Chapter 1

I was five when I found them.

The men with shadowed faces and quick hands, the kind mothers warned their children about.

I didn't run. I walked right up to them, my small hand clutching a worn, silver locket.

"Take me," I said. My voice didn't shake.

They looked at each other, then at me, a small girl in an expensive dress, standing alone near the park's edge.

One of them knelt. "Where are your parents, little bird?"

"They don't want me," I told him, the lie tasting like ash. The truth was worse: they wanted too much of me.

I knew about the whispers, the late-night calls Mr. Hamilton made in his study.

"A perfect match for Clara," he'd said, his voice cold, like the steel instruments in the sterile rooms.

Clara was my older sister, always sick, always needing something from me. My blood, my marrow. I was their spare parts kid, conceived in a lab for her.

I' d seen the ledger, too. A big, dark book Mr. Hamilton kept hidden. I only saw a few pages when he left it open once, but the words "shipment" and "specimen" and numbers next to names burned into my mind. I remembered where he kept it.

Mrs. Hamilton, my mother, she just nodded, her face smooth and empty. She' d lost the locket I held, a tiny, unique thing, and never even looked for it. I found it, kept it. Proof.

The traffickers took me. It was better than staying.

They weren't kind. No one was.

Years passed. Faces changed. Dark rooms, hunger, fear.

Then, Brenda Miller.

A trailer in the Nevada desert, baked by the sun.

Brenda called me "Trash."

Her eyes were mean, her hands quick to strike.

Her daughter, Ashley, was a mirror of her, lazy and cruel.

I cleaned, I cooked, I took their hits. I waited.

Ava would have wanted me to wait, to be smart.

Ava, the real Hamilton daughter, my only friend in that cold, rich house.

She was frail, already given too much to Clara.

She' d died in my arms when we tried to run from the first set of traffickers, the ones I thought would be an escape.

"Promise me, Jenna," she' d whispered, blood on her lips. "Make them pay."

I promised.

So I endured Brenda. I remembered the ledger. I kept the locket hidden.

I waited for the Hamiltons to need another piece of me, or who they thought was me.