Page 22 of Violent Possession

I toss the phone on the bed. At least the routine makes some sense. Another fight. Another fat check. The same predictable shit, just with more expensive carpet. Money. Fight. Survival.

That’s when I hear it.

Things happen in the span of less than a minute. It’s not the maid. Maids knock.

The sound comes from the wall, from the connecting door, the side I didn’t even think to check when I came in.

The door. The fucking connecting door. How did I not see the fucking door?

It opens, and a man enters. A silent giant, dressed in black and a balaclava, with a knife in his hand. I only see his dark eyes and a split eyebrow from a scar.

Assassin. Only assassins enter like that. This fucker is an assassin. But why? They paid, they took care of me, they fixed the prosthesis. Now they want to kill me? What kind of bet makes sense of that?

He approaches. I know I wasn’t supposed to have noticed him. But they have cameras, they know when I’m awake. Why the hell would he be surprised? The questions keep hammering as my body reacts on instinct. I back up, throwing the armchair in his path. The prosthesis is on the other side of the room. Too far.

They paid me. They fixed me up. They gave me a doctor. For what? To send me to a clean slaughterhouse? What the fuck kind of investment is this?

The giant sidesteps the obstacle. The blade cuts the air. I dodge. The metal passes inches from my face.

This doesn’t feel like settling a score. Karpov would send a gang of noisy brutes, not an impersonal professional. I may not know Karpov beyond Marcus’s descriptions of the organizer, but I know the pattern people like him follow; the pattern of the ridiculous spectacle, of the scene that satisfies their petty desires.

I kick the small table. I throw a lamp at his head. He barely blinks. He just keeps coming.

Who pays for a guy like this? The same guy who pays for the hotel? The same guy who fixed my fucking prosthesis?

I’m cornered near the bed.

His arm tenses, the knife comes in a downward arc. I twist my body, the blow grazes my ribs, and the force of the movement pushes me toward the armchair where my prosthesis is. I reach it, but there’s no time to attach it. So I grab the metal piece,anyway I can, and hold it like a hammer. The assassin closes in, shifting his weight. He doesn’t realize that, standing like that, he’s close enough.

Did they fix me up just so I’d be well-rested for the slaughter?

When he advances, I use the momentum to throw what’s left of me forward—and with the strength of desperation, I smash the prosthesis against the bone of the hand holding the knife. The blade flies across the room. The guy tries to retreat, but I keep swinging—with every hit, the sound is of tearing flesh and cartilage. He still tries to defend himself, but then I hit his face. Hitting a human face with a metal bar is always ugly. Blood sprays, the nose flattens, eyes sink. He falls to his knees, and I don’t stop. Not until the movement ceases, not until the silence returns.

I stand up. The assassin’s body is on the floor. I’m holding my own arm like a weapon. And the confusion doesn’t lessen.

I look around. At the broken-in door. At the blood on the carpet. At the smoke detector on the ceiling. At the camera lens.

I weigh my options. Stay and wait for the next one? Run? Call Marcus?

I wonder if it’s worth putting the prosthesis back on. The blood is already starting to clot on the new wound, but there’s no time to stop. If someone else is coming, they’ll be here soon.

I open the assassin’s door and see that there’s nothing there. The entire hotel is dead quiet. Nothing. Just me and the dead man.

And, I guess, the fucker watching from the ceiling.

CHAPTER 3

BLOOD IN THE WATER

ALEXEI

My laptop screen displays four different angles of a destroyed hotel room. One feed shows the connecting door kicked off its hinges. Another, the body of Vladimir, Ivan’s watchdog, lying in a growing pool of his own blood. The third camera focuses on the stained carpet. The fourth, on the smoke detector, is my favorite. It shows Griffin.

He’s standing, panting, holding his own arm as if it were a makeshift weapon. There’s blood on his face, on his bare chest, on the polished metal of his prosthesis. He looks directly at the camera—at me—and there’s a question in his eyes, a raw intelligence the grainy footage can’t hide.

He exceeded expectations.

I’ve had a busy week. Between managing three tech market acquisitions and ensuring a stupid cousin’s shipment didn’t end up at the bottom of the ocean, my new project in Sacramento has been the most...invigoratingdistraction.