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She was bleeding out. She’dalreadylost more blood than most people could have endured.
For both my safety and the rest of the household’s, I wasn’t supposed to leave the boundaries of my rooms without approval. I’dnevercrossed this specific threshold, only leaving by the outer door into the yard. When I reached the doorway, tension locked around my muscles. I stopped with my feet on the threshold and caught Anna just before her head hit the hardwood floor.
“Anna!” I said, her name coming out like a protest. My throat had constricted. I felt like I was choking.
I’d seen a lot of people dying before, but mostly people I’d killed with the full intention of doing so, and the others I hadn’t known anyway. This—this wasn’t right—how could this be happening?
Anna’s grip on my forearm was weak. She couldn’t lift her chin enough for her eyes to meet mine. She seemed to be staring at my running shoes braced on that uncrossable line between my rooms and the rest of the house. Her blood dripped in a rhythmic patter against the floorboards.
“Garlic milkshake,” she croaked, or at least something that sounded like that, since the words I thought I’d heard made no sense. She coughed and sputtered. Her normally cheerful voice came out thin and warbled. “Leave. Find… somewhere safe. I—I think they’re gone… Played dead until—couldn’t leave you locked away in here with no one—”
“Don’t talk,” I ordered. I meant to sound firm, but the words came out more frantic. “We have to—if I can stop the bleeding—”
But it was too late. I’d known that before I’d reached her, even if every cell in my body resisted the fact. As I moved to turn her so I could treat the wounds, her muscles went slack. Her body sagged, the last fragments of life slipping out of her.
I knew death well enough that I couldn’t deny it when it was happening right in front of me. No amount of CPR was going to restart a heart that’d already lost twice as much blood as any living human being should. My hands itched to start the chest compressions anyway.
But what good would that do? It would only waste time, when—
The enemy had come here. To my own fucking home. What else had they done?
What was I going to do about it?
With my pulse thudding in my ears, I let Anna’s limp body come to rest on the floor. My insides had tied into a string of knots from the base of my throat to my gut. I forced myself to stand, to take stock.
I had the door open in front of me, leading to a small room and a short hallway beyond it. It was the path to the rest of the house, a total unknown I’d never ventured into. Blood streaked the floorboards from around the corner, some of it in the shape of handprints. Anna had dragged herself here with her last bit of strength.
She’d let me out, given me permission to go, so I could—so I could dosomething.
The years of training kicked in with a wash of adrenaline, rolling back the haze of shock that had settled over me. My spine pulled straighter, my gaze flicking over my surroundings with an increasingly analytical sharpness. All my thoughts narrowed down to getting through the next however many minutes alive—and taking down the thugs who might still be lurking around, looking to add to their list of murders.
Unfortunately, Noelle always brought my mission kit to me before she sent me off on an assignment. I didn’t have any firearms of my own in my rooms—no official weapons of any kind.
I walked to the trim wooden table where I’d eaten my dinner and snatched up the dinner knife. Blunt, but better than nothing. With a brisk motion, I smacked my water glass against the edge of the table just hard enough to crack it and pried out a long, deadly shard. My fingers clenched around it.
All right. Time to see what the hell was out there. Time to make whoever had invaded the safety of this house and riddled Anna with bullets very, very sorry.
I paused on the threshold, looking down at her lifeless body. The knots inside me tugged tighter. I had the urge to offer a gesture that would honor her in some way… but I had no idea how, and I didn’t have much time to figure it out.
She’d thought the killers had left, but she could be wrong.
I stepped around her body with a silent, awkward apology and slunk through the room beyond. It was set up like a home office with a small desk and bookcases along the walls. One of those bookcases had swung out to reveal the door to my rooms. I hadn’t realized they kept it quite that hidden.
With my ears perked, I stalked into the short hall, setting my feet down gingerly. No sounds reached me except a soft, distant rustling.
I peeked around the first bend and found a broader hall. Brass light fixtures gleamed, casting their bright glow over side tables and a geometric-patterned rug that ran the length of the hall. The furnishings had the same modern styling as in my rooms, but with a much more opulent feel to them that reminded me of the swanky hotels I’d run some of my missions out of.
The contrast was jarring enough that it took me a moment to notice the pair of feet protruding from a doorway at the other end of the hall.
I eyed the feet for a minute, but they didn’t move. Keeping my back to the wall, I sidled toward the first doorway, much closer to me.
It opened to a dining room nearly as big as my entire main living space, with a gleaming ebony table that could have seated twenty people. It only held two at the moment: a man and a woman face-down on the wooden surface, blood pooling beneath their lolled heads. And not just beneath their heads—one of the bullets had caught the man at just the right angle to spray more blood all over the wall behind him.
I walked closer. I didn’t recognize either of these people, as much of them as I could see. But then, I hadn’t had much contact with the household other than Anna and Noelle and the occasional temporary trainers who’d taught me skills that weren’t in Noelle’s wheelhouse. Imighthave met one or both of these two a decade or longer ago and simply not recognized their faces with the gore in the mix.
I patted them down out of necessity, but neither turned up any weapons or phones or anything else I could use. Offering them a silent benediction, I crossed the hall to the next room.
This one was a huge living room filled with white leather sofas and chairs, a large ebony liquor cabinet, matching side tables… and a whole lot of corpses.
