It wasn’t particularly important where she came from.

People like her weren’t useful because of their origin, but only thanks to it. Knowing where she came from wouldn’t have made a difference to her work.

There were hints. Context clues.

An assassin’s weapon. Near impossible to master, but mastered nonetheless.

Quiet. Silent. Under the silkiness of her voice, you could hear the cracked edge of under-use. If it was evidence, there must have been a long period of her life where she didn’t talk at all.

Boss wasn’t a nosy person. Usually. That’s what she tells everyone. Not nosy. Can’t be nosy in this business.

Anyone that knew her for more than a week knew that was a lie. Boss was the nosiest motherfucker by square footage that this underworld had ever seen, she’d sink her teeth into your throat from twenty miles away if she smelled human meat on you and anyone that needed to know that, did.

She warned them all, chasing the narrowing eyes of a threat with a flippant, ‘but that’s not my business.’ They knew.

Soricel though? She did was she was told. But when her superior was the ocean under everyone’s feet, her responsibilities expanded and her claws circled cities. Rumors started, whispered between runners and bleeders. Shadows in the dark.

Boss, she had an army of assassins. Trained from birth.

Eyes all over the place. A bigger network than anyone could imagine. Bugs in every syndicate, in every nightclub and alleyway.

Radu’s disappeared, and you know who got him. His boys caught too, or dead, who knows. Missing and dead were the same in these parts.

One of her assassins.

There had to be more than one.

You’d only see that foreign girl hanging around. The one with the clipboard and the short skirts and the dead doll eyes. The accountant.

But there was more. Had to be more.

Boss enjoyed the rumors. She was swimming in her own mythology. Human traffickers either cut their stock loose or fled after the first wave of assassinations. The drugs were flowing and the money was too and damn, it was good to be on top. Good cigars, good cars, good clothes, good old cops minding their own business while the trash was cleaned. The good guys liked to trade big bads for small ones. For their cut, of course. Had to feed the community, after all. Innocents stopped going missing. Gangsters got paranoid as their mates slipped out like candles.

Boss was a hurricane, leveling it all and rebuilding. Maybe it was going to her head. She didn’t seem to care much, charismatic grin permanently wired to her lips. If the attention frightened her, no one would guess it.

The truck was still bolted behind her eyes.

The gaping maw of the cargo door sliding open.

The rancid breath of bodies on bodies, of piled up screams, of meat and rope and insides cooking in the summer heat. Blood running over the license plate and dripping onto her shoes. Tangles of hair peaking out of mounds of flesh that had been someone’s daughter, someone’s friend, someone’s someone.

The tired sigh of her Don as he shook his head at the truck and mourned his lost dollars.

The wet sound he made when she broke his neck on his mahogany desk three weeks later.

That truck was her reason. She’d seen the monster, seen down its throat and into its ravenous belly. Eating everything, always hungry. She saw herself in its stomach, melting away, and decided that she would kill it. Even if she only had her two hands. She’d kill the monster.

Soricel watched, listened, acted. Her whip glimmered like teeth in the dark. One candle, four candles, twenty candles, snuffed. The bleeders always begged. Dead doll eyes. Women in cages. The sellers begged with their bullets pointed at them and Soricel felt nothing. Candles going out. Women running. Keys turning locks. Crying, thanking her. It didn’t matter, not really.

Well, it mattered to Boss. Soricel found herself caring about that as years folded over on themselves.

They were killers. Boss believed in something, believed it so deep that being a hunter was second to her choice of prey.

And Soricel watched. Listened. Acted. A participant in the game and still separate. From her lofty perch she could see the cliff Boss would reach eventually. An operation she couldn’t stop, a Don she couldn’t kill, a hitman she couldn’t dodge. She’d careen off and into her own black ocean one day, and she’d have too much momentum to stop.

Still, Soricel stayed. Traffickers met her whip. Traitors watched their windows, knowing she’d come for them.

Boss was selling her soul for the idea that the monster was starving because of her. If people wanted to kill themselves on her drugs, she wouldn’t be the one pulling the trigger. Morality was a fickle thing and it didn’t matter anymore, not as long as her old Don was still catching her bullets.