Behind the dark window were Jiro’s eyes. He jabbed a finger at the glass and smiled a knowing smile, a mocking smile.

The black car’s doors opened. Feet hit pavement and gave chase. Alina slipped beyond the terminal’s sliding glass entry. Having lost her, the men turned back for Munroe while the car with Jiro’s laughing face blocked her from the side and vehicles front and back kept her from pulling free.

Munroe took the bike up onto the sidewalk, guiding the front wheel around carts and bodies: people too preoccupied with their own departure and belongings to look up and notice the danger until she was already upon them.

The black car followed her progress alongside. The men on foot gave chase from behind. The crowded sidewalk was a course of moving obstacles and she could do this for an hour and never pick up enough speed to lose the men behind or get free of Jiro. Munroe swerved and bumped down to the road between the luggage of two cars unloading at the curb. Her tires hit the pavement just behind Jiro’s vehicle and she followed the pedestrian crosswalk against the light. Horns blared and car brakes squealed. She wound into the parking garage, down a level, and out the entrance against the traffic, to the nearest junction, where she braked, reoriented, and slipped into the airport’s outward flow.

The black car was nowhere in sight. No police lights yet, either, though that could change. Adrenaline charged through her system, narrowing her focus to the point of danger. Munroe followed the traffic and turned off the road, down a side street where bicycles and mail carts and vending machines mixed with pedestrians walking where they would in the absence of sidewalks.

Munroe pulled tight against a corner and shut off the engine, waiting, breathing, allowing her heart rate to settle.

Alina was free, promise fulfilled, burden gone.

The last of this thread waited in the hotel room, things left abandoned after the fight with the boys with pipes. She needed to collect them and close out the bill before she was truly able to return to the facility and focus on Bradford.

Munroe ripped the tape off the plates and waited longer still, then finally started up again, turning for downtown, where she could stash her ride for a few hours. She could run this final errand while killing time measuring the response, if any, to the airport drama. She found parking at Osaka station, placed her belongings in a locker, and continued to the hotel empty-handed and on foot.

Lobby air-conditioning was a balm against the heat and the clerk’s smile a warning that sent the inner timpani back to pounding war drums. The tell of threat came within the shadows of discomfort in his pleasant welcome.

Prudence said to turn around, to abandon what remained, but the heady rush of need and want pushed her forward.

This was the fight she’d been denied in defending Alina from Jiro’s chase.

Munroe took the stairs at a run and dumped into the hall in time to hear the muted ring of a phone. Footfalls soft against the carpet, she approached her room and knelt, ear to the door. A male voice spoke words of acknowledgment and then came a minute of conversation between two men.

The desk clerk had notified them that she was on her way.

Now they waited.

Munroe scooted out of the fish-eye’s range. Patient in the drawing silence, she invited the men inside to make the first move. Her absence would create agitation, then anxiety, and the desire to see for themselves.

Vibration came toward the door. Whoever was behind it turned to speak to his companion, close enough that Munroe could make out the conversation as they mocked the desk clerk and dickered back and forth. They’d waited through the night. They were hungry and tired and ready to finish business.

Want built tight inside her chest, her skin tingling, itching for the pain to follow and for the violence that would scratch the itch. She had no fear of fists, or blade, or blood. Nothing could be done to her now that she hadn’t already survived. The only caution, muted against the want, was Bradford not yet set free.

The door handle moved. Her heart fluttered in ecstasy.

The door opened. A foot stepped through.

A head leaned forward to peer into the hallway.

Munroe lunged upward, the full brunt of her momentum connecting beneath the jaw. The force of the impact set her ears ringing, bones transferring the crack of violence as his head snapped back. His legs buckled. She grabbed his collar and shoved him inward, using his body as a shield.

Six steps forward, against the window, the second man pulled a knife.

Knife as weapon of choice meant no gun.

Instant assessment, instant strategy change. Firearms laws, a gift to the predator, created of her speed and lack of fear a god among mortals.

Munroe plowed into the tight space between bathroom cube and wall, and heaved the body into the knife man.

He pushed the deadweight aside, buying her a microsecond lead.

The unconscious man hit the desk and bounced backward. In that same heartbeat Munroe went around his legs, up on the bed, and threw herself feetfirst into the knife man’s knees, twisting in midflight, her hands clamped onto the cutting arm before her boots fully connected.

Her opponent was shorter than she, but stockier, heavier. He had muscles and street-fighting smarts, his arms and legs writhing and struggling to gain the upper hand.

They tumbled to the floor, between chair legs and bed legs and desk legs.

He folded in half, scissor-locked around Munroe’s hips.

She forced pressure points on his wrist, his elbow, and yanked the arm with the knife hard out of place. He screamed, and in that scream of anger and rage he punched with his free hand, blows to her rib cage, her back, her head.

She found relief in the pain and laughed, crazy and blind, forcing more pressure onto his arm. He yelled and hit harder, faster, and she stole his knife, eliminating his bulk and strength, because a knife didn’t need power, only contact, and he would bleed the same as every other man.

Munroe twisted and plugged the blade beneath her, low into his side. He kept swinging and she drove hard again, and when he kept punching, she stabbed his legs and with the cutting forced a break in his hold.

She kneed his groin and still he didn’t let go or stop punching.

Behind the grunts and yells came shuffling: the man with the broken jaw rising up to continue the fight. Munroe kneed again and shoved hard, throwing her weight forward at the same time her opponent pulled. She slammed a leg backward, boot to the knee of the broken-jawed man.

The force of her thrust popped the knife man’s arm out of joint, and she stabbed the knife into his unwounded shoulder, yanked hard through cartilage and back again as she pulled the knife out and then pressed the blade tip up under his chin in that sweet soft spot, with just enough force for the point to cut skin. And with that movement, he froze.

Panting, Munroe reached an arm up off the floor, yanked the ceramic flower vase off the desk, and slammed it into his head. The knife man went limp and she turned to the broken jaw, who’d already started crab-crawling for the door. She stomped on his chest and boosted over him. With her back to the door, she turned to face him, knife ready to work again.

He stared up at her, eyes glassed over, and for the first time she was able to see—truly see—him and his companion. She smashed an elbow down into his head and he slumped over. Knifepoint to his shirt, she sliced the material open. Tattoos covered his shoulder and his chest. She kicked him in the ribs, for herself, for Alina, for the stupidity of them having waited out last night in the wrong place, for their crappy boss and his attempted ambush, and the time all of this had stolen from her freeing Bradford.

She kicked him again, letting frustration loose, and then stopped and glared. She took a breath and glanced around, taking stock of yet another mess.

Her backpack was on the bed, its items strewn.

Munroe stepped over the broken jaw for the bathroom.

She washed the knife in the sink, rinsed blood spatter out of her hair, tore off her shirt, and replaced it with one from the backpack.

She went over the room with a washcloth, wiping down every surface, including—especially—the vase on the floor by the knife man’s head.

With the washcloth wrapped around the knife hilt, Munroe dipped the blade into knife man’s blood and smeared the blood across the shirt of the broken-jawed man. She would have flicked spatter patterns, too, if it wouldn’t have complicated her own exit. She placed the knife into broken jaw’s hand, wrapped his fingers around the hilt, and clenched his fist in her fist for a good set of prints. She left the blade out of reach beneath the desk, stuffed the washcloth and the bloodied shirt into her backpack, then packed up the last of her belongings and stepped out into the hall and shut the door.

The hotel had no security cameras—nothing but the desk clerk’s word to document that she’d been present. By leaving these men alive, she could flip the burden, could be spared living on the run as a murder suspect while trying to solve Bradford’s problem, and worst case—if everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong and then worse—they could claim she’d struck first and they’d retaliated in self-defense. But these were criminals in her hotel room.

Someone on the hotel staff had given the bleeding tattoos upstairs a key. Calling the police to deal with that mess would most certainly raise questions the hotel would rather avoid. Immigration had her thumbprints on file and the front desk knew her face. But all foreigners looked alike, and she’d provided false information upon check-in. If law enforcement did come after her, if they were able to connect her activity hotspots, and if she’d been sloppy enough to leave anything in the room that they could use to find her, then she deserved whatever followed.