Prologue
Prologue
I’m Judy Williams. Some people call me a genius lawyer. Others call me a psychopath. I don’t bother correcting either of them—because I always win.
And when you always win, people stop caring how you do it.
From the outside, my life is perfect. A mansion in a quiet, expensive neighbourhood. The kind where nothing ever goes wrong—at least, that’s what people like to believe. I have the looks people admire without saying it out loud. Long red hair, sharp green eyes—features I got from my mother. Back in school, the popular girls used to mock me for it. Red head, they’d say, like it was an insult.
Now? It’s the same thing that makes people remember me.
Funny how that works.
My dating life, though, is practically nonexistent. Not because I can’t—but because I don’t see the point. People are predictable. Temporary. Replaceable. It’s easier that way.
But there’s one thing about my life that doesn’t fit into this perfect picture. One thing I’ve never told anyone.
My past.
It’s… incomplete.
My family was far from perfect. That much I know. The rest feels like pieces of a story someone else lived—a story I was forced to forget.
What I do remember is this: my mother killed my father.
She was given the death sentence. And just like that, both of them were gone.
I was too young to understand what really happened. Too young to question it. And maybe that’s why no one ever gave me the full truth.
All I was left with were fragments.
After their deaths, I inherited my father’s assets—far more than any middle-class man should have ever had. No one explained that either. Money just… appeared, along with a new life I didn’t ask for.
I didn’t stay with my father’s sisters. They hated my mother, blamed her for everything, even before she killed him. Living with them would’ve been unbearable.
Instead, I was sent to my uncle and aunt. Compared to the rest of my family, they were… tolerable. Distant, but not cruel. And at that point, that was enough.
There’s something else.
I don’t know my parents’ names.
Not their real ones.
After they died, I was given a new identity. New documents. A new life. And somewhere along the way, my mind decided it was easier to forget than to remember. A coping mechanism, they’d probably call it.
I call it convenient.
But memories have a way of slipping through, no matter how deep you bury them.
There’s one moment I can never forget.
The last thing my mother ever said to me.
I don’t remember her face clearly. I don’t remember the room. I don’t even remember what I felt at that time.
Just her voice.
Soft. Calm.
Almost relieved.
“We are safe now, honey.”
Safe.
I’ve spent my entire life wondering what she meant by that.
And more importantly—
who she was trying to protect me from.
