The world’s newest tallest building is groaning under its own ego, one bad wire away from folding in on itself. I’m at least fifty floors above sane altitude, hands shaking as I reach for the junction box welded into the steel beam.
Blood slicks my fingers. Some of it mine. Most of it not.
A shadow moves behind me.
I spin just as an assassin lunges, blade flashing. He gets a single breath of triumph before I slam my fist into his jaw and wrench his arm sideways, keeping his hand wrapped around his own gun. His trigger finger spasms. The bullet tears through his neck, then the forehead of the man charging up behind him.
One shot. Two corpses. It’s just another day at the office.
The gun is mine before either body hits the industrial carpeted floor.
A third assassin bursts through the half-collapsed doorway, swinging a machete like subtlety is beneath him. I fire once and he drops. The machete clatters across the entrance tile, spinning toward the wall.
Another blade whistles past my ear. Close enough to shear a strand of hair. That one actually pisses me off.
I snatch a knife from my boot and fling it without breaking stride. It buries itself in the thrower’s throat, pinning him to the wall like a very poorly placed art installation.
My lungs burn. My shoulder is bleeding where someone grazed me a few floors down. My white tank is a crime scene.
None of that matters.
Not with the junction box gaping open, two final wires dangling like a dare. Twist them, and this 184-story vanity project drops into the desert like a felled titan. I get thirty seconds to escape if I’m lucky.
Twenty, if the building decides it’s had enough of me.
I reach for the wires and twist once, twice before cold metal presses to my temple.
A long-range sniper rifle. Up close.
It’s like a cold fingertip against my skin, steady despite the wind threading through the shattered framework of the floors I’ve just come from. I can feel my heartbeat in the raw cut along my shoulder, but the pain has settled into something clean and usable. A reminder, not a distraction.
And then that voice I hate rolls in behind me, low, delighted, smug enough to make my pulse stumble.
“Well, well,” he murmurs behind me, tone smug and intimate. “If it isn’t Saint James…”
I breathe out through the side of my mouth. “I know. I’m just as disappointed to see you here too.”
My fingers twitch toward the last two wires dangling from the gutted junction box. The entire skyscraper hums beneath my feet, its spine vibrating with the tension of astructure seconds from collapse. I’ve rigged charges down its throat, floor after floor, a stitched line of destruction waiting for this final pulse.
The barrel presses harder into my skin. “Don’t even think about it.”
“You’re late to the party,” I tell him. “I’ve been thinking about it since the elevator shaft.”
He shifts his weight, boots scraping against the metal grate—a subtle adjustment, the kind you make when you want a cleaner angle at the kill. Wind gusts against the windows like a phantom drum. Somewhere below, alarms wail through the stairwells like distant sirens in a sinking ship.
“It’s over, Saint,” he says, as if the words have any power over me. “You’ve run out of luck and floors.”
I let a faint, humorless smile pull at my swollen lip. “The trail of bodies I left on the way up suggests I’m just getting started.”
His breath brushes my cheek—too close, too familiar. “I’ve waited years to watch one of my bullets go through your skull.”
“Mmm, I know.” My voice drops to a soft rasp. “But I do enjoy putting a damper on your plans. It’s practically a personality trait at this point.”
“You think you’re so fucking funny?” That draws the crack in his composure I’ve been waiting for. His tone sharpens, no longer amused. “This all started becauseyoukilled thewrongman.”
A slow burn ignites behind my ribs. Not rage—rage is loud. This is quieter, colder, the kind of anger that steadies my hands instead of shaking them.
“Weboth know this started long before that body hit its shallow grave.”
