She found it a particularly useful tool as a first. Especially when the violence was dirty and unexpected. Doubly so when it came from a woman who looked the way she did—no—because it came from a woman who looked the way she looked.

Her targets were nearly always men.

This lifestyle seemed to draw the worst of them.

And the one thing that she’d yet to prove wrong was the inverse relation between a man’s respect for women in general and how hard he’d be to send to his knees.

Whatever faulty wiring induced a guy to tell a woman with twice his education and four times his brains that she’d get further in life if she was a little friendlier and smiled more, and to think he was doing her a favor, was the same faulty wiring that made a guy feel entitled to a woman’s time and attention and grow abusive when she didn’t give it, and the same faulty wiring that prompted a guy to laugh at the little lady when she told him to back off and then to tell her he liked ’em fired up and she should give it her best shot when she threatened to break his nose.

Same candy, different flavors.

Anyone who handicapped a person on account of double X chromosomes was also one to miss the signs that double X was about to knock them on their ass. “Hit hard, hit once,” that was her motto.

Those kinds of guys never saw it coming, and her world was full of them.

She slipped out the back and into the dark, stride changing, gait loosening, shape-shifting, and stepped out into the open like a party girl finding her way home after a few drinks too many, and made her way to the entryway that would lead to her quarry. She dropped a set of keys, struggled to pick them up, and fumbled them toward the keyhole. Her fingers, sheltered by a drunken body hunched for concentration, picked another lock. She made her way up with the same uncoordinated steps and reached the apartment and pounded on the door, calling out in French, “Goddammit, Anton. I came all the way from Paris to see you, and you’re going to tell me you’re not here?”

They couldn’t shoot her.

Not through the door, not after all the noise, and not with the neighbors, who would have taken note. Easiest way for them to resolve this would be to open up and let her in.

She counted down those seconds in her head, digging through the purse, swearing and complaining about losing her door key, punch knife between her fingers as a just in case, and then she pounded harder, making a drunk-ass ruckus.

Voices came through from the other side, one near, one far.

Russian, spoken clearly enough to grasp snippets.

“. . . Some drunk bitch . . .”

“. . . Make the noise stop . . .”

The door opened.