Iona Driver had not been born as such. Back when she was young and still living in the same town where she had been born, she’d been known as Iona Milosovici, younger sister of Andre Milosovici. For all she remembered, they had been happy despite their poverty and their lack of parents. She had a room all to herself and sometimes the heating went out, but Andre always managed to find more. Years later she would come to suspect that he stole them, but she didn’t think about that a lot. It wasn’t their idyllic life that consumed her thoughts, but instead the moment that had torn it all apart.
They had just been eating dinner, some simple soup and bread as they always had. She was telling Andre about her day at school with her mouth full of corn bread, rambling about things he probably didn’t care about but listened to anyway. Though over two decades had passed, she remembered the way the door crashed open and three men with guns made their way inside without being invited. Andre shoved her under the table, quickly moving between her and the men. Words were exchanged, half of which she couldn’t hear over the sound of her own muffled and terrified tears. The guns fired only couple times, all but one of the bullets tearing their way through the only family the had. The last one tore through the skin and muscle of her hip, leaving a scar that would never fade. When the ambulance came and the paramedics took her away from her brother’s body, she was repeating the one word she remembered the men saying, clinging to it like it would give her answers.
Constantin.
Three years later, she was adopted by a family in a foreign land that couldn’t say her last name. They told her through a translator that she was now Iona Driver, that she wouldn’t be returning to Romania, that she would be learning English and becoming a part of a family that she had never met before. It took years for her to adjust, but eventually she grew to love her family and grew to love the opportunities that she got. Now, twenty years after being taken away from the land where her brother was murdered, she finally had the skill to chase after his murderers.
It took a bit of digging around to find out about the Constantin family and even more to find someone she could approach -- and lie to -- without being immediately shot. Probably, at least. There was a son in the family that had been disowned and was now living in America. If anyone was willing to give up their family secrets, she figured it would be someone who had been wronged by them. So she found his address and, putting on her best sad face, prepared to spin a story about her car breaking down and her cell phone dying as she knocked on his door.