Page 7 of Pretty Little Assassin

Bladed weapons. That means she gets intimate with her targets, meaning she has a way of getting close—and isn’t what she appears to be.

An omega who kills alphas by using their own biology against them.

The pattern is elegant. Synthetic heat pheromones to disable her targets. Alphas lose higher brain function around omega heat signatures; a biological vulnerability most of my kind refuse to acknowledge.

The synthetic heat won’t work on me. I can identify synthetic pheromones from fifteen meters. They smell flat, chemical, like perfume sprayed over rot. Real heat has texture and depth. I’ve never lost control around it, not once, and it has kept me alive in situations that would have buried a lesser alpha.

So, her primary weapon is useless against me.

I step over Ferretti’s body and leave through the service entrance into the cold night.

I don’t go after her. Not yet. Chasing a target you don’t understand is how you end up dead, and I have no intention of dying in this city. The weather’s too miserable, and the coffee isn’t good enough to justify the trip to the afterlife.

Instead, I go to work.

My apartment in the city’s west end is functional. Sparse. A king-size bed, a weapons rack, a laptop with enough processing power to crack most government databases if I’m patient. I am patient—it’s what separates professionals from corpses.

I track the dossier’s coordinates to The Ellsworth, downtown. Gerald Wallgreen III is on the guest list tonight. High-flying investment banker. Generous philanthropist. Scumbag who funnels omegas through his “wellness retreat” trafficking pipeline. Twelve confirmed victims. He’s the special kind of alpha who preaches about omega protection in the light and then guts their lives in the dark. If the little assassin doesn’t end him by dawn, I might just step in and handle the trash myself, pro bono.

But Wallgreen is her problem. Mine is finding where she sleeps.

The VEIL thinks they’re ghosts, but every shadow has a source. No one is truly invisible in this business, not if you know which digital artery to slice. It’s all about the traces. The footprints. The predictable patterns of people who think they’re smarter than the wolf on their trail. Find the right thread and pull until the whole thing unspools.

I start with her known aliases. The Zurich killing, fourteen months ago, connects to a hotel booking under the name Elena Vargas. Elena Vargas was linked to a rental agreement for a storage unit on the city’s outskirts, paid in cash but requiring an email address. The email address was a burner, but the IP it was registered from pings to a coffee shop in the east end. The coffee shop has exterior cameras. A contact of mine in law enforcement, who owes me his continued existence, pulls the feed for the right dates and runs the photo from the dossier through facial recognition.

One hit. Copper hair. Small frame. Walking from the coffee shop on three separate occasions over the past two months, always between 7 and 8 AM. Always on foot.

People are careful, right up until someone more careful comes along.

From there, it’s geometry. Walking radius from the coffee shop at an average pace. Cross-reference with properties in the area that match the profile of a safehouse: industrial, low foot traffic, multiple exit points. Filter for anything leased or purchased in the last three years under a name that doesn’t appear in any other database.

Three possibilities. I eliminate two in twenty minutes; one is an active machine shop; the other has a family of five living in the converted loft above it.

The third is a warehouse on a dead-end street in the east end, near the port. Leased eighteen months ago under the name Sarah Cain, who, according to every record I can find, doesn’t exist outside this single transaction.

Found you, little assassin.

3

VALENTINA

Fear lasts exactly fourteen seconds.

I know because I count. It’s a trick I learned from a true-crime podcast about a hostage negotiator who said that fear is just a chemical, and chemicals have half-lives, and if you count to fifteen, you’ll outlast it.

The podcast host was later arrested for insurance fraud, which raises questions about the quality of advice I take, but the counting works.

Fourteen seconds of ice in my veins, and then my hands stop shaking and curl into fists.

Rage.

I read the texts again. He’s been watching.

The bathwater is cold now. The champagne is flat. The dead alpha two floors below me is still dead. It’s the only thing going right tonight.

I’m halfway through composing a message to Donnie—trace this number, priority one, and if you’re asleep, I will personally unplug every monitor in your basement—when my phone screams.

Not a text. Not a call. The security app.