CHAPTER ONE
THE GHOST
The fist came at Kiera Fallon's face like a freight train.
She slipped it.
“The man behind the fist. A mountain of scar tissue and protein shakes, who called himself Crusher—grunted as his blow cut through empty air, stumbling forward half a step that changed everything.”
Kiera kicked her left foot and drove her elbow into the back of his skull.
The crowd in the basement erupted.
Not for her,the blood, the sound his teeth made when they snapped together. For the way a man that big folded like wet cardboard and hit the oil-stained concrete with enough force to shake the cage walls.
Kiera stood over him with his chest dripping with Blood leaking from her split lip where his first jab had caught her in the second round.
Her knuckles was wrapped with dirty white tape
way up to her collarbone.
She gave herself three seconds to feel it.
Then she spat blood onto the floor and stepped back.
"Winner!" The referee, a guy named Hitch who smelled like cigarettes and bad decisions,
grabbed her wrist and yanked her arm up while the crowd booed and someone threw a cup of something warm and sticky that missed her head by an inch.
She didn't flinch.
That particular reflex had died somewhere between the sixth month of sleeping in abandoned buildings and the second time she'd fought with a dislocated shoulder just to eat.
The money was two hundred dollars, folded into a rubber band and pressed into her palm by a man with no neck and a gold chain thick enough to tie a boat.
"Are you fighting again on Friday?" No-Neck asked, "Got a guy coming down from Detroit. Real animal.”
Kiera pocketed the money without counting it.
"Maybe." She pulled her hoodie over her head and she said, "Depends on my schedule."
No-Neck laughed like she'd made a joke but she hadn't. She genuinely didn't know if she'd still be alive on Friday.
She slipped through the crowd before anyone could touch her, before grabbing hands while they offered for "a drink, just a drink, sweetheart," the men who thought a woman who fought for money could be bought for less.
The exit was a fire door at the back of the basement, wedged open with a broken cement block.The cold Chicago air hit her like a wall then the lake made it look harsher and a wet cold that could get into your bones and stayed there like a bad memory.
Kiera pulled her hood up and walked.
She already had a route.
Not a destination for people with apartments and door keys with a reason to go back. She had a route, which was different. A route you could change at any moment. A route let you see who was following.
Nobody was following tonight. She checked three times, doubling back once through an alley behind a restaurant that smelled like garlic and hot grease. Her stomach contracted painfully at the smell.
Later, she said.
The two hundred dollars needed to last two weeks which was meant for rice,beans if she found where to buy and maybe an apple if she was feeling extravagant.
She crossed the river. Turned down two side streets then Ducked under a chain-link fence. Walked the length of a parking garage at the third level good sight lines, nowhere to be cornered and came out the other side into the shadow of a building that had been condemned for eighteen months.
Home.
The word tasted wrong in her mouth but she didn't let herself think it too often.
The building had been a textile factory once. Four stories of red brick and broken glass and
pigeons who didn't care that the roof leaked. Kiera had found a room on the second floor that was mostly dry, mostly hidden, and had two exits She'd been here for six weeks. Longer than usual then She started to feel things about her comfort, maybe, or something like it and that was always the sign it was time to move.
But not tonight. Tonight she was exhausted and her lip was still bleeding and she had two
hundred dollars and for exactly one hour, she was going to let herself rest.
She climbed through the ground floor window the one she'd relocked from the inside with a
bolt she'd installed herself and took the back stairs, counting the steps out of habit from twelve to the landing and Three more to the door.
She stopped.
One hand pressed flat against the wall.
Stayed there.
Her heartbeat, which had slowed to a comfortable rhythm the moment she left the fight, kicked and back up.
Something was wrong.
She stood in the dark hallway and let herself feel it in a particular wrongness of a space that had been touched. It wasn't a smell or a sound but It was the quality of the air. The way the
darkness sat differently she'd spent six months training herself to notice the difference between
an empty room and a room that had recently held a person, and right now, every nerve she had was screamimg.
Someone had been here.
She moved to the door and Pressed her ear against it.
Silence.
She opened it.
The room looked the same, her bedroll in the corner and her pack against the wall. The small gas camping stove she used for heat as much as cooking, her three changes of clothes folded in their plastic bag, her weapons which consists of two knives, a collapsible baton Which was hidden in their spots.
She checked the knives first.
Both the knives was there where exactly she left them.
But.
She crossed to the bedroll, Crouched and Pressed her fingers to the edge.
It had been moved less than an inch which repositioned almost perfectly. But almost wasn't good enough she'd folded the corner at a specific angle, a habit she'd developed after four months on the run, and the corner was now folded at a slightly different angle.
Someone had searched it.
Kiera straightened her mind ran through the options with the cold, fast efficiency that used to make her the best in her field.
Option one: a random squatter,Possible and Unlikely she'd been meticulous about not leaving signs that the room was occupied.
Option two: Viktor's men, The bounty on her head was eight months old now, but bounties
didn't expire, and Viktor Sokoloff was not a man who forget She'd killed two of his best
operatives eighteen months ago while protecting a target. The fact that the target had still died wasn't something Viktor cared about and He'd lost men which was personal.
Option three.
She didn't let herself finish option three. Option three had a name attached to it, and she'd sworn six months ago that she would never think that name again.
She grabbed her pack which was already packed even though she always kept it packed. She pulled on her second knife, strapped it to her ankle, and moved to the window.
The fire escape.
She went for it.
The window was stuck she'd always needed to force it and she was halfway through it
when the shadow on the fire escape moved.
Kiera threw herself back inside and came up with her knife.
Three figures, Two male, one female moving through the window fast and a professional,
dressed in black, no visible identification. The woman moved like military then the bigger man
moved like a tank while the third was already in the room and circling.
Kiera made her calculations in half a second.
Three against one she was tired, split lip, two hundred dollars cash, no backup.
She attacked anyway.
The woman came first faster than she looked, a grab for Kiera's knife wrist. Kiera rolled it, broke the grip, put her thumb into the pressure point behind the woman's ear then the woman made a sound and staggered. The tank was already there, arms going around her from behind then Kiera dropped her weight, drove the back of her skull into his nose, felt the crunch, heard him curse in Russian? No, Something Eastern European.
Not Viktor's accent.
Different.
The third man was the problem he'd stayed back, which meant he was smart, meant she should have hit him first. She tried to turn but the tank had recovered faster than he should have his arms around her again, pinning her elbows.
"Easy," the third man said with an American accent and Calm. "Nobody wants to hurt you."
"Tell that to your face when I'm done with it," Kiera said through her teeth, and drove the heel of her boot into the tank's instep.
She felt something sting her neck.
Cold.
Fast.
She knew what that was before her legs went soft.
Tranquilizer,Fast-acting, Military grade and based on the speed.
The room tilted, her knife fell but she tried to catch herself on the wall and missed it entirely.
She was going down, she knew it and there was nothing she could do about it, which was
the only thing in the world that truly terrified her helplessness, the loss of control and the body
refusing to obey.
The floor came up.
The last thing Kiera Fallon saw, was as her cheek hit the cold concrete, was a pair of shoes.
Polished, Black and Expensive.
Standing very still in the doorway, watching her fall with her amber eyes which she would have recognized in any dark room in any city in the world.
She knew whose shoes those were.
She knew whose eyes those were.
She had spent six months telling herself she'd never see either again.
The darkness took her before she could decide how to feel about being wrong.