Page 56 of Pretty Little Assassin

No loud breathing after that remark. Impressed into silence, perhaps?

“Twenty-four, then,” Viktor whispers after a moment.

At the same time that Viktor’s words come through the comm and into my ear, I spot something moving across the ballroom.

I know that walk.

I’ve been watching for it. I studied that walk. The fucking arrogant swagger. The way his shoulders lean back as if he’s waiting for the world to impress him. As if he thinks he’s the one controlling it.

I take a second, exactly one.

“Valentina.” Donnie’s voice is more like a gasp. He sees him too.

Zero and Viktor are silent on the comms. Hard to tell whether that silence is the kind that comes before a moment of violence or the kind that is patiently watching the room.

I put one designer heel in front of the other and cut a straight line across the ballroom toward my target.

He’s older now, grayer, leaner. He looks like the kind of alpha that’s trying to hang on to his leadership of the pack.

Power. Money. Influence. I don’t doubt he still has all those things. Leverage too.

At least he actually looks like shit. Prison carved something sharper out of him, not weaker, just sharper and more desperate. Like pulling meat off of bone. Doesn’t change how strong the bone is, but it definitely strips away the fleshy exterior.

He sees me before I am close enough to speak. His smile grows slowly like a cancer across his face. By the time I’m standing in front of them, it’s wide enough to count his teeth.

All of them. All the way to the back.

Beside him, not too close, but definitely within earshot, Primacy operatives. Two new ones that look like they just slipped in. That brings the number up to nine now.

“There’s my girl,” he says.

That’s my cue. I swallow. Action.

“Hello, Stepdaddy.”

17

VIKTOR

Four exits, two of them staff. A service corridor runs behind the east wall, and nobody in a dress in here knows it is there. I cannot stand in all of them at once, but I can watch them all. And I will.

Working with comms backup is not new to me, but the banter is. I’m a loner who sometimes has backup or is backup. Valentina and VEIL seem more like chosen family, complete with spying, a know-it-all little brother, and a protective big sister. And a stray alley cat that reminds me of my sister.

Assassins having families. Something to think about after we destroy the new Director and ensure Valentina’s omegas’ safety.

I keep a bored look on my face as I hold my tray of drinks and watch the exits, the Primacy operatives, and the alpha players.

When they look at my little assassin with narrow, hungry eyes, I want to castrate them with a butcher knife and watch them bleed to death through their silk trousers.

I won’t. I’m backup tonight. Part of the scenery. I get to watch my pretty little assassin at work.

“Remind me what it is again that you’re doing, Viktor?”

Valentina’s annoying little tech friend has a habit of being both impressively talented and also mosquito-level aggravating.

“Monitoring,” I say under my breath. There’s no need for more than a whisper. The wire picks up every breath I’m making, apparently.

The quartet has been playing the same eight bars for twenty minutes. Musicians do that when a schedule slips and nobody tells them what to do.