@worthless-weight-in-gold (for jim)
Jamie had always been told that her brother Jim had died as a child. As infrequently as she considered her childhood, when she did so, she wondered whether the absence of her sibling had affected her somewhat. Her elder brother had died too young for her to truly miss him -- she simply missed the idea of having an equal. From what little she recalled of Jim, she remembered that he was far more intelligent than other boys his age -- she had vague memories, blurred with the point of view of childhood, of him reading books and studying insects in jars. Where the other children they knew were slow and immature, playing pretend games and building fairy houses and running wild, Jim and Jamie had sat together in their respective silences, Jim reading and Jamie drawing. Neither had yet reached double digits, but they were both far intellectually superior to their classmates.
Jamie had not yet been six when her brother had died, and her parents had never spoken of him afterwards. His photos had been slowly removed from the walls, and his bedroom had become an office for her father, and that was that. Jamie had barely dwelt on her brother Jim, the quiet and genius sibling she had lost. She had grown up, and first followed in the footsteps of mob bosses and cartel leaders, before forming her own organisation, the scope of which was almost unbelievable. She’d moved to the United States shortly after her parents deaths, and planted the roots of her group there, but it had spread across the world, bringing with it a wealth of knowledge unprecedented in criminal history.
And it was then that she heard whispers of a similar group, with a leader whom people called Moriarty, operating primarily in England. So few people knew that Jamie Moriarty was at the heart of her operation -- there were several decoy Moriarty’s as it was, and most knew her only as M, if at all -- that the information about a carbon copy of her organisation was unforgivably slow to reach her. But when it finally did, she made the necessary arrangements to travel to London to seek out the spider at the centre of this identical web. She imagined that it was some foolish low-rung criminal wishing to make a name for themselves, using her established identity to garner respect.
So, she finally made her way to a warehouse known to be owned by a shell cooperation, a front truly owned by this ‘Moriarty’ imposter. Her intelligence had informed her that he would be visiting this place that afternoon, so she had shot the guards present, and was now waiting in perfect stillness and silence, expecting to torture and subsequently murder whomever had been stupid enough to dare use her identity.
