Page 91 of Pretty Little Assassin

“Are we?” I toss a glance back at Madam before taunting him further.

“Pretty sure your agents have been falling like flies, Stepdaddy.” I wipe Mercy against my shirt. I want her to be clean and shiny when I kill this bastard. “Go ahead and see if they’ll come help you. I think they’re all dead.”

Fear flickers across his eyes. He mumbles a few words into his own comms. No men suddenly materialize in the hallway.

I’ve been keeping count. I’ve been taking them out room by room as Madam and I crawled through this godforsaken house.

No one is coming to save him, not from me.

“I don’t need anyone to help me put you down, Valentina. You’re still just a frightened little girl. Still small. Still led by your emotions. You always have been. Still the poor little abandoned child whose mother left her behind. Still the stubborn, disobedient teenager playing at being an assassin.”

“Trying to get inside my head, Stepdaddy?” I laugh. “I’ve never been a frightened little girl. And I’ve never had to play at being good at killing people.”

His hand disappears inside his jacket.

Madam fires before he can clear the gun. The bullet tears through his forearm, and the weapon hits the marble before skidding beneath a console table.

He swears and draws a knife with his other hand.

Guards, an escape route, a gun. His backup plan is disappearing piece by piece.

He rushes me before Madam can line up another shot. She won’t risk firing with our bodies this close.

That leaves him to me, just the way I like it.

Mercy shallowly slices the side of his jaw, and the cut looks worse than it is. A surface wound, nothing that slows him down, but I enjoy the aesthetics of the blood dripping down. I hope the feel of his life force trickling down his face panics his abusive alpha heart.

I am always, and especially in this case, bloodthirsty. This is the love part of my love/hate relationship with the colour red.

I jab him under the chin right as he goes to try and stick his knife in my chest. For a second, he gags on air.

It’s enough time for me to disarm him and kick his pathetic knife across the floor.

His hand reaches for my hair and pulls on my bun.

It fucking hurts and forces my field of vision upward. He’s learned how to fight dirty in prison. His combat skills aren’t terrible.

But mine are better.

I let him pull me towards him, and then, in a macabre embrace, I pickpocket his phone, and I hold it out to him.

“Send out the order to stand down.”

He looks at me. Blood trickles down his face, and a drop falls onto the screen.

I plunge Mercy deep into the meat of his thigh. That one makes him yell out in pain.

“I can do this all day. Nobody is coming to help you. And I know all the ways to keep you alive and have it be verrrry painful for you.” I scrape Mercy up his thigh as I say that. I avoid the femoral artery.

“Nine minutes,” he gasps, managing a smile. “Kill me, and you lose the only authorization that can stop the order. Every omega on that list dies.”

“I know.” I twist Mercy. His smile breaks into a howl. “That’s why you don’t get to die yet.”

I take his right hand, the one I'm not kneeling on, and press his thumb flat against the screen. It's slick with his own blood, and it fails twice. The third time, the phone opens.

He stops smiling.

And now I'm holding an unlocked phone I still can't send anything from—his channel, his format, his authorizations, and I wouldn't know where to start. My earpiece has been dead since I came through the front door. The plan was Donnie, and I haven't had Donnie in half an hour.