THE WALLS of my rooms were so thick that the screams of the dying couldn’t reach me.
At least, I assume there were screams—and shouts and cries and the rest of the noises people make when they’re facing their end, especially if it’s violent. In my experience, hardly anyone goes silently.
But like I said, I couldn’t hear them.
I was finishing up a pretty typical evening in my part of the house with no idea what havoc was being wreaked beyond my door. I’d worked out in the gym for a couple of hours before dinner, running through the new exercises Noelle had given me. After a gazillion years of workouts and assignments under my primary trainer’s watch, it took a lot to bring the burn into my muscles. I threw everything I had into the jabs, kicks, and flips until I’d broken a real sweat.
Slacking off wasn’t an option. I had to keep pushing myself, keep stretching the time before fatigue started to set in. I never knew how long I might need to keep fighting or running to see a mission through, and a second’s weakness could mean failure. A.k.a., curtains for me.
It was a dangerous world out there, and the only way to ensure survival was to be the most dangerous thing in it. I’d been doing a pretty good job of that so far.
Anna brought dinner at the usual hour looking totally normal, so the massacre mustn’t have started until after that point. She’d set a novel on the tray beside my plate.
“I just finished that one,” she said, tapping it with a smile. Anna gave out smiles easily—not like Noelle, who I only got a rare grin out of when I’d kicked ass particularly well. “I thought you might like it, Decima.”
“Thanks,” I said, practicing my smile in return.
I wasn’t thrilled about the book, because I wasn’t much of a reader. I got impatient with words strung together with so many details that hardly seemed important, characters meandering around with no idea what they wanted, so I’d start skimming and then lose track of the story. But Anna always tried her best to be kind to me, and she meant that kindness a hell of a lot more often than most people I’d encountered. I was grateful for that.
When I was little, once I’d figured out what a family was from books and movies, I’d wondered if Anna was my mother. She used to spend more time with me between my training sessions back then. She’d laughed when I’d asked her, looking a little sad at the same time, and said no, that my mother and father had been taken from me by the bad people out there right after I was born. But the household would stop those people from getting me too. The household would look after me. They’d make sure I was strong enough to handle the world outside our home when it was time.
And they’d definitely come through on that promise.
Hungry after the long workout, I wolfed down the lasagna and salad, and then I just couldn’t settle down. My pulse kept thumping a little too fast as if the exertion of the workout hadn’t worn off. Maybe some part of me sensed a shift in the air, a vibe of brutal chaos that seeped through the walls even if sound couldn’t.
None of the movies or shows available on the TV—the nature documentaries, thrillers, and ridiculous comedies that Noelle had decided didn’t have any lies distracting enough that they might interfere with my missions—caught my interest. I couldn’t make it through two pages of Anna’s book. I brought up a game on the new console she’d brought last year, which Noelle approved of for honing my reflexes and observational skills. Not even assassinating my way through an office building took the edge off the restless itch crawling under my skin.
Finally, I went into my bedroom, sprawled out on the bed, and dipped my hand between my thighs.
Getting off like this usually brought a rush of energy and then a mellow lull that helped me relax after an intense mission or get to sleep. I kept my eyes shut and my mind blank, focusing completely on the physical sensations I summoned with the pressure of my fingers. If I let my thoughts stray, the chilling memories that would rise up might kill any chance of release. All that mattered was the slowly building pleasure and the thumping of my heart alongside it—
The whir of a lock disengaging jolted me off the bed. Every tingle of bodily enjoyment vanished in an instant.
With all my senses on the alert, I darted into the main room, instinctively sticking close to the furniture. Unexpected visits after dinner time were unusual. It could be Noelle coming with an urgent mission or with some kind of test, in which case I’d better show I’d prepared myself quickly.
But it was the other door that was swinging open, away from me into the room beyond. The door that led to the rest of the household.
No one ever came through there after dinner.
As I froze, bracing for the unknown, Anna staggered into view. Even clutching the door’s outer handle, she was crumpling toward the ground. She’d always been so separate from the harsher parts of my training that it took my brain a second to process that the red all over her dress was blood.
The blood pulsed from beneath her other hand where it was pressed to the side of her neck. It seeped from a bullet wound that’d seared through her dress and stomach, and another at her hip. Holy hell.
I dashed to her, my mind automatically taking stock of the arteries and veins that were most likely severed, the amount of fluid she’d already lost, the odds of survival.
She was bleeding out. She’d already lost 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’d never crossed 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 do something.
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. I might have 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.
“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath, taking in the spectacle. Eight bodies lay scattered across the furnishings, their blood staining the pale leather and walls in every direction like some kind of sick abstract art. A meaty, metallic smell soured the cool air. Nothing moved except the swaying of a curtain where a draft was coming through a shattered window. That was the rustling I’d heard.
I’d killed a lot of people in my life, but I’d never made this much of a mess doing it.
I picked my way between the bodies, bile rising to the back of my mouth, and realized the mess was purposeful. The style of certain wounds was distinctive—this man and that woman had clearly been shot to clip an artery for maximum spray while they were still moving around, before the killing strike. From the pattern of splatters around the guy over there, someone had neatly sliced his wrists and let him flail around before putting a bullet in his skull.
Whoever had done this had wanted it to look messy. Why?
I stopped by a woman sprawled in front of one of the sofas whose dark brown hair was streaked with gray. She’d taken not one but three shots to the face, which both struck me as excessive—a total waste of bullets—and had mangled her features into a fleshy pulp.
I swallowed hard. Was that Noelle? Had they managed to take even her by surprise? There wasn’t enough left for me to tell for sure.
She wasn’t the only body the killers had battered beyond recognition—and I was sure now that it was killers, plural. I could identify at least two different types of shot wounds reflecting different sizes of bullets from different guns. It’d have been nearly impossible for one to take down so many in the same space quickly enough anyway, especially with a knife in the mix.
A grim weight was forming inside me, pressing down on my stomach. Whoever had carried out this massacre was both very good at what they did and had reveled in the savagery. I didn’t think I’d ever gone up against an opponent quite like that.
For all these years, the people of the household had looked after me and trained me so that I could hold the cruelty of this world at bay. But it hadn’t been enough to protect them in the end. I hadn’t even known this was happening.
I couldn’t save them now, but I could ensure their killers were properly repaid. One last mission to set one small thing amid the awfulness out there right. To create some kind of justice for Anna and Noelle and everyone else who’d provided for me.
And then…
When I tried to think about it, my mind stalled, so I just didn’t think that far.
The killers had left no trace of their identity that I could spot other than the unusual approach to their kills. Three more bodies lay in the space where I’d spotted the protruding feet, which was a music room with a sleek white piano and framed concert posters on the walls. Blood was splashed and smeared across all of it. Two of the bodies had been cut in an odd zigzag from their throat to the left side of their collarbone.
None of the bodies provided me with a gun or even so much as a pocket knife. Had the entire household really been unarmed, or had their killers removed their weapons afterward?
The latter seemed more likely. It was what I’d have done with a job anywhere near this big, to ensure anyone I hadn’t taken down yet couldn’t add to their options for striking back at me.
After making a circuit of the lower floor, I headed upstairs. The many bedrooms up there reminded me of the lavish penthouses where I’d carried out a few of my killings. There was one woman lying dead in her bed, her face smashed in with the impact of the bullets and the ivory duvet drenched red, but otherwise they were empty.
A quick search of the dressers and vanities turned up no weapons but a couple of wads of cash and several expensive-looking necklaces and bracelets, glittering with gold and gemstones. I stuffed what I could into the pockets of my track pants and dropped the rest into a tote bag I found hanging over the back of a chair. Missions took a lot of funding even when I knew who my target was. I wouldn’t have the household’s credit cards smoothing the way for me this time.
I wouldn’t have the household at all. When I left here, it’d be for good.
The thought hit me hard enough to stop me in my tracks in the middle of the hall. A momentary chill flooded me.
I’d left the house plenty of times before, of course, but never for more than a week for a particularly complicated mission. Rarely for more than a couple of days. The rooms behind the bookcase had been mine for as long as I could remember. I’d barely talked to anyone other than Anna and Noelle except to get what I needed from bystanders in the middle of an assignment.
And in the blink of an eye, it’d all been destroyed.
My fingers curled around the makeshift blades I was holding until the pinch of the glass warned me to loosen my grip. None of this should have happened. I’d worked so hard—
I gritted my teeth. I’d keep working until the vicious assholes who’d done this were just as lifeless as the bodies they’d left behind.
When I was finished checking every inch of the house, I headed back to my rooms. I stuffed a box of energy bars and a couple of changes of clothes into the tote bag before pausing over the plush tiger toy perched on the headboard of my bed.
The stuffed animal’s fur was worn from the many nights I’d gone to sleep hugging it when I’d been very young, and one of its glossy eyes was coming loose. But looking at it brought a sharp sense of possessiveness into my chest.
Damn it, it was mine. Somehow it felt like the only thing in this place that truly was, which didn’t make any sense since it must have come from the household like everything else. Holding it had always given me a weird sense of comfort even though I couldn’t remember who’d given it to me or when, I’d had it so long.
Without letting myself second-guess the impulse, I grabbed the toy and stuffed it into the bag with the rest of my belongings.
On my way out, I stopped by Anna’s body with another twinge of regret. My practical instincts told me that I shouldn’t let it be obvious she’d opened this hidden door.
My presence here was meant to be a secret. That might still matter to someone—it might matter to me. I’d have an easier time dealing with the pricks who’d done this if they didn’t know I existed.
I eased Anna’s body a couple of feet farther into the office room so I could push the bookcase and close the door. The bookcase swung back into place against the wall, concealing all trace of the entrance. I didn’t know how to open it again—I couldn’t have returned to my rooms even if I’d wanted to.
There was no way to go but onward.
I snuck out the back door I’d noted in my survey of the first floor and headed to the garage. Inside, a thick, oily scent laced the air that set off my inner alarm bells. I opened the hoods of each car in the row and found the engines’ cables snapped, the compartments cracked by swift blows.
Of course. The killers had probably come through here before they’d entered the house so no one who managed to flee would have a vehicle to escape in. I couldn’t repress a flicker of respect for their thoroughness, even if it made my jaw clench at the same time.
I’d just have to find transportation outside the property.
As I slunk across the expansive treed yard, the night’s darkness cloaked my movements. Thick clouds blotted out the stars. A damp breeze licked over my face and my bare arms. It tasted like incoming rain.
The stone wall that surrounded the property stood a foot higher than me, but with a running leap, I clambered onto and over it. I dropped to the sidewalk outside with only the faintest rasp of my shoes on the pavement.
The whole rest of the city—the whole rest of the big, bad world—stretched out before me.
Clutching the tote bag close to my side, I touched the wall in silent farewell and set off through the shadows. Resolve hardened inside me.
The killers who’d descended on the household might be good, but they were going to pay the price anyway. They couldn’t have counted on tangling with me.
