“Time to get to work.”

Those words make me nervous.

This is our first assignment and I’m terrified that I am going to fuck it up. I’ve never carried out a successful mission in my life. We’ve been contracted to deal with some people smuggling drug runners. Relatively small time. I know this is basically a test. They want to see if I’m actually useful. I’m fairly certain I won’t be.

Because this is so small time, it’s just Ken and I. Our mission is simple enough. Go in and take the leader captive. He’ll be either broken or traded or god knows what. That’s not our concern.

Ken will do all the heavy lifting. All I have to do is stay in the rear and not fuck up. Should be easy enough.

We’re not even going all that far. We’re not leaving the state. This is a short, hop, skip and a jump to a part of the countryside where some people with very bad intentions have set themselves up to supply people who should know better.

“You stay on my six,” he says. “Any sign of trouble, you take cover. This is a small operation, we’re not expecting much resistance, but you never know.”

He’s fucking hot in this mode, but I can’t allow myself to be distracted. This is real. And I have to prove myself. Specifically, I have to prove that I’m not a total loose cannon, that I can follow orders and that I can be trusted in the field. Even I don’t know if any of those things are true. I guess we’re about to find out.

It takes way too fucking long to hike to the spot. We’re dropped off several miles away and we have to walk in. These guys like it remote.

There’s no talking though. There’s just three hours of Ken’s ass moving in perfect concert inside black tactical pants. I’m fucking hungry for this man. When this is over, I’m going to devour him.

It’s probably not normal to be horny as hell heading into a mission, or maybe it is. Arousal, fear, excitement, they’re all basically the same thing. This is a slow burn of anticipation. As soon as we get our man, we’ll be choppered out. And later on tonight, I’ve been promised a celebration.

Today is a good day.

Until everything goes wrong.

Good things take time. Bad things happen instantly. We are still ten minutes out from the target when a blast of smoke and sound disorients me. Flash grenade. Thrown right the fuck at us.

There’s shouting. It might be mine. It might be Ken’s. I don’t know what the hell is happening. I can’t see and I can’t hear. Fumbling about in the fog, I grab for the nearest thing that feels human. It takes hold of me, wraps around me.

THUNK

Something hard and heavy smacks me over the skull. My world goes dark.

When I come to, they have me. One of my eyes is swollen. I spit dried blood out of my mouth. A tooth goes with it. Left canine, by the looks of things.

I’m not tied up. That’s… interesting. I sit up, look down with my one good eye, and see that I’ve been laid out on a stained mattress. My vest has been taken off. My shirt is partially open. Not a good sign. But my belt is still on. I guess they didn’t like what they saw when they pulled my bra down.

“What the fuck happened to you?”

The question is spat at me by a man sitting at a table across the room. The twisted up look on his face says it all. His disgust saved me from a brutal assault. Never thought I’d be glad to be missing a nipple.

“Some limp dick pussy tried to fuck me, I think,” I say, taunting him on purpose.

The thing about men who are used to hurting women is that they forget that not everyone is their victim. This guy is wearing a knife and a gun on his waist, making himself a walking weapon rack.

It takes him a full thirty seconds to realize I’m talking about him. The realization dawns slower than grass grows. So he’s sloppy and stupid. Awesome.

“What did you just say to me, you ugly whore?” He comes storming over, like the fucking idiot he is. In a split second, the knife which was at his waist is in my hand. The point is in his brachial artery.

He’s not quite dead by the time he hits the floor, but in another twenty seconds he will be. I don’t have time to listen to the whimpering and the gurgling. I have to find Ken.

This shack has a basement, and there are unpleasant sounds coming from it. I work my way slowly down the stairs, knife in hand, to see what’s going on.

Ken is tied up against the wall, Jesus style. A-fucking-men. Three men are interrogating him, mostly by yelling at him and hitting him repeatedly with a piece of wood. Simple, but probably effective enough over time. He’s going to be a mass of bruises.

I walk up to the middle man and shove the knife between his ribs from the back. He’s dead before the other two even realize it. They don’t notice anything is wrong until I push him forward and off the blade. There’s an almost comical moment where their comrade keels over face first, and they suddenly realize that there’s a problem.

Me.

The first man to turn toward me meets the point of my knife in different fashion, right across the belly, clean and smooth. His insides become his outsides in spectacularly short order, a cascade of viscera making a mess of all our shoes.

There’s one man left. I turn toward him, knife ready to remove soul from flesh.

He throws up and passes out.

It’s well played. Even I don’t kill unconscious people. Isn’t sporting.

I leave him in his vomit and turn my attention to the task of getting Ken out of here.

He hasn’t made a sound since I came into the room, although, to be fair, it’s only been sixty seconds since I started killing.

“I didn’t teach you to do that,” he says from his spreadeagled place on the wall.

“I know,” I say, as I work on the bonds on hands. “They did.”

“Who did?”

“The hospital,” I say. “They made me watch things. When you watch, you learn.”

“I never thought I’d be glad you were ever in there,” he says. “And I’m still not, but… goddamn.”

“You made me faster at it,” I say conversationally. “Would have taken me longer if it had happened before you trained me.”

“Huh.”

He slides gingerly down from the wall, rubbing his wrists and looking at me with an expression I know signals the end of our love.

Now he’s seen it all. The part of me I tried my best to hide. The capacity no good woman is ever supposed to have. He always knew I was a monster, I think. But now he knows it for absolute certain. It’s easy to feel sorry for me and look past the scars. Fucking a charity case is one thing. But wanting a woman who just did what I did? Not going to happen. Women function as repositories of goodness for bad men. That’s how it always is.

“Sorry I fucked this up.”

“You didn’t,” he says. “That guy on the floor is the one we want. Let’s get him out of here.”

He bends down to grab the guy, but doesn’t get more than an inch or so bent before he curses and straightens with a gasp.

“I’ve got him,” I say, laying hands to his boots. I start dragging the asshole out feet first. Ken follows, armed and watchful, calling in the cavalry.

Our extraction team is not too far away. I guess the Head figured we might need it. The helicopter swoops in like a dark angel, picks us up and within five minutes, it’s like we were never there.

The helicopter is loud. It’s impossible to have a conversation between the rapid beating of the blades. Instead, Ken just holds my bloodied hand.

The moment we land inside our compound, others take over. The poor bastard in the back is about to have a very, very bad day.

Ken is sore. He needs medical attention. I tell him as much, and hear the last thing I ever wanted to hear.

“You need to see the doctor too.”

“Nope.”

“No doctor,” I insist.

“We have a new one on staff. I think you’ll like him.”

“There’s only one doctor I’d ever see and…” I trail off as Ken’s lips twist into a knowing smirk. “You got Tom hired here too?”

“He’s a military surgeon whose ex-wife ruined his civilian career. He’ll do well here,” Ken shrugs. “And you’re going to see him, if I have to pick you up and drag you to him.”

“You couldn’t pick up a kitten right now,” I point out.

Ken lets out a growl and advances on me, keen to prove me wrong. Before he can hurt himself macho-ing out on me, I raise my hands in surrender. “Okay! Okay! Fine!”