Page 85 of Pretty Little Assassin

Zero fights like a machine, too. She covers my back if one of the kills decides he isn’t quite ready to die yet.

Back-to-back, we fight until we’ve made it out of the warehouse, leaving a bloody trail of severed limbs in our wake.

The last one gets a knife into me before he dies. Left side, low, under the ribs, and I don’t feel it go in—I feel it come out, which is worse and is how I know it was deep.

I keep walking. There is a very short list of things I cannot do while bleeding. Walking is not one of them.

Zero sees.

“Viktor—”

“Later.”

That isn’t a later kind of inj⁠—”

“Then it will have to be a never kind, because we lost contact with Valentina.” I press the heel of my hand against it, and the hand comes away wet through the shirt. Fine. Blood I have. Time I don’t.

“That was too close, Donnie.” Zero’s breath is ragged, but her eyes still burn with adrenaline from the pile of bodies we just slaughtered.

“Agreed.” I strip a key fob from the nearest dead operative and press the button. A black SUV flashes its lights three rows over.

"And where the hell are you going?”

“To Valentina.”

I start toward the SUV.

“Donnie, send me the fastest route to Johnson’s house, Any more miscalculations on your end, tech nerd, and I think you might be replaced with Mr. Pickles and his murder sweaters.”

27

VALENTINA

Madam knows every passage and hiding place in this house.

Better than I do.

She knows spaces inside these walls that I never found, and I was a teenager trapped here with nothing to do but look.

We’re inside a small closet beneath the staircase. Primacy guards are all around us. The house is flooded with them like a hive full of wasps.

“I know a passage that will take us past most of the guards and closer to Johnson,” she says. “But once we use it, there’s no clean way back out.”

Stepdaddy dearest is still hiding somewhere inside this wretched fucking house.

If he weren’t here, the guards would be outside. They’d be on the perimeter, building a cage around us.

Instead, they’re in here. Hunting us and protecting him.

“Then show me the passage.”

“Valentina, once we go after him, we commit.”

“He put forty-three omegas on a timer. We passed the point of no return a while ago.” I tighten my grip on Mercy. “He’s the kill switch. We don’t leave without stopping him.”

“Then we finish it.”

“Good. I want his blood spilled across the floorboards of this house.”