Page 8 of Pretty Little Assassin

Three alerts stacked on top of each other, all red, all urgent:

EXTERIOR SENSOR 3: OFFLINE

EXTERIOR SENSOR 5: OFFLINE

EXTERIOR SENSOR 1: OFFLINE

One sensor goes down; that’s weather, a bird, maybe. A rat chewing through wiring because the east end has rats the size of my designer handbags.

Three sensors, sequentially, in under a minute?

That’s a person.

I’m out of the tub before the fourth alert hits, water sloshing across the marble floor. I don’t bother with a towel. I pull up the interior camera feeds with wet fingers and stand there dripping, naked, watching someone dismantle Donnie’s security network like it’s a children’s puzzle.

The exterior feeds are black. All of them. Whoever did this knew exactly where the sensors were, which means they either have thermal imaging or very good eyes, and disabling them without tripping the failsafe means they understood the network architecture.

Donnie is going to have a hissy fit when I tell him.

The interior cameras are still live. Three angles: kitchen doorway, main living area, weapons rack. I swipe through them, my heart hammering in a way that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with someone being in my home.

Camera one: empty.

Camera two: empty.

Camera three: the biometric lock on my front door clicks open.

Nine minutes. Donnie designed that lock. He called it his masterpiece, said it would take a quantum computer to crack it.

Nine. Minutes.

The door swings inward, and Viktor fucking Petrov walks into my warehouse.

The dossier is a goddamn liar. It says six-foot-four, but that’s just a figure on a screen until the alpha is standing in your space, making even twelve-foot ceilings feel too low and the air too thin. He doesn’t just walk through my doorway; he consumes it. Scale is one of those things a photograph can’t capture—the sheer, predatory presence of a man who makes everything around him look small and fragile.

Black coat. Black gloves. Black everything.

I watch him move through my space. Methodical. He examines my weapons rack, opens my closet. I see his eyebrow rise a fraction as he clocks the stilettos lined up by the door, and a hot, possessive anger flares through me. I want to reach through the screen and stab him.

Those are mine, asshole.

He opens my fridge. Takes a beer. My beer. The last bottle of the craft IPA that the brewery on the south side only makes in small batches and sells out in hours.

“You son of a bitch.”

It’s not the broken lock or the shredded sensors. It’s the sheer, unmitigated gall. He’s standing in my sanctuary, drinking my fucking beer.

Then Mr. Pickles appears, and my heart drops into my stomach.

My twelve-pound orange-and-white catastrophe, the only male I’ve ever loved without wanting to stab, headbutts Viktor Petrov’s ankle like he’s greeting a long-lost friend. I watch in horror as my cat, my traitor of a cat, rubs his entire body against the legs of the man who was literally hired to kill me.

“Don’t you dare,” I hiss at the screen. “Don’t you dare touch my cat.”

Viktor looks down at Mr. Pickles. There’s a beat. And then Viktor fucking Petrov sneezes.

His eyes water. He sneezes again. And again. His hand braces against the counter, and his face contorts.

He’s allergic.