He yelled out and dropped to his knees, toppling head over heels down the stairs until he came to a writhing stop atop the first dead man’s body. The lead hitman spun around and started firing through the gaps in the stairs, already savvy to what had happened.
Allyson dove out from her hiding place and squeezed off the last of her bullets until the weapon clicked. One of the rounds struck the man in the shoulder and rocked him back. As he recovered, she pushed herself off the floor and ran at him. He struggled to raise the weapon with his wounded wing, but he was too slow. Allyson was on him in three seconds. She bounded up the steps two at a time and hurled her body at him. Her knees crashed into his chest and drove him back against the wall. The blow jarred him, but he was hardly finished.
He swung the elbow of his good arm and struck her across the jaw. She’d grabbed on to his neck with claw-like fingers, and the shot to her face loosened her grip, but she reattached to the vest and tugged hard. She jumped again, and her feet found the wall behind him. Allyson pushed the balls of her feet hard and flung their two bodies down the stairs. She wrenched her torso in midair, forcing the assassin underneath her as they crashed to the floor. He absorbed the impact with the concrete, his head bouncing on the floor.
Allyson could feel his body go limp, but he wasn’t dead. His mask-covered head still turned back and forth, the effects of the head injury he’d just incurred doing their worst. She yanked off the mask and stared into his lost eyes. They searched for stability in a dizzy world of smoke, darkness, and blonde curls. She grabbed the gun from his weak fingers and pressed the barrel against his face.
Her finger rested on the trigger, and she was about to execute him when a voice from the doorway stopped her.
“Wait!” Adriana called. She stood in the entryway, surrounded by moonlight from outside. The smoke was clearing now and hovered above her head. She was an imposing sight with a pistol in one hand and a hunting knife in the other. “We need to ask him a few questions before we kill him.”
Allyson’s right eye twitched, a result of adrenaline and rage. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what answers this killer had to offer. But it was the prudent thing to do.
She pulled the barrel away from the man’s cheek but not before shoving it an inch deeper to make it hurt. “You hear that? You’re going to tell us everything.”
He groaned but didn’t say anything coherent. Blood oozed through the black fabric from a hole in his shoulder. His eyes roamed wildly around the room.
Allyson kicked him in the groin with the tip of her shoe, which caused him to heave up a few inches. Another spit-filled gasp escaped his lips.
“Watch him,” Adriana ordered. “I’m going to make sure there aren’t others.”
She disappeared around the edge of the house and went up the path on the right, careful to keep to the shadows. With each step, she used the side of her foot, pressing down into soft earth to make sure she didn’t make a sound. It was a technique her father claimed ninjas used in ancient times, though as she’d grown older, Adriana discovered there was no way her father could have known about the ways of the ninja. Their training and methods were nothing but myth and lore. Still, what he’d told her about the technique for silent movement worked extremely well, and she deftly skirted the side of the house to the rear entrance.
The door hung open, allowing heavy gray smoke to billow out into the chilly night air. Adriana crouched low and crept inside the little foyer where she’d been just a few moments before. She noted the tear gas canister, sitting idle on the floor, its contents completely spilled. The smoke level was still lower in the main level, due in part to the fact that the grenade hadn’t been stemmed like the one downstairs, and because some of the smoke from the basement must have made its way up the stairwell and into the living area.
She crouched low to keep clear of the remaining gas and swept through the kitchen, living room, down the hallway, and into the master bedroom. Everything was clear. She rushed to get back outside, careful not to inhale any loose wafts of the noxious smoke. Once in the fresh air again, she gasped deeply, taking the clean oxygen into her lungs.
Her respite didn’t last long. Adriana forced herself to swoop back around the other side of the home, checking the perimeter along the way to make sure all the members of the hit squad were either dead or captive. Arriving back at the lower entrance and satisfied there was no one else to worry about, Adriana shoved her pistol into the back of her shorts. She slipped the knife into a sheath and strode over to where Allyson still stood over the wriggling prisoner.
When Adriana spoke, it was loudly and in a commanding tone. “Who sent you?” Her question was simple and to the point.
The man rolled his eyes, so Adriana planted a foot on either side of his torso, reached down and grabbed him by the vest and asked again. “Who sent you?”
All that escaped his mouth were mumbled, incoherent babblings.
“This guy’s toast,” Allyson said. “I’m going to ice him right now.” She raised her weapon and pointed it at his head again, but Adriana put up a hand, blocking her shot.
“Take it easy.”
“This idiot isn’t going to tell us anything.”
“Maybe not. But we have to try. Unless you have an idea of who these guys are and who they work for.”
The man’s head continued to wobble back and forth. The wound in his shoulder was still bleeding, but it wouldn’t kill him, though it could send him into shock, if he wasn’t there already. He kept mumbling something about a bald man, and more than a few times expressed a fear of that person killing him. The name, however, was never mentioned.
Adriana grabbed him by the vest, dragged him to a support beam in the center of the room, and propped him up against it. She smacked his face several times and then took both cheeks in her hands to steady his head. His eyes still wandered.
“Look at me,” she commanded. “I need you to focus.”
The eyes drifted another second or two before the eyelids lowered and he locked in on her gaze.
“That’s better. Tell us who you work for.”
He shook his head and snorted derisively. “That’s not how this works.”
“Oh, really?”
Adriana looked back at Allyson and with a nod of her head motioned to the wound. Allyson took the cue and shoved her thumb into the bullet hole.
The assassin screamed as her salty skin came in contact with nerves and exposed tissue. She pulled the thumb out, covered in thick blood.
He swallowed and breathed hard, relieved that she’d stopped. “You don’t… understand,” he said between breaths. “I’m already dead. That’s the price of failure.”
His accent was odd, maybe Hungarian. Adriana wasn’t sure. But for a trained killer to be afraid of someone was a strange thing.
She pressed on. “Who is he?”
“You can’t know. None of us do. We only know he’s called the Eraser. We take care of problems that need—” He stopped suddenly in midsentence. His head twitched, and then his eyes fixed on a random point in the ceiling.
Adriana felt his body go limp, and gravity pulled it to the floor.
For a few seconds, they were left with nothing but a deathly silence and the acrid smell of gunpowder and the lingering scent of tear gas.