Helena Bertinelli was born a princess in a Mafia Empire she blissfully knew nothing of. She knew her parents loved her, and her family loved to get together at her father's house. They would descend their home in Gotham Heights to see musicals in the city, or go to the zoo, or the circus, or the museums to see the dinosaur bones. It was a happy childhood, until the day cruel men in black masks kidnapped her right after school ended at Saint Sebastian’s in the Heights.

What exactly happened to Helena is hard to work out. Police reports suggest various mental and physical traumas, but Don Bertinelli pulled whatever strings necessary to ensure no one would examine his baby girl and put that filth on a report any of his enemies could pay some clerk to get ahold of. Her father told her to put it behind her, that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger” and encouraged her not to speak of it again.

Not even a year later, a van full of masked gunmen burst into the Bertinelli estate in Gotham Heights, and murdered every living member of the Gotham City Bertinelli family. All except the little girl too numb to be scared; without fear little Helena could think, slipping under the corpse of a still bleeding uncle. Immediately after Helena was returned to the Sicilian Bertinelli clan, the "mother clan" there was talk of marrying Helena off to a distant cousin, or a rapid riser in the Sicilian scene. It was then one of the greatest assassins of the early 20th century, Giovanni Bertinelli, took Helena with him one early morning to hunt fowl.

Giovanni would later admit perhaps he was pushing himself to find something when he took the girl hunting that morning. His own parents had been murdered in a war within the Cosa Nostra. He knew that drive for vengeance. Just as much as he knew a natural born killer when he saw one; and in Helena, he saw it in spades. Helena Bertinelli had no childhood after that day. Her training began immediately and unrestricted. She holds degrees in various engineering specialties and economics, with post-graduate degrees from the London School of Economics. She achieved this by the age of 22 while receiving training in secret from Giovanni and Lady Shiva.

Where her father was a quick minded and ruthless businessman and Don, Helena had become a true master in the art and science of international business. Helena leveraged family wealth inherited from her father, and uncle, and bought failing and crumbling business after failing and crumbling business only to turn downsize, raise product quality, and worker efficiency...and in turn cost efficiency of the bottom line. Sometimes called a 'corporate terrorist', the result was nearly inevitable, what businesses would assist her the most in her ultimate goals were kept while all others were sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder.

When Helena Bertinelli returned to America it was on the cover of Business Week and being covered by Bloomberg and CNBC as a Private Equity darling. Using the ultimate power broker of money, Helena used to the fact that she could make more of it than anyone else available to usher her return to not only the Gotham Mafia, but to the American Mafia as a whole. Now the majority owner but never direct manager of multi corporations, Helena has turned her focus squarely on the Mafia...and her quest to ruin it from the inside-out.

Taking on the missiongiven to her by God the day she played dead under the corpse of an uncle, Helena has decided a theatrical method of hitting the Mafia from the outside while secretly exposing and bleeding them from the inside by taking on the mantle of a former feared and dangerous enemy of the Mafia: The Huntress.

She is neither villain or hero, merely a very dangerous and resourceful young woman on a fanatical quest for blood and revenge. A quest that can only end in her own death or the death of the American Mafia as it is known or had ever been known. A fact she has willingly accepted.