Secret Weapon

5. Emmy

5

EMMY

Welcome to the “nothing is ever easy” club.

The scream had come from the north, but undergrowth restricted visibility to a few yards in any direction. Spiky evergreen bushes grew beneath pine trees, and a carpet of leaves and needles meant few footprints and no obvious tracks. If someone had come this way recently, we weren’t able to tell.

Ana was on a path to my left. I couldn’t see her, and I couldn’t hear her, but I could feel her.

We’d met late in life, barely known each other existed until a chance meeting in a frozen wasteland just over two years ago. Trust didn’t come easily to either of us, but despite that, we’d clicked. We’d clicked, and now Ana was one of the two people I trusted most in the world to have my back. The other was my husband, but he was still in California.

And Ana’s presence wasn’t the only thing I felt. A prickle at the base of my spine told me someone or something else was lurking in these woods, and the meeting wasn’t going to be pretty.

Up ahead, our paths converged, and I glimpsed Ana through the trees, thirty feet ahead of me. What was out here? Who was out here?

Turned out I didn’t want to know the answer.

Because a moment later, she was there.

Darla, Darya, Nine—whatever her name was—and now I knew that Ana had been absolutely right. Nine was still wearing the f*****g muumuu, but she had a knife in her hand, and her stance said hunter.

Ana was about to become her prey.

They stared at each other for a heartbeat. Never had I seen Ana hesitate, not once, but today she did, which let Nine get the drop on her, and before Ana could recover, her semi-automatic was flying through the air. Ana went for Nine’s knife, but she was already one point down in this battle, and I couldn’t shoot the b***h myself in case I hit my sister.

Ah, f**k.

I hated knife fights. Somebody always got cut, but I began running anyway, and my own blade was already in my hand. An Emerson CQC-7B with a textured grip, so even if my hand was slick with blood, I still stood a chance of holding on to it.

Ana leapt back as Nine slashed with the knife, then grabbed the b***h’s wrist with both hands to control the blade. But that left Nine with a free hand, and I was still ten feet away when Nine got Ana with a vicious chop to the neck. Ana fell to her knees. Was she out? s**t, she was out.

Five feet away, four, three, and Nine lashed out backwards with a boot and caught the side of my knee. I saw stars, but I grabbed the back of her dress and yanked, hoping to tighten it around her throat. Instead, I heard the scriiiitch of Velcro giving way, and the whole thing came off in my hand. And Nine really did believe in being prepared. Under the hideous top layer, she was basically Lara Croft, complete with thigh holsters and a tactical belt that had to be custom made. And I’d just given her better access to her toys.

Fuck my life.

She smashed her head back, and not for the first time I felt the crunch of cartilage in my nose. My plastic surgeon needed to offer a loyalty card—after nine rhinoplasties, the tenth came free. But I was also used to pain and fighting through it—thanks, Alex—so I wasn’t about to back down.

If Ana was right, Nine had gone into this battle with the assumption that she was fighting for her life, and now so was I. She wouldn’t stop until I was dead. But we had to be fairly evenly matched—she’d undergone the same training as Ana, and I’d sparred with Ana plenty of times, although, granted, we hadn’t actually been trying to kill each other. Nine had two inches on me height-wise and probably a little weight too, but she’d also been working in a craft store for a couple of years. I had the advantage of endless hours of practice during that time, with Ana, with Black, and with Alex, to name but a few.

Nine came at me with the knife, but I ducked, grabbed an ankle, and upended her. She used her momentum to roll, and in a heartbeat, she was back on her feet, but not before I’d kicked the knife out of her hand. Another appeared in a blink of the devil’s eye, and we circled each other, assessing. A second later, she was in the air, swinging one-handed from a branch above, aiming a boot at my head as she went. I ducked but lost sight of her for a second, then felt a hand on my wrist and punched her in the shoulder as she grabbed my knife. It slid under a bush as Ana groaned softly, and there… Nine glanced to the side, only for a fraction of a second, but it was enough. I gripped her wrist and drove the point of her blade into a tree, hard enough that it stuck there. There was blood on her, not mine, I thought, but hers. I’d nicked her somewhere with my own blade, but as I tried to get an arm around her throat, she bit me, and f**k, that stung.

“You b***h!”

“Idi na khui.”

Oh, we were speaking Russian now?

“Khui tebe tozhe, suka.”

An elbow to the stomach knocked the wind out of me, but I had her in a chokehold now, and I wasn’t letting go. She clawed at me, stomped on my instep, but I propelled her forward into a tree and then she needed her hands to save herself.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ana roll to her knees, and I aimed a silent “thank f**k” skywards. Then Nine used her legs to push off the tree and sent me stumbling backwards, cursing, and when we landed I was underneath, but she was still on her back, which didn’t give her the advantage she’d hoped for.

She tried to twist; I hung on and wrapped my legs around her waist. My arms were getting shredded by her nails, but skin regrew, right? She tried to reach for my hand, and I bit her. Payback was a b***h, and so was I. For the thousandth time, I wondered why I did this s**t. I was married to a billionaire. I could have been sunning myself on a beach somewhere, but oh no, I had to fight with a Russian assassin in the bloody woods instead.

Then I heard it. The most glorious sound in the world. No, not the hiss of a coffee machine but the crackle of a stun gun as Ana jammed it into Nine’s armpit and held it there for three seconds, four seconds, five. Nine let out an unearthly yelp as she spasmed, then her grip loosened enough for me to heave her off.

“Hope you had a good f*****g sleep.”

Ana bit her lip, and I’d never seen her look spooked that way either.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“Just get her the hell away from me. Tie her up.”

We carried flex-cuffs and paracord as standard, and by the time Nine opened her eyes, we had her hog-tied and disarmed. Of course, she began struggling right away, spitting curses in Russian and English and calling us all manner of uncomplimentary names.

And now we had the problem of what to do with her.

“So…” I started, wiping away the blood that still trickled from my nose. “Any ideas?”

Nine had several, all of them unpleasant and some of them physical impossibilities. Safe to say she wasn’t happy with recent developments. Admittedly my Russian wasn’t fluent, but she seemed to be pissed about us stabbing a dog? Was that some kind of idiom? Ana knelt beside her and brushed her hair almost tenderly, then she shocked me for the third time in as many minutes when she leaned in close. And kissed the murderous witch. Not with tongues—our old-new friend would’ve bitten it off—but more than a chaste peck.

What the f**k?