I don’t rise to it. "Twenty-four seven on her door. Rotate every two. Anybody breathes wrong inside this corridor, we give them a reason to pray."
He nods, all business again. "Amen."
Dre’s phone buzzes. He looks down, his flicking thumb on the screen, and his pulled-together eyebrows tell me something is up even before I hear the urgency in his voice. "Boss," he pulls his tablet from his pocket. "The Teterboro surveillance footage just came in."
He props the tablet on the edge of the nurses’ station. The black-and-white video is grainy, and a timestamp flickers in the corner, indicating this happened five hours earlier.
A small plane bumps onto the runway, its nose is dipping, and the wings are jerking in the crosswind. The door opens before it’s even fully stopped. A figure stumbles out. A woman, tall enough to beMrs. Conti. She holds a bag in one hand and a gun in the other.
Then the shadows move.
Four men fan out from behind the hangar, weapons drawn.
"Jesus," Dre mutters. "That’s an ambush if I ever saw one."
On-screen, the woman drops behind the landing gear and fires twice. One of the men goes down hard. She moves fast, low, precise, favoring her left arm.
"Her left arm’s bad," Dre notes. "See that? She’s keeping it tight, probably already hit."
I nod, eyes glued to the screen. "She compensates with the right."
"Yeah," Dre comments, half impressed, half horrified, as he watches one of the men tackle her. They hit the tarmac and roll. For a second, she disappears under him, just a blur of limbs and motion. Then she moves. She drives her knee up, once, twice—low and brutal, nothing cinematic about it. It looks practiced and trained. She's not holding back like a woman who only knows the moves through some self-defense training. No, she's efficient.
The man jerks, his grip falters. She twists, catches his wrist, and wrenches it until a knife clatters away. The next movement is pure brutality: she grabs his head, slams it against the asphalt, and keeps going until he stops fighting.
Dre winces. "Ouch. That looks like it hurt."
"She compensates well," I observe, watching the way she uses her injured side as leverage, not weakness.
"She fucking knows how to kill, too," he mutters, and his head turns towards the sleeping beauty on the other side of the window. "Who the fuck is she?"
On the screen, the woman in question pushes herself up, shaky but steady, blood on her sleeve and a snarl in her posture. There is no sound, the only indication that she was just hit in the side is her sudden jerk forward; in a practiced roll I know all too well, her muscles work on memory when she moves to compensate for themomentum of being shot. She gets her gun up. The feed catches the muzzle flash, turns the whole frame white for a heartbeat. The last man goes down.
"Tell me that’s not clean," Dre says under his breath.
"It’s clean," I admit. "Too clean for an amateur."
The camera catches her again near the tail of the plane, swapping magazines one-handed. Blood darkens her shirt at the side. She rips the sleeve off one of the dead men, stuffs it against her wound, and ties it off with a belt. Then she reloads and shoots through the windshield of a pickup.
Dre whistles low. "Badass," he murmurs. Then, after a beat, "She fights like a goddamn assassin."
"She does," I agree thoughtfully.
The woman looks up once, but there is still no clear view of her face. Just a smear of dark hair coming loose in the wind, her eyes hidden behind shadow. She limps out of frame, leaving four bodies and an idling truck behind.
"Probably to hail that Uber," Dre says.
I keep watching the static that replaces her. "Pull every record you can find on female assassins operating in the last five years," I tell him. "Start with red hair."
He glances at me. "That’ll take a while."
"Then start now," I order.
He scrolls, already opening databases and dark-net boards. "If she’s on a list, I’ll find her."
I look at the screen again, the grainy figure disappearing into the blur of heat.
"Good," I say quietly. "Because whoever she is, she just walked into my war."
