss in a lower voice. "You are monsters."

"Maria, " his father said, his voice hard. "Get the kids."

"Uh-uh-uh! Your kids aren't going anywhere. We need both of your signatures. And like I said, I won't lay a hand on them so long as you sign," the man said.

There was a silence. Donnie's heart was beating hard in his ears. He crept closer, only daring to go down the steps until he could see part of the room on the reflection of the glass door of the ebony grandfather clock that sat in the living room. A figure in the reflection moved, and he realized that he was looking at his parents, on the other side of the room.

"Someone hand me a pen," his father spoke, and Donnie could see his mother inhale sharply.

"Finally," the girl groaned from somewhere Donnie couldn't see.

Donnie did, however, see his father's gaze fixate on someone else.

"You're Angel, right?" his father asked. After a snarl, presumably from the girl, he continued. "I hope you realize that what you're doing, what you're part of, is wrong. And for your sake, I hope you one day find a better path."

"You don't know me," the girl snapped.

"Less talking, more signing," the man said.

Donnie watched as his father leaned over to some papers on the table and signed something at the bottom of the page. Then his mother followed suit, though her face was grim and fire in her eyes.

"Now," she said, looking up. "We'll get our kids and get out-"

Bang.

Donnie had always heard gunshots in movies and tv shows, but the sheer volume of it and suddenness was nothing he could have imagined or prepared for. And when he saw his mother's body collapse through the reflection, he might have felt a part of himself die with her.

"No! " Donnie heard his father scream, or maybe it was just his imagination. He wasn't sure. He didn't even remember his knees giving way. "You said you wouldn't lay a hand on them! "

The man's response was quick, fluid, and awful.

"I'm not touching you."

Bang.

An eternity later, a sound of someone else hitting the floor echoed in Donnie's mind more than the second gunshot. Not making sense, it morphed into the sound of a soccer ball being kicked across a field. Suddenly Donnie wasn't where he was any more, and instead everything was green and golden and blue and his father was teaching him and Leo and Raph the rules of soccer, and their mother was on their large deck, holding a very small Mikey to her chest. They were smiling and waving from the side, and Donnie was waving back, and Leo and Raph were fighting over the ball, and their father was laughing, and everything was fine, they were all fine, none of this was real, none of it, not the smell or gunpowder or the smoke, or the screaming.

Someone was screaming. Wailing. Somewhere deep in Donnie's muddled mind, his brain gave out the orders to move his legs. To get up. To get to… whoever was screaming. Mikey?

"The children. Get them," a horribly familiar voice said, distantly. "Find them and kill them, too. I don't want any Delucci blood alive."

The words barely registered, but somehow Donnie's legs were moving, taking him somewhere without his explicit permission. He looked down, realizing that he was holding an orange towel. Where had that come from? Where was he even going?

The smell of smoke filled his nose, and something crept into his brain, a memory pushing itself through. Donnie felt something grab his shoulders, and he didn't fight it. The bad people had gotten him. He knew the bad people had gotten him, of course they had, and now he was going to—

"Donnie!" It was Leo, shaking him. Donnie focused on his blue eyes, and the world came back to him, as if someone had turned off the mute button. They stood in their parents' bedroom, the door locked behind them—had Leo done that? Donnie barely remembered climbing the stairs and moving through the hallway.

Leo shook him again, his voice sharp. "What happened? What was that noise?"

"Mom and Dad," Donnie said faintly, his brain beginning to work again. "Mom and Dad, they—they—we need to get out of here, Leo. We need to run."

Leo stared at him, horror in his eyes. "No. No, they're not."

Raph emerged from the bathroom, a damp Mikey in equally damp clothes. Mikey had gone completely silent, his eyes wet with tears, empty of emotion. For some reason, without any scientific proof, Donnie suddenly had the strangest notion that Mikey's sixth sense was the reason he'd been so upset all morning.

Raph's eyes were full blown. "What did you say, Don?" he asked, his face growing pale.

From outside their locked door, somewhere, multiple footsteps marched through the halls. Some laughed. Some sang.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are! "

Leo, Raph, and Donnie exchanged wild looks of pure fear. Seeing that his brothers weren't moving, Donnie grabbed at Leo and Raph's shirts, tugging them wordlessly into the large closet of their parents' bedroom. It wasn't until he shut the door and turned the lock that the horrible truth set in. He'd trapped himself and his brothers.

"We can't be in here," Raph snapped. "We have to call the police."

"They'd find us," Leo whispered, holding Mikey tight.

"Then we need to go out the window and run!"

"There's no rope," Leo said, his voice shaking hard. "And with Mikey, we can't-we can't-"

Raph was pale, and his mouth shut, unable to come up with any more ideas. Donnie looked at his two older brothers, and felt his knees buckle under him when the pounding began on the closet door.

"Hey! I think they're in here!" It was that girl's voice again.

Donnie's legs were useless. He felt his brothers' hands pull him away from the door, towards the back of the closet, into their mother and father's coats. Donnie's eyes watered as he inhaled his parents' scents, realizing he would never again be able to receive their hugs again.

Mom, his heart cried out. Dad. Help.

He was shrouded in darkness behind the coats, his brothers next to him. They pressed against each other and against the wall behind them. There was no way out. There was another blast, and the closet door could be heard falling. Donnie closed his eyes and tried to lie to himself.

Dying won't hurt, dying won't hurt, it won't hurt, it won't -

The sound of someone's footfalls neared them. The air seemed to still, and in that moment Donnie could feel someone's hand reaching out. Any moment now, and the coats would be pushed aside and they would be revealed. He could feel Leo and Raph holding their breaths. Donnie buried his face into Raph's shoulder, whose grip on his right hand was as iron-tight and unyielding as Leo's on his left. This was it. No way out.

Then the wall behind them deliberately gave way.