Heat Wave ➣Romanogers

Ten

He was hunting her.

As good as he was, though, she was better. She caught sight of him blocks ago. That wasn't the first time. Earlier that night, on the tail of the last missions she'd completed, she'd first seen him. She'd been in the extravagant penthouse of a particularly tall skyscraper in Beijing, having extracted the codes she'd been sent to retrieve from the now dead Chinese business owner under her nearly naked form, and she'd looked up and out the huge windows and caught a glimpse of him. He'd been across the way in another building, a shadow barely framed by the setting sun. She'd gathered her dress, her heels, her data, and run.

Now she was weaving through the crowded streets, attempting not to appear like she was aware he was there. He was. Behind her and dressed in black. Police? Unlikely. An amateur looking to prove himself or get lucky? No amateur could make her as he had. A rival assassin? She didn't think so. An enemy like that wouldn't have allowed himself to be detected, nor would he play this cat and mouse game. This man, whoever he was, was watching her. Learning about her. If he'd been sent to kill her, he wouldn't have wasted time (and opportunity) by doing that. She picked her way through the evening bustle, cars clogging the metropolis' streets. The streets were alive with shouting, business people heading home from work, tourists and youths chatting loudly as if their conversations were the only ones that mattered. The glow of neon was a power all its own, brighter than the sun. She made of point of seeming aimless, wandering through a series of street merchants and gazing lazily at their wares when in truth every one of her keen, well-honed senses was parsing the information around her. He was still there, back a bit and also making a show of being inconspicuous, and he seemed to be alone. Foolish, she thought. Whoever was trying to shut her down had underestimated her. She would make him pay for that mistake.

She led him on for a while. True to form, he kept his distance but matched her, step for step and turn for turn. It was well into a thick, steamy night by the time she grew tired of this charade. Ahead was an area of Beijing that wasn't so heavily populated and commonly frequented. She went there, flirting with merchants and tourists along the way, playing the fun-loving traveler effortlessly. He kept pace. That more than anything made her lead him on. This was bold, and the inclination to this guy (and whoever had sent him) a lesson for their impertinence, for thinking that she was some sort of trophy to be won. Taking down Black Widow. Never.

Even wandering into the less savory neighborhood hadn't dissuaded him. She wasn't given to acts of kindness or mercy but this dance through Beijing had afforded her hunter plenty of times to disengage and back off. He hadn't taken any of them. She should have hunted him, killed him and eliminated the threat, but she'd caught a scant look at his eyes once or twice, and there was something about them. They were not entirely unlike the eyes of the people who lived in her world: dark and shadowy, filled with the promise of ruthless violence, emotionless, precise. But there was something she hadn't seen before in them, too, and because she'd never seen it, she couldn't name it. Couldn't understand it. It was something softer, something purer, something... It intrigued her.

She'd find out who this man was, and then she'd kill him.

She led him deeper into the darkened alleys. The crowds of respectable folk had long since fallen away. The night shadows here were thick, made to hide unsavory and criminal acts. He followed her unspoken invitation, meeting her every step, every turn. Eventually she chose the place this fight would happen: a lonely, dark nook behind some sort of warehouse that had at one point belong to a rather large crime syndicate but fortunes rose and fell swiftly in the underworld so it was now abandoned and empty. No one would find them here, interrupt them or bother them. Once she was sure she was dutifully tracking her, she ran, finding a position within the old equipment and junk cluttering the alley from which she could attack. She hid in the shadows, breathing slowly, eyes carefully scanning the area. She waited.