Secret Weapon

4. Nine

4

NINE

My cat shot through the door of the break room like a Tsirkon missile, and a bad day suddenly got worse. Because Pickle was followed by a dog—where the f**k had that come from?—and they leapt onto a set of shelves. The free-standing unit tipped over, scattering beads and Pickle across the floor. Paulo made a grab for the canine and slipped over on a river of faux pearls, and a cacophony of yowling and barking and shrieking sent a battering ram through my already delicate head.

Pizdets.

Pickle scaled another set of shelves, and the dog attempted to follow, but it was flagging. Where had all the blood come from? I focused on Pickle, but she didn’t seem damaged, which meant the dog must be the donor.

The dog…

Brooke ran in with Romi Mendez and Shauna Weaver following close behind, and I realised it was Shauna’s unruly mutt that was currently wrecking my store. She never had been able to control it. More than once, it had bolted down Main Street in pursuit of a car with Shauna huffing and puffing along behind. Today, it was miraculously wearing a leash, so why wasn’t she holding the damn thing?

I thought longingly of the syrette of tranquilliser I kept nestled in my bra, just in case of a little emergency. It was meant for humans, but it would probably take a dog down too. Or kill it. I sighed. Death would invite questions I couldn’t answer, so this would have to be done the old-fashioned way.

Paulo’s new friend had run to help him up, and the blonde who’d been browsing the gift section was puzzling over the red streaks on the tiled floor. Brooke and Romi were frozen, Shauna was crying, and didn’t any of these coddled westerners understand the concept of action?

I shuffled toward the dog, keeping the soles of my feet in contact with the floor so I didn’t make the same mistake as Paulo. The thing launched itself at Pickle again, but half-heartedly, which suggested that in the war of blood loss versus adrenaline, whatever injury the dog had suffered was winning. When the leash whipped past me, I caught it and yanked, and the dog fell to my side with a strangled bark.

I nearly snapped, “Hold this f*****g thing,” at Shauna, but I caught myself just in time.

“Hun, could you grab the leash while I try to catch Pickle?”

Shauna didn’t move, but the blonde held out a hand.

“Here, I’ll take it.”

“I really appreciate that.”

Back in Russia, I hadn’t been a cat person. My tormentor, the man who’d shaped me into what basically amounted to a pet assassin, had hated animals unless they served a particular purpose. Tracker dogs? Okay. Pet dogs? Not okay. In all honesty, I’d never intended to have a pet in America either, but Pickle had walked into the store one day, nothing but skin and bone, and while the old me would have put her out of her misery, new me thought “f**k it” and took her to the veterinarian. She’d grown on me now. A small creature who gave affection when she felt like it and asked for little in return.

Apart from today. Today, there was no affection, only pissed-off hissing.

I grabbed a square of taffeta from the fabric bin and unfolded it. Pickle was normally friendly, but her claws were sharp, and thanks to Shauna’s incompetence, she was in fight mode. People should have to take a test before they could own a pet. Question one: Can you stop the varmint from being a pain in the ass? Negative? Then no dog for you.

Pickle readied herself to jump to a higher shelf, and I tossed the taffeta over her before she could make the leap. Then I bundled her up and deposited her in the staff bathroom to cool off while I dealt with the rest of the chaos. This was why I preferred to avoid people.

Paulo was whining about bruises, and as I checked on the dog’s status, it collapsed onto the floor in slow motion, scarlet pooling underneath. Bleeding often looked worse than it actually was, unless you used a stiletto knife, or an ice pick, or a neat little .22, but I had to concede that there was a significant volume of blood on the floor.

“I think he’s hurt?” The blonde stated the f*****g obvious as she knelt at the dog’s side. “He’s bleeding.”

Shauna contributed by bursting into tears, which took Brooke out of the game too because one of us had to calm Shauna down and it wasn’t going to be me.

“Somebody help Scooby,” she wailed.

“What happened?” I asked. “How did he get hurt?”

Brooke answered for her. “She thinks it was a cougar.”

A cougar? Not this near town, no way. Baldwin’s Shore had thick forest on two sides, and there was enough food out there that mountain lions didn’t need to risk coming near man.

The blonde gently probed through Scooby’s fur. “I don’t see any bite marks, but maybe they’re on the other side?”

“Is the blood definitely his?” Romi asked. “What if he bit the cougar?”

Doubtful.

I turned to Shauna. “You saw the cougar?”

“N-n-no.”

Give me strength. “So what did you see, hun?”

“Scooby made this noise like…like…like a scream, so I ran along the path, and Scooby was there, and he was hurt, and I saw this blur disappearing into the trees.”

“And what made you think the blur was a cougar?”

“I guess… I guess it was a beige colour?”

“I called Luca,” Brooke offered. “He’s on his way, but he’s down near Bandon.”

Luca was her fiancé, a former Army Ranger and a current sheriff’s deputy. At one time, I’d thought his profession might cause me a problem, especially when I’d carved up a guy who abducted Brooke, but Luca had remained delightfully oblivious to my extracurricular activities. And lately, it seemed he’d actually been encouraging them. Tsk-tsk-tsk.

Anyhow, he’d be at least half an hour, and the non-cougar would be long gone. “What about Colt?”

Colt was the other deputy, the one who’d rescued a princess at the side of the road and somehow ended up dating her.

“He has the day off, and he went sailing with Brie and Kiki.”

Sailing. Which meant they’d be on Nico’s boat, and hopefully, Nico was with them. The local hotel owner was a man I avoided whenever possible. I considered it unlikely that he’d recognise me—we’d met just a handful of times prior to his arrival in Baldwin’s Shore, and under very different circumstances—but I only took risks when the potential upside outweighed the downside.

I heard the snap of teeth, and the blonde leapt back. She’d managed to roll the dog, something the dog hadn’t appreciated in the slightest.

“Here’s where the blood’s coming from.” She pointed at a wound on Scooby’s neck. “But it doesn’t look like a bite mark to me.”

No, it wasn’t a bite mark. It was quite clearly a knife wound, but I couldn’t admit I knew that.

“Maybe someone should take him to the veterinarian?” And by someone, I meant Shauna because her crying was getting on my last f*****g nerve.

Brooke spoke up, as I’d known she would. She had a kind heart, too kind at times because with that kindness came a naivety that had gotten her into trouble in the past.

She saw the good in people.

I saw the bad.

“My car’s right outside,” she said. “Paulo, can you help to lift the dog? We’re gonna need a towel or a blanket to lay him on.”

“The throw from the couch in the break room?”

“That’s perfect.”

Speaking of bad, who was running around in the trees with a knife? I’d admit to being curious, and perhaps a little scouting was just what I needed to blow the cobwebs off and liven up a dull day?

Paulo reappeared with the throw, a multicoloured woollen thing I’d knitted soon after I arrived in town. I’d been broken back then. Cracked down the middle with pain and anger and sadness spilling out. The only man I’d ever cared about was gone, and I was left with two options: return home to face the music, or run. Lieutenant General Zacharov didn’t tolerate failure, so returning home would have been distinctly unpleasant, and if he ever found out that I’d sabotaged the operation, I’d have been dead anyway. What did I have to lose by running?

My sanity, as it turned out.

The first couple of years in Baldwin’s Shore hadn’t been too bad. As my fractured soul healed, I’d taken pleasure in the mundanity of everyday life. Working as a live-in nurse to East Baldwin had been a piece of cake compared to my former life, even when I had to deal with his family, who ranged from milquetoast to malicious to murderous. I’d taught myself to knit, learned to bake, and wheeled East along the seashore every morning with the wind in my hair.

When Nastya hadn’t come, when Vik hadn’t come, I’d begun to relax. For a while, I carried one knife instead of two and only packed a gun on special occasions, and I cut myself slack if I missed an early-morning run. Target practice became entertainment rather than necessity. Boredom crept up on me like a slow-rolling fog, and I couldn’t find my way out of it. Wasn’t sure it was worth the effort. What need was there for a spy-s***h-assassin in sleepy little Baldwin’s Shore?

Then Nico came to town, and everything changed.

At first, I’d been spooked. Now, I was ninety-nine percent sure his presence was a coincidence, a big cosmic joke. But there was still that one percent of me that asked what if he knows?

I’d started training again, hard, the way I always used to. And in the scraps of spare time I eked out, I began to have fun. To enjoy myself. They’d given me a nickname—the Bad Samaritan—but at heart, I’d always be Nine. Nine of Ten. Only seven of us had made it through the initial training. Three more died later. There were only four of us left now, or perhaps three if Ilya had let his greed get the better of him.

“We need to get the dog onto the throw,” Paulo said, snapping me back to the present. “I don’t want to get bit.”

“Maybe Shauna could help?” I suggested. Scooby was her dog. If anyone was going to get tetanus, it should be the girl who couldn’t tell the difference between Homo sapiens and Puma concolor. Me? I’d had my shots. Always be prepared, General Zacharov had drilled into us.

Scooby didn’t have the energy to snap as we pulled him onto the blanket, and that wasn’t a good sign. But the veterinarian was only a two-minute drive away, and Isaac Ward seemed competent from what I’d seen of him. The dog might pull through—anything was possible.

“Should I come too?” Paulo asked. “No, I should help to clean up the store. Someone has to rescue all of those Swarovski pearls.”

“Oh, you go, hun. If Dr. Ward doesn’t have an assistant there, they’ll need you on one corner of the blanket again.” I turned to the blonde and the hummingbird. “And I’m afraid you’ll have to leave too. I really need to get these bloodstains wiped up.” The hummingbird opened his mouth to protest, but I’d had enough bullshit for one day. “If you want to jot down your number, we can ship whatever you’d like at no charge.”

“But the yarn—”

Good thing the blonde took the hint. “No shipping charge—that’s a great offer.”

“We should help to—”

She linked her arm through his and marched him toward the front door. “We really need to leave the lady to take care of her cat, okay?”

“I’ll email you,” he called back over his shoulder, and I dredged up a smile.

“I’ll be looking forward to it.”

The instant the door closed behind them, I threw the bolt home and headed for the rear exit. If there was some asshole with a knife in the trees behind Main Street, I needed to find out who they were. Kids walked there. Okay, so I didn’t much like kids, but I liked assholes even less.

I strolled out the door, breathing deep to settle my headache. Peace and quiet and a little fresh air worked better than any painkiller. Blood drops led across the small yard at the rear of the store, and I followed them like breadcrumbs, one hand ready to grab the gun strapped to my thigh if necessary. There was a reason I wore a muumuu most of the time, and that reason had less to do with making a fashion statement and more to do with concealment. Luck was on my side today—I’d picked out a nice subdued outfit this morning instead of nuclear orange or mustard-gas yellow.

The path curved into the trees, and I slipped a switchblade into my hand.

Whatever came at me, I’d be ready.

And they’d be sorry.