Anna truly and sincerely hated having to leave Zi’s side.

She sat with Randy and sipped coffee, discussing how to break the news to their children. Sometime around nine in the morning Zi’s eyes fluttered open, but she was in too much pain to do much more than accept a little food and water and hold hands.

Anna decided to leave before Zi’s surgery to go check in on Cao Cao, and agreed to take the pup over to the Cole’s house to watch Teddy and Jebediah until Randy could bear to leave his wife’s side.

Anna got home a half-hour past twelve as the day was winding up hot and bright, a stark contrast to the long, gloomy drive from last night, and it left Anna feeling refreshed, but her body was still heavy from a lack of sleep.

Cao Cao was all over her when she got home, having never been separated from her for that long, with a present behind the couch in the living room waiting for her arrival to clean it up.

The dog was walked, his food bowl refilled, his water refreshed, content to be with his master again.

With a deep breath, Anna prepped herself. She had spent the past two days wallowing in depression as memories of what happened raced through her head, but…

Somebody had the gall to shoot Zi.

To try and murder her.

Anna sat down in her office and opened up the false floor to punch a number into her private safe, and reached inside to pull out the manilla folder she’d taken from Devin’s office.

She stared between the folder in one hand, and the bottle of Cozitomine in the other.

Zi didn’t want her involved. Of course not, the moment Anna put her foot in from any angle, this entire incident would get a lot more complicated, a lot messier, and there was a strong likelihood that Zi would have to finish the job she’d sworn to fifteen years ago.

She could be a homebody, baking cookies, calling her daughter, watching her shows, petting her dog, and watching after her little surrogate family living not even ten minutes down the road. Not a psychic, just a single American mother letting the world pass her by, her hands clean, her ears far from the hushed whisperings of the FBI, and unnoticed by an organization of lethal psychics.

It was the life she was adjusted to, and she enjoyed its simplicity and quietness.

But as she looked up at her desk and saw the picture of her best friend, all she could imagine was Zi swaddled up in that bed like a premature birth, no word on whether she’d be completely fine, or if there were complications…

And she saw a picture of Madeline, young and so outrageously beautiful that sometimes even Anna felt a small pang of envy, but so very vulnerable, her intelligence and responsibility poor defenses against true, vicious intent.

And then Tasha. Anna stared at her daughter’s smiling face, and an image flashed in her head of her baby girl in that hospital bed, eyes closed and skin pale, tubes coming out of her body, uncertain she’d wake up, uncertain she’d be whole, but for certain sure that her baby girl wouldn’t be the innocent, cheery little imp she normally was if she’d been attacked.

Anna looked at the Cozitomine that Rickard had given her, and quietly set it down, turning her attention to the manilla folder.

She had a hand in this mess, somehow, someway, she knew that for sure, and regardless of what Zi begged of her, she was going to have a hand in cleaning it too.

Zi was right, she was a real free-spirit… and as her computer whirred to life, and her mouse moved across its pad and her keyboard clicked entirely free of her hands, so was her mind.