ABOUT
Alessandra Choi | 26 | Bratva | Jennie Kim
She doesn’t remember much about her life before Chicago, adopted from a village in South Korea at a young age, when hardly anything made sense anyway, but made even less sense being moved from one country to another. There’s not much that accompany her; a tatty, yellowed letter, an empty locket, and a scar across her left shoulder - all remnants of a life she can’t remember.
The family is nice, sweet, gentle, and above all else, patient. But she was always different, internally and externally. While the other children wanted to run around at the park, ride their bikes and collect scratches and bruises, Ales was busy inside, collecting things of interest. At first, it was bugs from the garden, then broken pieces of stone from the pavement, odd pieces of kitchenware, before high school brought her the most valuable thing to collect; information.
Information was like currency to her, and the power she felt when a piece of information about someone else was handed to her, placed in her palm like something valuable, was exhilarating. She couldn’t seem to get enough, and sought that power, trading secrets and information, doing what she needed and crafting whatever identity was required. It didn’t matter, anything for that sense of power that elated her.
It was sunny the afternoon she came home to find her mother and father waiting, shaky hands and teary cheeks awaiting her. The irony was that for someone who liked to collect information, collect secrets, collect words, she never collected her parent’s - her mother was sick. The chemotherapy worked at first, a hope blossomed, but then it didn’t. And then it really didn’t. Three years later, when all was done, there were no words left and the power that had once come was gone. It made sense now. Secrets and information was nothing. Being able to control life was where true power laid. While Ales and her father found it harder and harder to bridge the gap between each other, with the chasm filling with words that neither were willing to speak, she found solace in that power. She could still seek out those secrets. She could still control people. But what she couldn’t control was her father’s thoughts, and no matter how hard she tried, he couldn’t hear her, and found himself slipping away from her, from himself, where eventually he found himself somewhere that could attend to him, around the clock.
The decision was made; connections bred weakness, and it was exactly the sort of groundwork the Russian’s needed in their killers. The first body was her first taste of true power, that feeling that coursed through her fingertips like a drug, and she knew that this was it. The untouched yellow letter betrayed its thin black foreign secrets as it burnt away, and she stood on the banks of the river, pulling the empty locket from the confines of where it had lived for two decades. There was no hesitation as it was thrown into the depths of the river. And since then, there hadn’t been hesitation. Not once.
