Page 74 of Pretty Little Assassin

I pick the phone back up, and the screen splits. Zero’s face appears beside Donnie’s.

“I heard,” she says. “The Madam is mobilizing everyone. Every asset who isn’t already deployed. It won’t be enough.”

"That's the point. He knows it won't be enough. He's the switch. If I get to him first, there is no order."

"And if the order doesn't need him?" Zero says. "If it's already queued and he's just the man who can call it back?"

I stop.

She's right, and it's worse. Killing him doesn't stop it. Killing him makes it permanent.

"Then I don't kill him." I hear how that sounds, and I say it anyway. "Not until it's dead."

"It's the only math that works, Zero. Forty-three names, two hours. We can't win a race he designed. But I can reach the man holding the starting gun."

"The order is sitting on something he's holding. A phone, a laptop, some dead-man key. If I can't disarm it, then I hand it to Donnie"

"And if it fires the second his heart stops?" Zero says.

"Then I keep his heart going until Donnie has killed it."

Viktor’s hands slip from my wrists. His jaw is tight, a vein pulsing at his temple.

“Then I go with you,” he says.

“No. He wants me alone. If you come, you jeopardize the whole thing. Forty-three lives, Viktor. I’m not gambling them on your ego, or mine, or on this.” I gesture between us, at whatever this has become. “He wants me alone. So I go alone. That’s not up for debate.”

“I’m not letting you walk in there alone.”

And then the air changes.

It comes off him in a wave. It goes past the part of me that thinks and lands underneath it, in the part that is only an omega in a room with an alpha, and every muscle I own receives one instruction.

Stay.

I feel my knees want it. I feel my chin start to drop. Eight years of training and twenty-three bodies, and some ancient piece of wiring in me is already halfway to yes.

I look at him, and I don't move.

It's gone as fast as it came, and he looks like an alpha who has caught himself doing something he shouldn't have.

"Do that again, and I'll put Mercy through your hand."

"I will not do it again."

“I’m not asking permission. Besides, the best assassin in the world does not need backup.”

“Second best.”

“Second best, my ass,” I say. “I’ll show you second best.”

“That’s my bloodthirsty omega,” Viktor says.

23

VALENTINA

Black on black, because red belongs to the dead now.