“I’ll decide who is and isn’t our concern,” snapped the Italian. When she was angry her tone was identical to her mother’s, and it shut the Serbian up as surely as a slap across the face. It did that with everyone. The Italian gave it a few seconds to set the mood, then she said, “Set up a surveillance post. Two cars. If Ledger leaves the café I want to know where he goes and where he’s staying. Upload surveillance photos and data to my personal file on Oracle.”

The Serbian nodded so curtly that it looked painful. “And then?”

“And then go back to the staging area until I call you.” The Italian made sure that her voice carried every bit of Lilith’s icy command. It was an illusion, borrowed power, but it was a useful skill that she’d begun cultivating before she was ten years old.

The other women mumbled something and went out.

When she could no longer hear their footsteps on the stairs she waited another thirty seconds, and then sighed, her shoulders slumping.

Was it ever like this for Lilith? Probably, she thought, and wondered how long her mother had to fake being tough before she actually became the stone-faced, stone-hearted monster she was now.

Knowing her mother as she did, that transformation had probably happened at a much younger age, maybe before she had been abducted by the Upierczi. If it hadn’t been there already, Lilith would never have escaped the pits, never have escaped the breeding pens.

For her own part, the Italian woman did not yet feel that hardness developing within her own soul. Perhaps it all came down to how many people she had to kill, perhaps there was a line that, once crossed, burned away all softness. At twenty-five, the Italian woman could still count the numbers. Every head shot, every cut throat, every garroting and poisoning. Lilith? If even half of the stories were true, then her kills could fill a medium-sized office building. Or an entire graveyard.

The woman believed that all of the stories told about her mother were true.

Every last one.

And everyone in the sisterhood expected her to be her mother’s daughter in every sense.

She murmured a brief prayer in Latin as she bent to peer through the sniper scope at the two figures seated in the coffee shop.

Joe Ledger and Jalil Rasouli.

Why had she lingered to watch?

The question flitted around in her head, fluttering like a bat after moths.

Why?