My bare feet roll over the cool floor soundlessly. Each step brings my heart rate higher, awakening my senses. I’m an artist in more ways than one, and by the time I open the fake wall hiding the ladder that will take me to the hunting ground, I’m ready to create my next work in blood.
The tunnel leading upstairs can barely accommodate someone of my size, but this isn’t my first rodeo. I flatten myself against the ladder, then dash between concrete slabs making up the skeleton of my house. It’s dark, and I sense a spiderweb with the tips of my fingers, but I keep moving, all the way to the ledge leading to the exit.
A voice comes from beyond the wall, and a part of me wants to go after the bastards who blew up my front door. They don’t deserve quick, quiet deaths, but does my need for revenge matter right now?
The pair of assassins who chose to move together have wandered too far away from all my traps, but that’s nothing that can’t be fixed. One swipe of my finger putsin motion a wall, which will cut off their current route and force them to return where I can dispose of them more efficiently. As for the third invader... she appears to have just passed my current hideout. Sweat beads over my lips as I unlatch the exit, peeking out in time to see her stop, uncertain which direction to take. She’s a couple of paces away and would have heard me if it wasn’t for the balaclava on her head. Her loss.
She stiffens, reaching for the gun holstered at her belt as I reach for her, but it’s too late. My dagger slices through her neck, cutting open the arteries. She tries to fight for her life, like an animal struggling against the hold of a boa constrictor, but all she achieves is spraying her blood on the walls.
Seconds later, she lies still, and I move on, hurrying downstairs, because the two men have already descended the staircase. I could return to the shaft and go back the way I came, but that might take too long and block me from making a move, if they unknowingly hover too close to the secret passage.
After checking their location once more, I dash for the stairs, and while I need to slow down on the steps, to keep from alerting them with the thudding, my adrenaline is spiking. The gun feels cold in my sweaty hand. It would have been easier to bring them down with the remotely-controlled machine gun, but it might increase the mess and potentially send some bullets toward the kitchen island, so that is a no-go this time.
Breathless, I’m ready to shoot as a dark silhouette looms at the other end of the corridor, but doing so now would alert his companion, and I can’t afford losing track of them. The knife it is, then.
I breathe through my nose as I stalk my prey, but he turns to face me while I’m too far away to immediately reach him. His eyes widen, and he raises his shotgun,giving me no other option but shooting him straight in the forehead.
His body folds, and I can hear the final goon dash from my atelier. I duck behind the wall in time, because the chunk of the wall the shithead shot could have been my head.
A trap it is then.
Fuck.
“Come on out!” the bastard roars, sending bullet after bullet at my poor wall. “We only came to talk!”
Bullshit.
He’s moving, and as I access the right panel on my security screen, the assassin is already halfway to my location. I switch on the countdown to the activation of my deadliest trap, then stuff the screen down my pocket and rise just as he appears, aiming at my head.
I’ve wasted too much time.
A bullet grazes my shoulder, as if the intruder didn’t expect to find me beyond the wall, and I dash forward, grabbing his wrist so I can hold the barrel away from me. The idiot still pulls the trigger, and my guts twist when I realize he could have hit my foot, not the floor.
Even with fog in my brain, my body is the perfect killing machine, and I twist the gun out of his hand, then slam my Glock into his teeth. His eyes roll back as he stumbles into the dining area, straight into the barrage of bullets from the hidden machine gun.
His mouth opens in a scream, but he crumples next to his companion, and I’m there to deliver the final blow, putting a bullet through his temple.
There.
It’s all over.
I collapse against the wall and slide all the way down, staring at the massacred corpse. Blood and mess from collateral damage, that include my new vase, arescattered around me, but I’m whole, and nothing truly irreplaceable hasn’t been—
I carefully inhale the gunpowder-and-blood scented air, because something isn’t right. I can smell char, but it’s not the usual odor of a shootout. Something about it is both dry, and greasy as if—
My security device beeps with an alert, and I quickly grab it from my pocket.
There’s a... fire.
Despite the fatigue, and the stinging in my arm, I drag myself up, ready to deal with the fallout of the explosion at the entrance, but the picture that pops up on my screen has my stomach dropping as if I were about to fall from a cliff.
My studio.
There’s a fire in the studio. But... how?
It doesn’t matter.
Switching on the sprinklers would have solved this immediately, but I can’t do that. I just can’t! Not in the studio.
