The only answer she received was more grunting and panting as the voltage slammed into him. She took a length of heavy steel rebar from the skip, checked up and down the empty laneway, and broke his kneecap with one vicious swing. He would’ve screamed had she not cut him off with another burst of crippling taser-fire.

‘Did someone send you after me?’

She backed away a few feet, still holding both weapons. The man had soiled himself. The stench was foul. His whole body was shuddering involuntarily. As he recovered, slowly and marginally, he began to moan.

‘I’m really not interested in your sob stories,’ said Julianne. ‘Unless you want me to break your other knee and hit you in the back of the neck, you need to cough up the information now. Were you being paid to get me?’

‘Yes.’ His voice was so weak and broken she almost missed the answer.

‘What’s that? Yes? Did you say “Yes”? So who sent you?’

She let him have another two seconds of voltage.

‘My boss, my boss,’ he replied, sounding as though he was pleading. ‘My boss take contract. I do job.’

A surge of anger boiled up inside Julianne and she smashed the bar down on the middle of his thigh. He screamed until she cut him off with the 26.

‘And who do you work for, hey? Who sent you out to ruin a perfectly good evening? I could’ve had fun tonight. I could’ve got laid. Instead I’m stuck here having a shitty time with you and . . . and . . . Oh fuck, you’ve got blood all over my new shirt!’

Jules could no longer control herself. She was so sick of running and hiding and running again. It was all she had done since escaping New York with the Rhino. A red mist of rage clouded her vision as she let loose with both the taser and the rebar. She could feel the jolt of the power surge every time she hit him, but she couldn’t stop. Her fury, her fear, her sick satisfaction at finally being able to lash out when previously she had felt only impotence and frustration – they all combined to doom this Romanian who had been sent after her.

When she was done, when she finally regained some control over herself, he was long dead. A ship’s horn wailed nearby as she collapsed against the edge of the skip, dropping the iron bar to the road. It was filthy with matted hair, bone fragments and clumps of grey matter. Julianne vomited.

She heard voices close-by and almost fled, but her father’s memory, speaking calmly to her across the years, stayed her reaction. ‘Better to be found at the scene than fleeing it,’ the late Lord Balwyn always said. ‘One always looks so bloody guilty when fleeing.’