Page 28 of Pretty Little Assassin

The world really has turned on its side.

When we arrive at our meeting place, Donnie opens the door only after several layers of security protocol complete automatically.

Viktor stands opposite him, a monolith of muscle, tattoos, and scars under a military buzz cut. Donnie, a decade younger and half his width, stares back through his glasses, casually wiping a smear of pizza sauce onto his graphic tee.

“You work like this?” Viktor asks as soon as we step inside.

Donnie’s tech den isn’t exactly the cleanest. It also isn’t his only one.

Even if Viktor is helping us out, bringing him into the heart of our main operations would be tactical suicide. This is a necessary precaution.

Viktor kicks an empty pizza box out of his path. Then a row of energy cans, lined up along the skirting like tin soldiers.

On the surface: a basement full of monitors and junk food.

Underneath: hacking, surveillance, digital forensics. Nine screens. Two of them are watching us right now.

“Holy shit,” Donnie says, his mouth hanging open as a small corner of pizza crumb falls out. “You’re really here. THE fucking Wraith. Dude, I’ve read your file. You’re like a meme in hacker circles. Dead by dawn or your money back.”

“Since when are you impressed by a hired sword?” Zero chides, stepping beside Donnie in the entryway. “I thought you were a tech nerd.”

“Yeah, I am. But this guy can hack shit too. He broke through the unhackable security devices I set up around Valentina’s place.”

“Then I guess they weren’t so unhackable after all, were they?”

“Jesus, you really do look like a demon on steroids,” she says, taking a good look at Viktor.

“Steroids are unnecessary.”

I roll my eyes at him. Who the hell thought Viktor Petrov would be so easy to work with? All the ruthless rumours about him are definitely true, but I think the footnotes left out a few things.

“Alright, so where do we start?”

Zero meets my tactical question with an unexpected offering.

“First, I made this. No sense in Mr. Pickles having to suffer in an unfamiliar environment after your place got compromised.”

She hands me yet another cat sweater. This one says, “Murder is my cardio.”

Viktor looks at the sweater. Then at Zero. Then at the sweater again, and says nothing, which is the correct decision.

“I’ve already been running facial recognition on Primacy operatives,” Donnie says, answering my question, which a feline cardigan momentarily interrupted.

Of course he is. Whether he lives like a naked mole rat with a junk pizza obsession or not, Donnie doesn’t miss a beat. His whole “thing” is surveillance. And he’ll gladly tell you that ad nauseam.

Skills deployed, motherfuckers. Primacy doesn’t know what they’re messing with.

“And?” I ask as I sit down at the computer beside Donnie.

“And I turned up a bunch of shit, like I always do, but there are some gaps. You know how much I fucking hate gaps.”

“Yeah.” I chuckle. “I do.”

Donnie would rather ingest forty-day-old pizza than leave a stone unturned or a riddle unsolved.

Zero comes to stand behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder as we all settle into our usual positions. Bickering and joking aside, we have a job to do, and that work usually comes with a life-or-death addendum stapled to the end.

“I did some interrogating,” Zero says. “Not that I don’t trust Donnie’s overzealous claims of technical divinity⁠—”