one thing Maria still doesn’t like to acknowledge is how her creators primed her to be a soldier the same way she does to her own progenies. Or if she does acknowledge it she doesn’t see it as the manipulation it was, she sees it as “preparing” them.
They had been watching her for weeks before they “saved” her, knowing she would be grateful to them for giving her the gift of immortality and freeing her from her captives. They knew the rage that boiled beneath a broken girl would be useful to protecting their coven. That she would do anything for a family she never had. What they didn’t bet on was her becoming the most powerful of them all, or being the sole survivor in their own bloody wars. How losing the only true family she’d ever known would turn her into a more fearsome warrior than they ever could have dreamed.