Stephanie Patrick is an agent with Magenta House.
Patrick was a willful teenager just entering college, full of rebellion and wanting little to do with her family. She knew there was still a lot of love but she could not bring herself to admit it. When they planned a trip to Europe and she was expected to go, she fought and used any excuse to avoid it. This made the trauma of learning the plane had exploded in flight, killing her entire family, leaving her alone and with tremendous guilt. She suffered a complete breakdown.
To cope, she turned to booze and when the money ran out and she needed some way to buy the liquor to drown the memories, she turned to turning tricks to survive. It was not long before she no longer really cared if she lived or died. That was when a man named Proctor showed up and told her plainly and bluntly that he had proof the explosion, and thus the deaths, was no accident.
Proctor, a freelance writer who wrote travelogues and reviews and the occasional news article, was kind to her and took her in. He treated her well, helped her sober up, and did not expect anything in return. When he was murdered, she suddenly had something to live for - revenge.
That is when she is approached by Magenta House. This is an ultra-secret government agency that does not exist. There is no official record of it nor is there any listing of the agents. The name its people call their organization is not official, either, as the name refers to the first building they used when they were established, a run-down forty-year old leading building that was an anonymous as the people inside. The purpose of this group is to take the intelligence other departments come up with, find the terrorists everyone is seeking, and eliminate them before they can be properly caught, tried, convicted, and then turned into martyrs behind bars rather than statistics. When possible, these deaths are made to seem accidents or internal conflicts but however it is done, killing the bad guys is the goal.
Given a chance to find the truth and exact revenge, Patrick agrees to work for Magenta House though their methods seem hardly better than the people she wants to find.