Chapter 5 - The Brutal Reality Behind the Mall Security Badge
The assassin was a professional named Viktor Vance, an ex-Spetsnaz operative who hadn't missed a target since the Balkan conflicts. He blinked in sheer disbelief. His brain simply refused to accept the geometry of what had just happened. He had calculated Vincent’s height, weight, reaction time, and breathing rhythm. He had accounted for the six security men stationed around the room.
He had not accounted for a thirty-two-year-old woman in a jacket three sizes too large.
Viktor whipped the barrel downward, aiming straight through Claire’s torso to reach the man behind her.
He never completed the downward arc.
Claire didn't try to draw a weapon—she hadn't been issued one. Instead, she stepped inside his firing arc, her shoulder slamming violently into Viktor’s right elbow joint at the exact moment he began to flex his trigger finger.
Crack.
The sound of cartilage and bone snapping was drowned out by the screams of the crowd, but Viktor felt it up to his shoulder blade. The silenced Glock clattered loudly across the marble floor, spinning away into the legs of a panicked investor.
Before Viktor could recover his balance or throw a left hook, Claire dropped low, sweeping her right leg in a vicious, circular low kick that caught his knee from the side. Viktor’s leg buckled with a sickening pop, and the two-hundred-pound assassin crashed heavily onto the broken glass and spilled champagne.
A second Serrano enforcer—a hulking brute named Marcus with cauliflower ears and a facial scar—rushed forward from the edge of the crowd, drawing a heavy combat knife with a seven-inch serrated blade.
He expected the slim woman to retreat, to panic, to cower behind her oversized sleeves.
She didn't retreat an inch.
As Marcus lunged forward, thrusting the knife in a low, vicious arc aimed at her ribs, Claire sidestepped with fluid, minimalist grace. She caught his outstretched wrist with both hands, used his own forward momentum against him, and executed a textbook hip toss that sent the massive man flying through the air.
Marcus landed with bone-shattering force directly on top of the shattered champagne flutes, his breath exploding from his lungs in a wet gasp. He lay motionless on the floor, unconscious before his head even hit the stone.
The third Serrano operative—the one who had been standing by the ficus plant—froze dead in his tracks. He stared at his two comrades writhing on the floor, then down at the Glock lying ten feet away, and finally up at Claire.
Slowly, deliberately, Claire snatched up the fallen pistol from the floor, her finger resting parallel to the trigger guard in perfect discipline. She pointed the black barrel directly between the third man’s eyes.
"Don't," she said.
May you like
The man looked at her. Then down at the oversized security jacket hanging off her slight shoulders like a scarecrow's shroud. Then back at her eyes—eyes that looked like winter ice over a bottomless lake.
He raised both hands slowly into the air and dropped to his knees.
