Prelude

PRELUDE

 The sound of her heartbeats was punctuated by the sounds of gunfire as she ran up the stairs to the roof of the Johnson Continental Building. She had someone to catch, and she would be damned if she would lose her target now.

 She was a skilled assassin, one of the highest paid in the business. For her it was a major triumph, being a highly regarded woman in a male-dominated field. She had dropped men where they stood without any warning, escaped from precarious situations were others would have found themselves dead. She was blessed with the right amount of devil-may-care recklessness, brute force, and mental cunning. It was something that her employer could not decide to love or hate. She herself decided it suited her just fine.

 Most of her missions were cut-and-dry maneuvers that required little or no thought in the execution. By now, her planning and plotting were mostly instinctive. However, on this mission she had hit a major roadblock: another assassin from another firm. She wasn’t quite vain enough (yet, anyway) to believe she was the best out there, but she knew that she was quite good, and this opposing assassin was just as good if not a little better than she was.

 Her target had something that belonged to the assassin…and the assassin was not going to rest until she had it. It was then that she realized, as she ducked in time to avoid a bullet in her ear, that the man chasing her up the stairs was not vying for the prestige of killing the target—he was the protector.

 Fuck me! she swore in her mind as she slipped on a step. The man grabbed her ankle and tried to pull her down to his level. She kicked viciously with her other leg and was gratified to hear a grunt of pain as her boot collided with flesh. She climbed to her feet as the throbbing began in the knee that met with the concrete stair. She heard him stumble down a few steps as she pushed herself toward the door that led out to the roof. She burst through it with a bang, gripping her gun in her right hand.

 With every step she took, her body quivered with over-exertion and pain. She wasn’t one to give up, and she was going to do what she came here to do even if it meant the death of her. She raised the gun as her target came into closer view. She aimed for the heart and squeezed the trigger…

 But felt a bullet go through her instead.

 The person turned at the sound of her hitting the ground, and she found herself face-to-face with her target. The target—who, at the moment, didn’t seem like much of a target—stared down at her regally. Rapid footsteps rounded her prone body and she guessed that it had been her target’s protector that had shot her. She swore under her breath tried to hold her grip on consciousness.

 “What is going on—?” the target stuttered out.

 She found herself lifting her head slowly to look at her opponent as his comely features began to look familiar, and he was doing the same thing. They assessed each other, and recognition came for them both simultaneously. Along with it came a sort of heavy dread and the sting of betrayal that overwhelmed the physical aches and pains.

 “Masako…” the man said, blue eyes wide.

 While she felt the stone-cold shock coming from him, she was all hot-headed anger in black Lycra. As usual. “You have got to be shitting me,” she muttered.

 

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