Or that was Ellie’s memory of it. That and feeling that the world was this great big monster that could not only bite you but devour you whole, no matter how many people loved you. She had grown up in a state of perpetual fear of not only the dark but also the light. It wasn’t until she became a cop that she reclaimed herself—from that day forward she would no longer be a victim.

Life after her brother meant moving across the country every few months and being homeschooled and living under different names and having heavily supervised playdates with her mother acting like a bodyguard, constantly scanning for potential threats. Ellie was what her mother always called her—the middle name of some cousin Ellie had never met. Ellie was twelve, and she embraced her new identity as she’d always done, as she’d been trained to do. Amanda Cullen, who had lived on the first floor of a rental home in Westmont, no longer existed, except in her mind. Amanda Cullen was, for all intents and purposes, dead.

As for her brother? There were no pictures of him around the house or on her mother’s phone. J.C. could be spoken about only at home, only when she and her mother were alone.

The Los Angeles police are still looking for him, her mother would say in the beginning. Keep praying. Don’t give up hope.

That became: He’s gone. He’s probably never coming home.

Then: We have to live our lives. Maybe one day things will change, but we need to live our lives.

Things did change, at least for Ellie, when she made the decision to move from Boston, where she had settled with her mother, to attend a small college in Los Angeles, against her mother’s wishes. Christ, what fights they’d had over that. Running away from your problems and fears, Ellie had learned at a young age, only magnified them, turned you into a victim. Victims ran away from their shit. Ellie wanted to run to them. Into them. That was how you dealt with life. After she got her degree in criminal justice, she enrolled in the LAPD Police Academy.

Now she had access to the most powerful and interconnected law enforcement databases from all over the world. Ellie quickly discovered that no one named Jonathan Cullen from Westmont had ever been reported missing. She confronted her mother, who admitted that she never reported to the police what had happened.

Why? Because, her mother explained, she recognized the voice of one of the gunmen that night. The voice, she was certain, belonged to a cop who was well-known in the neighborhood. She couldn’t go to the police, because they might come after Ellie. This cop, her mother had learned, was working with other cops to abduct carriers from all over the country and sell them to blood farms.

Save your daughter or stay and try to find your son? Pick one.

She picked her daughter.

Even as her mother was dying, the body lying in the hospital bed looking more like a husk by the day, the cancer having feasted on all her organs—even in pain and on morphine she refused to share key details from that night that would help Ellie find J.C. or, at the very least, find out what had become of him, if he was alive or dead. It’s for your own protection, her mother kept telling her. Those men are still out there—they could find you. Promise me you’ll let it go.