Page 4 of Pretty Little Assassin

TARGET: Viktor Petrov

Designation: Alpha

Alias: The Wraith

Affiliation: The Primacy (confirmed) / Independent contractor (suspected)

Status: ACTIVE. EXTREME THREAT.

The photo loads last.

Black hair, cut close enough to see the shape of his skull. Jaw slightly off-center, like it was broken once and reset by someone who didn’t much care. Eyes so dark they don’t reflect light; they swallow it. A scar that cuts through his left eyebrow and disappears into his hairline, and another one, thin and surgical, along his throat. He isn’t looking at the camera; he’s looking through it, like he can see the person on the other side and has already decided how to kill them.

Viktor Fucking Petrov.

The Wraith.

I know this alpha. Not personally. I’ve never met him, and I pray I never will. But I know his file. Everyone in the business does.

He’s a ghost story they tell recruits to keep them humble. The alpha who killed an entire motorcycle gang with a vodka bottle, though rumours remain divided on whether it was empty or full at the time. The one who can wait eighteen hours, motionless, for a single shot. Who tracks targets across continents like a wolf following a blood trail through snow.

He’s never failed a contract.

Neither have I.

I scroll down, my thumb moving on autopilot while my brain runs the calculations. His known tactics. His psychological profile—or lack of one. Three separate profilers have tried, and all three disagreed. It means he’s either brilliant or genuinely insane.

Probably both.

His confirmed kill count is forty-six. Suspected is triple that.

And someone wants me to put a knife in him.

I almost laugh. Almost. Because this is either the opportunity of a lifetime or a suicide note.

My thumb scrolls to the red-flagged warning the Madam has embedded directly in the dossier header, and the laugh dies.

TARGET IS HIGHLY RESISTANT TO ALL INDEXED SYNTHETIC COMPOUNDS.

I read it twice.

I have seventeen blends in my collection. Seventeen psychological profiles indexed, calibrated, and field-tested over six years of operational refinement. The paternalistic controller. The status-driven pack alpha. The territorial isolationist. The sexually aggressive rut-prone. I have a blend for every alpha psychosis I’ve ever met, and several more for types I only read about in psych reports. Not one alpha I have deployed them against has walked out of that encounter in control of himself.

Viktor Petrov apparently didn’t get the memo.

Either he’s been conditioned out of the biological vulnerability, which is a specific kind of program that produces a specific kind of monster, or his natural chemistry is so dominant that foreign signals can’t register above it.

The file offers both possibilities. Neither one makes this easier.

The anonymous part bothers me more than the target. The VEIL rarely accepts anonymous contracts. The Madam vets every client personally; it’s what separates us from the Primacy, who’ll kill anyone for anyone as long as the check clears. Anonymous means someone with enough leverage to bend the Madam’s rules.

I let myself into the room two floors above Gerald’s, reserved under a fake name, and pour myself a glass of his champagne, Dom Pérignon, 2008.

I run a bath because I deserve it, and because I need to be clean. I need to be me again before I drive back to the warehouse.

The omega act is exhausting in ways killing never is.

The marble tub fills as I peel off the red dress, unstrap Mercy and her holster from my thigh, and pull the garrote wire from my hair, letting the copper strands fall past my shoulders. I sink into the water and close my eyes, but Petrov’s face is burned into the back of my eyelids. Those dead-black eyes. The quiet violence of his jaw. Something in my chest tightens—not fear, but its cold shadow. A hunter’s recognition of a true predator. For six years, I’ve been the most dangerous person in every room I enter. Now, someone’s asking me to walk into a room where that might not be true.