The bedroom was cold. It always was.
The wallpaper had peeled in long, curling strips from the damp corners, and the tiny hearth at the far end of the room hadn't held a fire in any memory she owned. Just soot and silence.
Tracey—though she didn't know that was her name—lay on the hard mattress with only a threadbare sheet and a lumpy old blanket to hold back the chill. Her thin frame curled tightly under the covers, trying to vanish.
Next door, the voices had started again.
"You're my wife," came the thick growl of the man who lived in the house. Her dad, they told the world. But not to her. Never to her. "I've got needs!"
"And I've got a headache," the woman snapped. "Like always—whenever you've been drinking."
It was always the same argument, always the same end. Dishes would clatter. A chair would be scraped harshly against the floor. And then silence—heavy, wrong silence that pressed against her like a hand over the mouth. A terrible weight.
She clutched the blanket tighter, willing it to be morning.
But then the floor creaked outside her door.
Her heart thumped once. Twice.
The handle turned slowly.
He slipped in like something oozing through a crack. His breath was heavy, ragged. The stink of beer and stale fags rolled ahead of him.
She shut her eyes and pretended to sleep, holding her breath, small as possible.
But the mattress dipped beside her.
The blanket was peeled back.
"Hey, little shit," he slurred. "You awake?"
A warm, callused hand slid over her shin, rough fingers pausing and pressing, creeping up her leg in slow, testing movements.
He licked his lips.
"You're pretty. Real pretty," he muttered. "Time you became a woman. My woman."
She opened her eyes—and saw it. Him, fumbling open his trousers, pulling out what made her stomach lurch.
She scrambled back against the headboard.
He grabbed her ankle. Hard. His nails digging in.
"Don't fight," he hissed. "You want this. You need this."
Her heel kicked out, wild and frantic.
Crack.
His breath left him in a strangled grunt as her foot slammed between his legs. He crumpled sideways, wheezing and cursing. His eggs scrambled.
She didn't think.
She rolled, hitting the floor hard on the far side of the bed. Her knees stung on the bare boards. She shot upright, heart pounding, eyes darting for the door looking for escape.
He was already blocking it—on his knees, clutching himself, but still full of hate.
"You little bitch!" he growled. "I'll kill you for that. Then I'll—"
He lunged.
She stepped back—into the hearth. Her hand brushed cold iron.
The poker.
Old, heavy, rusted. Left from a time before radiators.
She grabbed it with both hands.
He reached for her.
She swung.
The sound it made was wrong—a hollow, sickening crack. It caught the side of his head just above the temple. His eyes rolled, mouth still open.
Then he dropped. Hard. Blood pooling around his head.
She stood there shaking, the poker still raised, her own breath roaring in her ears. Time seemed to pause.
Then she dropped it and ran.
Down the stairs. Through the kitchen.
Barefoot, she yanked open the back door. The air outside hit her like ice, but she didn't stop. She grabbed whatever she could reach from the washing line—some too-large jeans, a hoodie that smelled of bleach—and ran into the night.
No plan. No shoes. No name.
Just a girl. Escaping a house full of silence.
She didn't know how far she ran. Just that the rows of houses thinned, streetlamps flickered overhead, and the pavement cut into her bare feet like broken promises. Sharp. But reminders she was alive.
The clothes she'd stolen off the line hung loose on her skinny frame. The jeans bunched around her ankles, slowing her down, and the hoodie sleeves swallowed her hands. But she kept running, until the orange sodium lights turned into the dim, grey haze of the city centre.
Birmingham at night was all shadow and noise. Shouting in the distance. The rumble of buses. Laughter from behind pub doors. She was invisible in it. Just one more child lost in the concrete jungle and forced to survive.
She ducked into an alley beside a kebab shop and dropped behind a row of bins, heart still pounding within like she'd stolen it too.
Her breath steamed in the air like a smoker.
Her stomach twisted with hunger at the smell of Kebabs. She had gone to bed hungry. Again.
She curled up tight, the hoodie pulled over her knees, and tried not to cry. Crying was a weakness. And she'd already spent all her tears back in that house. She slept.
The next day, she tried to act older. Tougher.
She wandered the markets, eyeing the stalls with all the caution of a fox near a trap. She stole a bruised apple. A packet of half-eaten biscuits left behind on a bench. A bottle of water from an unlocked bin lorry.
No one helped. No one saw. She was part of the invisible world. The hidden underbelly of society.
She asked a woman for directions to a shelter and got told to move on. She asked a man for change and got a cold glance and a curse.
By the third night, she stopped asking.
It didn't take long for her to learn the rules.
Keep moving. Don't look too clean, or too dirty. Don't sleep in the same place twice. Trust no one.
Especially not men.
She was only eight, but she'd always been tall for her age—and pretty, though she'd never really understood it. On the street, that made her a target.
Twice in her first week, men tried to lure her into their cars. One offered her money. The other didn't bother pretending.
She ran from both.
The second time, she found a broken bottle and kept the jagged neck tucked in the pocket of her hoodie for the next month. Just in case.
Weeks passed. She couldn't tell how many.
She found warmth in laundrettes if she timed it right. Sometimes she snuck into the back of buses and rode the loops to stay warm. She stole sanitary pads from pharmacy bins and learned how to layer them and newspaper under her clothes when it got too cold.
Sometimes older street kids gave her scraps. Usually, they ignored her.
She got mean. Very fast.
She swore. She spat. She learned how to stand like she might have a knife, even when she didn't.
But every night, when the noise faded and the streetlights buzzed overhead, she curled into herself and held tight to the old rust stain on her jeans—the one that reminded her of the rusty poker—and told herself she'd never go back.
Never.
She didn't see him coming.
She was eleven by then. Hardened. Fast. Smarter than she had any right to be. But she was also hungry - distracted by the scent of fried chicken drifting out from the bins behind the takeaway, making her stomach gurgle like a boiling kettle. She'd taken a risk, slipped behind the alley gate, and started rooting through the bags.
That's when he grabbed her.
Big hands. He smelled of cheap aftershave and sweat, and something else, possibly spices. A foreign voice like sandpaper in her ear.
"Easy now. Don't scream, I'll be gentle."
She did scream—bit and kicked and clawed like a cornered animal. But he was stronger, and she was so tired. Weakened by hunger.
He slammed her into the wall. The bricks scraped her face, the air went out of her lungs, and for a second she thought: This is it. I was stupid. I die here. I die for half a cold chip and a bag of grease.
Then something kicked in.
Not fear. Not rage. Something deeper.
She dropped like dead weight, just like she'd seen rats do when they played possum.
He leaned in, confused, grabbing at her shoulder—and that's when she surged up, smashed the back of her head into his chin. He grunted. She bit his arm, hard, tasting blood and old pennies. He screamed, blood pouring from his mouth where he had severed his tongue.
She ran. For the second time.
Didn't stop running. Not for blocks. Not even when her lungs burned and her legs threatened to give out.
She hid in a public toilet that night. Locked the stall and curled up on the seat lid, shaking. There was blood on her lips. Hers and his. She was too afraid to leave the stall and rinse her mouth.
She didn't cry.
Couldn't.
Tears were a luxury.
But in the silence, she whispered one word to herself, over and over, like a prayer.
"London. London. London…"
It had always sounded like a fairytale city. Like the stories she heard in the shelter before she got kicked out. They said you could find anything in London—money, safety, a job, a future.
Gold, even. Paved into the bloody streets.
She believed it. Needed to believe it.
So she found a lift with a lorry driver. Said she was sixteen. Said she was going to see her sister.
He didn't ask many questions. Just smiled too wide.
When he stopped at a service station and tried to put his hand on her thigh, she stole his wallet and slipped out the back door.
London greeted her with the stink of fumes, the roar of traffic, and a sky that never really got dark.
She found out quickly: there was no gold. Only concrete and people who never looked you in the eye.
The shelters were full. The hostels were worse. Girls like her were meat for the men in the underpasses, the ones with warm coats and dead eyes.
She tried to work. Cleaned dishes in a greasy diner for two weeks until they found out she didn't have papers and shorted her pay. She bagged groceries for a corner shop until the owner's wife got jealous and threw her out. Always the same. Too young, too pretty, too something.
She slept in shop doorways, on rooftops, in the narrow space between skips. God knows how many times she was nearly crushed. The weight in her belly grew heavier every night—the fear that maybe this was all life would ever be.
Then she got sick. A fever that clung to her bones and made her sweat through two layers of stolen jumpers. She passed out behind a tube station, convinced she wouldn't wake up.
She didn't expect to be saved.
But she was.
The streets had thinned by morning. Most people were still asleep, or hiding from the rain. She lay curled behind a skip outside Victoria station, soaked to the skin, lips cracked, body burning with fever.
No one noticed the girl collapsed in the alley. Or if they did, they looked away. That was London's first rule: Don't get involved.
But he saw her.
He'd been tracking someone else—a man who owed a debt and thought he could hide in the grey spaces of the city. He was good at finding people. He didn't just look. He watched. Patterns. Shadows. Gut instinct honed by decades of war.
And something made him stop.
There, half-hidden under torn black plastic and damp cardboard, was a girl.
He crouched without hesitation, one knee in a puddle. Her skin was hot to the touch, her clothes ragged, her body all edges and angles. She couldn't have been more than ten or eleven.
When he lifted her gently, her head lolled against his chest. She was mumbling something in her sleep. A name? A warning? He didn't catch it.
But she clutched his jacket like she knew him.
His name was Sergeant Daniel Reeve. Late of 16th/5th Queen's Royal Lancers. Joined at seventeen, lied about his age, fought in every major British conflict from the Falklands to Basra.
He'd done things that never made the papers.
By the time he left the army, he was fifty and had scars in places most men didn't even have nerves. He'd served with Special Operations Command in two unofficial theatres and could kill with everything from a bootlace to a biro.
But it wasn't the fighting that broke him. It was the silence that came after.
He tried civvy street for six months. Desk job. Smart shirts. Paperwork.
Then came the drinking. The nightmares. The day he almost put a bullet through his own head in a B&B in Margate.
His past died long before that.
Mingshan—his wife. Beautiful, fierce, soft in all the ways he wasn't. She taught Mandarin at King's and used to sing in the kitchen while she cooked. Their daughter, Lily, had her mother's eyes and his stubborn chin.
They were on the Piccadilly Line the morning it happened. July 7th, 2005.
He was in Kandahar.
He never forgave himself.
After that, he disappeared. No address. No pension office. No calls from old mates.
Just a ghost in the city's veins.
He worked when it suited him. Quiet jobs. Contracts that paid well in cash and silence. He had contacts across Europe, in places that didn't ask questions. But he always came back to London. Like some part of him was still trying to fix something that couldn't be fixed.
He took the girl to a place no one knew existed—an attic above an old printworks in Southwark. The only way in was over the roof and through a locked steel hatch. The kind of place a man builds when he doesn't want to be found.
She didn't wake for two days. When she did, she bolted upright, wild-eyed and ready to fight.
He didn't stop her.
Just stood there, arms crossed, letting her swing until the fever ran out of her punches.
Then he gave her water.
A slice of bread.
And a name.
"Princess," he said gruffly, offering a blanket. "Until you want something better."
She didn't speak for the first three days.
Not a word.
She'd watch him from behind the bedframe—eyes sharp and animal, like a fox waiting for a trap to snap shut. She'd only eat when he wasn't looking. Wouldn't sleep until she'd checked every window, every lock, and wedged a chair under the door.
The place had nothing but the essentials: a mattress, a folding table, a trunk full of old army gear, and a battered punching bag hanging from a beam. He didn't explain where the food came from. Or how the place stayed warm despite the broken window. It just was.
She didn't ask.
He didn't push.
He spoke little, and when he did, his voice was low and firm—like gravel over calm water. She caught him reading sometimes, muttering under his breath in strange languages. Once he asked her in perfect Cantonese if she'd like more rice. The next day, it was German. Then Russian. She didn't know what to make of him.
On the fourth day, she tried to sneak out.
He let her get all the way to the edge of the roof before speaking.
"You're free to go," he said from the shadows, arms folded. "But if you fall, you'll break your back. Roof tiles are wet. Wind's shifting north."
She froze.
He stepped into view, calm as a statue. "Don't run. Learn."
That was the first time she really looked at him.
He wasn't young. Greying at the temples, short-cropped hair like steel wire. Lines around the eyes. But his body moved with the quiet control of someone who'd never forgotten how to kill.
She stayed.
But she made him earn it.
The training began when she snapped at him for giving her soup.
"I'm not your charity case," she'd hissed, clutching the bowl like a weapon.
He didn't argue.
Just set it down and said, "Then earn your keep. Show me what you can do."
She tried to fight him.
He didn't hit back. Just redirected, deflected, stepped aside like her rage was wind and he was stone.
The next day, he laid out a makeshift gym in the attic. Told her the names of muscles. Taught her how to fall without breaking something. How to breathe while punching. How to throw someone twice her size.
He taught her pressure points.
Disarms.
How to turn everyday objects into weapons.
How to read body language like a second language.
She resisted at first—mocking, sarcastic. But every time she thought she'd outsmart him, he was already two steps ahead.
He didn't yell. Never raised a hand in anger.
He taught.
And in that silent, disciplined world, she began to feel something she hadn't known in years:
Safe.
Weeks turned to months.
He started taking her out across rooftops at night, teaching her how to move in silence, how to trust her feet and not her eyes. They'd go for miles across the skyline, her laughing when she finally cleared a ten-foot jump on her first try.
In the early mornings, he showed her how to cook proper food. How to sew. How to pick locks. How to vanish in a crowd.
"You need a name," he said one day as they sat watching the Thames glint like oil.
"I've got one," she muttered. "It's—"
He raised a brow. Waited.
She scowled. "Nonya."
"Nonya? Is that foreign?"
She shrugged. "Short for nonya business."
He chuckled. A deep, tired sound.
"Alright, Nonya," he said. "We'll go with that."