Page 5 of Pretty Little Assassin

I take a long sip of champagne and stare at the ceiling.

“Two million,” I say to the empty bathroom. “That’s a lot of stilettos.”

I’m running through approach strategies when my phone buzzes again on the marble ledge. Not The VEIL’s app this time. It’s a text from an unknown number.

I pick it up with wet fingers, leaving droplets on the screen.

The message is three lines long, and by the time I finish reading them, the champagne has gone flat in my mouth, and the bathwater might as well be ice.

Hello, Valentina. Or should I call you Asset 13?

It’s been a long time, stepdaughter.

Happy early Valentine’s Day.

The phone nearly slips from my hand. He’s supposed to be in prison. Six more years, minimum. That was the deal. That was the evidence I planted, the trial I watched from the back row of the courtroom, the only time in my life I cried in public, and those were tears of joy. Fifteen years. He got fifteen years, and he’d served nine when I last checked, which was⁠—

I sit up in the tub, water sloshing over the sides.

Which was two months ago.

Two months. Anything could have happened in two months. Early release. Parole. A well-placed bribe to the right official, because that’s what alphas like him do; they buy their way through every locked door the world puts in front of them.

I kill people for a living, and my hands do not shake. But they’re shaking now.

I read the message again, and then a third time, and each time the words rearrange themselves into something worse. He knows my VEIL designation; it’s supposed to be classified and untraceable.

The phone buzzes one more time.

I’ve been watching you work. You’ve grown up so well.

We have so much to discuss.

I stare at the ceiling and feel something I haven’t felt in years.

Fear.

2

VIKTOR

The problem with killing a man who’s an easy target is that it’s boring.

No challenge. No art. Just a body that needs to stop breathing, and the mechanics of the job. Like unclogging a drain. Necessary, unglamorous, and someone has to do it.

Tonight’s drain is a beta arms dealer named Enzo Ferretti who made the mistake of selling heat-inducing drugs to a trafficking ring that operates out of the northeast. Normally, I don’t care what betas sell to whom. Not my problem. Not my business. But the Primacy wants Ferretti gone because he’s been skimming profits from clients who also happen to be Primacy clients, and skimming from the Primacy is the kind of career decision that ends with someone like me standing in your kitchen.

Ferretti is sitting at his dining table in his uptown condo, eating leftover carbonara, when I step out of the shadows behind him. He doesn’t hear me. They never hear me. I’ve been inside his apartment for forty-seven minutes, standing perfectly still beside the refrigerator, watching him eat, check his phone, pick his teeth, and live the last unremarkable minutes of his unremarkable life.

I could have killed him the moment I entered. The door was child’s play, the security system laughable, and Ferretti’s only bodyguard is unconscious in the stairwell with a dislocated jaw and a lesson about checking blind corners. But I wanted to observe. You learn things about people in their private moments, the moments they think no one is watching. It’s a habit. Possibly a compulsion.

Ferretti shovels another forkful of pasta into his mouth, and I decide he’s had enough.

“Enzo.”

He chokes. Spins. Sees me. The fork clatters to the floor, and his hand goes for the gun on the table, but I’m already there, my palm flat on the weapon before his fingers touch it. I slide it away from him like clearing a dinner plate.

He starts to stand up. “Who the fuck⁠—”