Imagine this: a sweet house sits on the outskirts of a town in Alabama. One night, eight- year- old Gemma wakes in the dark. Did she hear a noise?
She isn't sure. The house is quiet.
She goes downstairs in a thin blue nightgown.
On the ground floor, a spike of cold fear goes through her. The living room is trashed, books and papers everywhere. The office is even worse. File cabinets have been tipped over. The computers are gone.
"Mama? Papa?" Little Gemma runs back upstairs to look in her parents' room.Their beds are bare.
Now she is truly petrified. She slams open the bathroom door. They aren't there. She darts outside.
The yard is ringed with looming trees. Little Gemma is halfway down the walkway when she realizes what she's seeing there, in the circle of light created by a streetlamp.
Mama and Papa lie in the grass, facedown. Their bodies are crumpled and limp. The blood pools black underneath them in the dark. Mama has been shot through the brain. She must have died instantly. Papa is clearly dead, but the only injuries Gemma can see are on his arms. He must have bled out from his wounds. He is curled around Mama, as if his only thought was of her in his last moments.
Gemma runs back into the house to call the police. The phone line is disconnected.
She returns to the yard, wanting to say a prayer, thinking to say good-bye, at least—but her parents' bodies have disappeared. Their killer has taken them away.
She does not let herself cry. She sits for the rest of the night in that circle of light from the streetlamp, soaking her nightgown in thickening blood.
For the next two weeks, Little Gemma is alone in that ransacked house. She stays strong. She cooks for herself and sorts through the papers left behind, looking for clues. As she reads the documents, she pieces together lives of heroism, power, and secret identities.
One afternoon she is in the attic, looking at old photographs, when a woman in black appears in the room.
The woman steps forward, but Little Gemma is quick. She throws a letter opener, hard and fast, but the woman catches it with her left hand. Little Gemma climbs a pile of boxes, grabs an overhead attic beam, and pulls herself up onto it. She sprints across the beam and squeezes through a high window onto the roof. Panic thuds in her chest.
The woman takes after her. Gemma leaps from the roof to the branches of the closest tree and breaks off a sharp stick to use as a weapon. She holds it in her mouth as she climbs down. She is running into the underbrush when the woman shoots her in the ankle.
The pain is intense and Little Gemma falls to the ground. Little Gemma is sure that her parents' killer has come to finish her off—but the woman in black helps her up and tends the wound. She removes the bullet and treats the injury with antiseptic.
As she bandages, the woman explains that she is a recruiter. She has been observing these past two weeks. Not only is Gemma the child of two outstandingly skilled people, she is a remarkable intellect and an athlete with a keen survival instinct. The woman wants to train Gemma and help her seek revenge. The woman in black knew Gemma's parents well and loved them. In fact, she is something of a long-lost aunt. She knows the secrets those parents kept from their beloved only daughter.
Here begins a highly unusual education. Gemma goes to a specialized academy housed in a renovated mansion on an ordinary street in New York City. She learns surveillance techniques, performs backflips, and masters the removal of handcuffs and straitjackets. She wears leather pants and loads her pockets with gadgets. There are lessons in foreign languages, social customs, literature, martial arts, the use of firearms, disguises, various accents, methods of forgery, and fine points of the law. The education lasts ten years. By the time it is complete, Gemma has become the kind of woman it would be a great mistake to underestimate.
That was the origin story of Gemma Lust Wilder. By the time she was living at the Sofitel Legend, Gemma preferred it to any other story she might tell about herself.