Page 94 of Assassin Anonymous

A voice comes back: “Stuart? Is that you?”

Booker.

Stuart’s face drops.

There we go. My turn to give him a little bow. “I did kind of figure whoever took the notebook was looking for something I did,” I tell him. “But I knew it could expose Sara, so just to be safe, I sent some friends to keep an eye on them.”

“Hey, Stuart,” Booker says. “Always knew you were an asshole.”

Stuart growls in the base of his throat and tosses the phone across the room.

“That must suck, huh?” I ask. “I’ll admit, I missed a few pieces, but everything else I pretty much figured out on my own. The only mistake I made was thinking I was up against a real player. Russia. China maybe. Not some kid with delusions of grandeur.”

Stuart tries to respond, but the words come out in a choke as his face twists in anger.

There’s the nerve I wanted to hit. I keep digging.

“You know what I think, Stu?” I ask. “I think you’re full of shit. You make me this nonsense pitch about changing the world. In your expensive apartment, which you can’t wait to show off. Then when I said no, you showed me the muscles you bought. You’re not trying to change anything. You’re just like every other one of these assholes. You want to be rich. You want to feel powerful. You got a little money and bought your way into the game. But you’re a tourist. I think you just want to be me. You want the kind of power I had. And you never will, so the next best thing is to buy me, like you buy everything else.”

Stuart’s face morphs from anger to rage to pure fury, and he charges at me.

Which is exactly what I wanted.

Get him to see red.

Red means stupid.

He comes at me with a roundhouse. It lands hard, but I’ve got my block up and take it on my forearm. I throw a cross and he slips, and then I go to sweep his leg and he hops around it. He actually is pretty good at this, but again, he bought this training on a mat, in a gym. He didn’t earn it on the asphalt, where the person on the other side of the fight is trying to kill you.

It makes a difference.

He comes at me with a teep and I sidestep, grab him under the ankle, and lift, which acts as a lever, sending him to the ground. I could kill him six different ways from this position. But I don’t. I let him get to his feet and come at me again, slipping and blocking, letting him tire himself out. Then I dance back a little, creating some distance, and when he charges, I duck out of the way and use his weight to smash him headfirst into one of those pretty, expensive windows. He falls into a heap and scrambles to his feet. Then he’s flailing at me, screaming like an animal. I do my best to block him, waiting for my opening and, when I find it, send my fist so deep into his stomach I leave knuckle prints on his liver.

He doubles over and before he even hits the ground, I’m sprinting through the doorway, looking for Astrid and Kozlov.

Never let an opponent get behind you. But I can’t abandon Astrid. I follow the sound of their struggle, through a series of hallways and an empty library, and find them in the dim lighting of a massive white marble kitchen. Astrid is lying on the island in the center of the room, and Kozlov is straddling her, his hands around her throat.

“Still pissed at you, by the way,” I tell him, and use my momentum to take a running jump with my knee out and slam into him. As I land on Astrid he goes flying across the room and slams into a cabinet. It stuns him for a moment, and Astrid leans forward, hacking the air back into her lungs.

Given our last meeting, I’m not giving Kozlov the chance to breathe. I hop off the island and go at him fast, driving my knee into his head so hard it cracks the cabinet behind it. His eyes roll around in his head for a second and I’m about to throw another, when he strikes me on the side of the knee and my body crumples to the ground.

I’m going to feel that tomorrow, but for now, the adrenaline is working.

He gets on top of me, but as he does I manage to place my foot on his sternum. I buck my hips and push up hard, throwing him into the air behind me. He hits the refrigerator, denting the stainless steel. By the time I get to my feet he’s already waiting on his.

There’s a trickle of blood dripping down from his hairline, which he wipes with the back of his hand, smearing it across his forehead.

“Don’t hold back,” he says. “Please.”

From there, it’s a dance. The two of us throwing blocks and blows in a mad, buzzing flurry. It reinforces the thing I learned the first time we met: we’re pretty evenly matched, and now it’s about who finds the first opening.

Which is me.

He drops his guard just enough that I’m able to open-palm smack him on the ear, hard.

Hard enough to pop his eardrum.

He screams and staggers, falling to his knees, but before I can take advantage of the opening, something slams into me, pushing me onto and over the kitchen island.

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