Page 101 of Pretty Little Assassin

“And possibly a new pair of stilettos.”

“At least you have your priorities clear,” I tease Valentina.

“I think I should get a spending budget,” Alley Cat says when she finally sets Mr. Pickles down, much to his relief. “I mean, now that Madam has given me a new title⁠—”

“She didn’t give you a new title,” Donnie huffs. “She gave you new responsibilities. There’s a difference.”

“I don’t see a difference.”

The argument goes on without either of them noticing that I have stopped listening.

She was spinning the cat a minute ago. Both arms up, chin up, entirely certain the cat was enjoying himself.

My thumb is on my wrist before I notice it is there.

Across the room, Valentina stops mid-sentence. The grief reaches her through the bond, and her eyes find mine. She gives me a small, understanding smile, the same one she gave me in that hallway with her palm pressed over the wound in my side.

“Anya.”

The room goes quiet the way a room goes quiet when a man who does not talk says one word.

Valentina doesn’t ask. She has not asked since a kitchen table a long time ago, when her eyes went to my wrist and stayed there, and she chose silence over the question.

“My sister,” I tell the rest of them, because it is time the name was said out loud in front of people instead of rubbed into my own skin for eleven years. “She was eleven. I was nineteen, and I was somewhere else.”

Alley Cat has gone still.

“Is that why you keep looking at me funny?”

“Yes.”

She thinks about it. Then she crosses the room and drops onto the arm of my chair, tutu against my shoulder, and says nothing for four entire seconds.

“Okay.”

That is all of it. That is all it was ever going to need to be.

Right as Donnie and Alley Cat start to bicker over monetary allocation, and just as the cat decides to take up residence on my lap for a nap and bless me with an allergy outburst that a single tissue box can’t mitigate—the contract Donnie promised appears on the screen.

DIRECTIVE: JOINT OPERATION

TARGET: Alpha who traffics in omega smuggling. Long ledger of vile acts.

CLIENT: private

Payout: one million. EACH.

Work together—Asset 13 and Wraith.

Bring me his head when you’re done.

“His head?” Alley Cat perks up at that last part.

“It’s a figure of speech.”

"I don't think so," she replies.

I reach for a vodka bottle before pushing the cat off my lap and standing up.