It was a painfully mild day in July when Lilyana Petrova came kicking and screaming into the world. If her entrance had been any indication of her future, her parents willfully ignored the signs, and were invested in making sure she had all the trappings this life could offer her. She was the fifth child of Nikolai and Alexandra Petrov, and their careers as a businessman and a successful orthopedic doctor were enough to give Lily and her four older brothers the life of luxury that the Petrov family had become accustomed to for generations. Even from a young age, her parents could tell that she was bright, supremely inquisitive, and always a charming little ball of light that refused to go to sleep when they had dinner parties that were well past her bedtime.

Nikolai's ties to the business world saw him making friends and enemies in high places, and his notoreity for being a shark backfired when one afternoon, his darling Lily went missing. Rumor has it, she had been at the park with her nanny (a young woman that had been working for the Petrovs for a few years), and the woman turned her back for a split second, and Lily was gone. Money was no object when it came to finding his little girl, and Nikolai greased the palms of quite a few shady characters, as well as hounding the police to locate his missing child. It took an entire month of despair on the part of the Petrovs before the kidnappers finally came forward with a ransom demand, and that let Nikolai know that this all had to do with business. Before he had the chance to write the check to get his daughter back, the police followed a lead that took them to a new housing development in the suburbs of Saint Petersburg, finding Lily drugged and out of it in a downstairs bedroom that blackout curtains over the windows. Lily (only six at the time) had been physically unharmed, aside from the drugs that she'd been pumped with for nearly a month to keep her compliant. She claimed that she didn't really remember what happened to her, and no amount of talking to specialists brought those memories back. She'd done a bang up job of blocking them. It was determined that a rival company, owned by Dmitriy Sokolov (a man of questionable morals), wanted to force Nikolai's hand with a deal he was trying to acquire, and decided that the best way to make that happen was by kidnapping the youngest member of the Petrov family, and holding her for ransom. What they hadn't been expecting was just how well connected the man was, and after he'd swiftly dealt with the men responsible, Nikolai and his wife decided it was best to move back to her home country of America.

The Harrison family welcomed their daughter and her brood back to her hometown of Boston, and while it was a culture shock to the Petrovs, they were nothing if not adaptable. Lily and her siblings were swiftly enrolled Milton Academy, and dealt with the added security their father believed they needed in the wake of Lily's kidnapping. Suddenly, they were being escorted everywhere by a plain clothes bodyguard that doubled as a nanny to the children, driving them to and from school, to piano lessons, ballet, soccer, and all the other activities their mother felt were instrumental in raising well-rounded children. Lily excelled in everything she put her little mind to, but her natural grace made her a natural at ballet. A resolve that had been building in the child since birth became even more apparent when she dedicated without fuss to the long hours of practice she had to endure. It pleased her mother that she was dedicating her time to something constructive, as she'd never truly worked through what happened during the month she'd been gone, and her father begrudingly accepted it, but required that she keep her grades up in order to participate in her extra-curricular of choice.

Dance was such a pervasive hobby, that every waking moment of Lily's day was dedicated to honing her craft. When she turned thirteen, and she transferrred to the British International School of Boston, Lily also moved on to the more demanding part of ballet: pointe. Her instructor suggested that she join the ballet school full-time, but her parents refused, much to Lily's annoyance. So, in an attempt to stay on top of everything, she carefully compartmentalized everything to make it all fit. By sixteen, she had developed an addiction to adderall, and was working her way towards a mild eating disorder, and it took an emergency hospitalization when she passed out during French before her parents realized that she didn't have everything together.

Her penchant for exuding a sort confidence (that puts everyone else at ease so they don't question her) had backfired, and it only made her parents more wary of letting her out of their sight. She promised to see a therapist on a weekly basis, stopped hanging out with the kids at school that turned her onto prescription drugs, and begrudgingly admitted that dance was no longer the healthy hobby that it once was. A lifetime of eating, sleeping, and breathing dance left her bereft of the choices for her future. Yes she was smart, but was she even good at anything else?

The end of her time at the British International School of Boston came and went, and her parents expectantly waited for her to tell them what her plans would be. She'd gotten accepted to most of the Universities she applied to, but suddenly the thought of leaving Boston was daunting. Lily also recognized that going back into a prep school setting wouldn't be healthy, so while she'd been given a green light for Harvard, she accepted a spot at Boston University. Her first semester was spent trying to get her bearings enough to decide her course of study, and how to navigate the social heirarchy of a public university. Her father pushed for her to get a Business degree, her mother suggested Lily find something that would satisfy her creativity, and Lily made friends with Theatre Geeks, and Computer Science Nerds, Jocks, and even a few other Russian Immigrants. After jumping into the sea of choice that BU offered, Graphic Design was where she landed, and much like everything she attempted in her life, Lily excelled. The young girl's curiosity about her father's world turned into a Business minor, and she even joined a Sorority along the way.