“No! No! Stop!” he begged, his eyes wild as he looked up at her. “We can come to some arrangement here, surely.”
She’d have thought about believing him if he hadn’t reached for the button under his desk to call security. She’d seen them on her way in, besuited behemoths with no neck and more weaponry than a small army.
“Ah, ah, ah,” she clucked her tongue at him chidingly, the click of the lock on his office doors resounding in the room. Shutters rattled down over the windows as she triggered the panic room protocol. Now no one would get in or out unless she wanted them to.
“Now it’s just you and me.” She smiled at him, her shark grin even bigger than his. This was the part she liked the most, when she brought an asshole to his knees and made him beg. Only he wasn’t begging enough, not yet.
James surged to his feet and slammed his hands down on his desk as he snarled at her. “You’ll pay for this.”
She saw the moment he looked her over, assessing her slight, delicate frame compared to his gym-honed physique, and bit back her sigh. It was the next stage in the escalation scenario for assholes like this and, whatever else she thought about them, she could always rely on them. They were like clockwork.
As the thought of using physical violence occurred to him, she reached around and pulled the butterfly knife from the back pocket of her jeans. A quick, easy flick of her wrist opened the blade, the complicated movement evidence of her experience with the blade, and she carefully picked under her fingernails. Just because she was a cyber-hunter, lethal in the digital world, didn’t mean she couldn’t take care of herself in the physical world as well.
“Oh?” She looked up as he stalled, mid-lunge around the desk, his eyes wide on her blade.
“Sorry… were you talking? Personal hygiene, you know. Very important,” she said, extending her free hand in front of her and studying her nails critically.
He folded, sitting back in his big leather chair with a thump. She recognized it as this year’s model Zeus-tech gamer couch, fully automated with massage and media functions. She’d been looking at one for her lair but had decided against it. Her gamer couch was specially adapted to her specific implants.
“I’ll pay your bill.” He grabbed the keyboard in front of him. She nodded, releasing her lock on the input console. A quick thought canceled the simulation she’d been running and restored his company to where it had been when she’d walked in.
“Plus twenty percent,” she added, pursing her lips as she folded the knife and slid it away. “Goes up to eighty if any of your goons try and jump me as I leave the building.”
His eyelid flickered and she shook her head. So fucking predictable.
“Done. Paid. Twenty percent on top.” He pushed the keyboard away, looking at her in angry challenge.
She smiled and pushed off from the couch. “Nice doing business with you, Mr. James. Don’t contact me again. Our professional relationship is now at an end.”
“But… who will I get—”
“Not my problem.” She cut him off with a wave of her hand as she walked toward the door. The panic room protocols disengaged, and the shutters rolled back with a clatter, sending dappled slices of sunlight over her face from the world outside.
Leaving the office, she nodded at the wide-eyed secretary and breezed past the security guards as she stalked toward the elevator.
It was an external glass one with an awesome view of the city. She sighed as she leaned back against the handrail, taking a moment to appreciate the ride down. Leaving her underground bunker was a rarity, so whenever she did, she liked to appreciate the sights and sounds of life not in the datastreams.
She’d almost reached ground level when a comms request nudged at the back of her brain, fed through from her implants. Ignoring the ping, she left the elevator to walk across the immense lobby of the James building, aware of the hard stares from the security team. She gave them a smile and a small wave as she walked out the front door.
As soon as she did, the serene silence of the lobby was replaced by a deafening cacophony, the symphony of a city well past its recommended occupancy level, with traffic and people packed in like industrious ants as they went about their daily business. She pulled her hoodie up to cover her face and did an about face to cross the road, weaving between the traffic to reach the other side. Even if James’s goons ventured out of the building to try and follow her in some sort of ill-judged quest of revenge, she was headed in completely the opposite direction to the one they expected. Street training 101, never be where they expect you to be.
Crossing a few more intersections, she headed for a subway station, her heavy boots rattling against the metal stairs as she jogged down them lightly. Leaving ground level meant she lost connection to the top-side data junction, but her implants had searched ahead, picking up a connection to the nexus that the subway trains ran on, so her stream was uninterrupted.
She walked along the platform, her personal comms device in her hand. It was an act. Unlike the rest of the drones packed onto the platform around her, she didn’t need anything as crude as a device to access the datastreams… but it allowed her to blend in seamlessly. Pretend she was one of the masses. Her dyed black hair and silver nose ring added to the cover. She could have been anything from a college student right through to a waitress waiting for her big break on the silver screen.
While waiting for the next train, she turned her attention to the comms ping. As soon as she saw the ID code, she stilled. It was Buchanan, her boss. Technically. She was on retainer with him, but most of the time he let her work on whatever projects she wanted to, like the contract she’d had with Charles James. He didn’t care if she made money on the side, as long as she was available when he needed her.
But… for a conversation with him, she needed to be in her lair with all her firewalls in place. Out here, where anyone could potentially hack her transit stream and listen in, was not a place she needed to be talking to Buchanan.
She sent a ping back, with a timestamp to account for how long it would take to get back to her apartment and secure it, and then leaned against the station wall, apparently mindlessly scrolling through her personal device. The wall opposite showed an animated poster for that new Latharian mate program.
She wrinkled her nose. Aliens. The Lathar… everyone was mad for them, but she couldn’t give two hoots. She had way more important things to do than worry about little green men.
Like what the president of Earth and all her systems wanted with her.
Raven pushed open the door to her bunker to be greeted by Crow, her AI. It appeared in the form of… none other than a large crow perched on the console table where traditionally she’d have dropped her front door keys before venturing further into the apartment. Since her “keys” were her implants and inbuilt, that would have been rather messy, so she just paused to ensure the door locks cycled correctly and nothing had crept through with her. She wasn’t worried about intruders of the two-legged variety, not this close to her home, but instead those with four legs.
Rats were an ongoing problem down here. They liked to congregate in the stairwells, watching her with their little beady eyes as they planned their assault on her home. Their usual method of entry was either to rush the door when she entered or left, or they chewed their way in through the vents and maintenance shafts.