He had an instant to register that the squat the body landed in was oddly coordinated before she erupted upwards into a leaping roundhouse that caught the torturer behind the jawline at an angle. The man collapsed as though his strings had been cut and the red blur flipped off of his dead friend’s waistband and landed facing him. She paused just long enough to pivot around one hip and hit him with a side kick to the solar plexus. It connected with enough force to throw him back against the coat closet door, his head cracking against it solidly, and leave him on the ground, gasping up through sickly doubled vision, “Who… who are you?”

The last thing Charles Worth saw was the muzzle flash from his late colleague’s pistol, in his victim’s leveled hands.

“I’m somebody that doesn’t chit-chat while they’re killing people.” She walked over to the body and tilted her head appraisingly a moment, before carefully and deliberately spitting on it. “The name’s Cally O’Neal, and that’s for trying to kill me when I was eight.”

The door burst open to admit three heavily armed men in black body armor.

“You’re late, Granpa,” she snapped coldly.

“The traffic was miserable.” The team point pulled off his mask and ran a hand through blazingly red hair, absently tucking a plug of Red Man in between cheek and jaw. He was a medium height man with a broad, low-slung body and long arms that gave him something of the impression of a gorilla. He looked to be about twenty but something about the way he moved, the look in his eyes, gave an impression of age and experience.

“Three hours?” Cally asked, incredulously, twisting her still naked body slightly as if stretching out a sore muscle and examining her pulled fingernails. “It had better have been a full scale pile-up. I was supposed to be bait not the trigger puller, dammit!”