Chapter 1
In front of her, a door that leads to the dueling field. Behind her, an exit. Between them, Kira Clark weighs the prospect of killing and the possibility of dying against the certainty of a life in servitude. The changing room clock gives her eleven minutes and forty-two seconds to make her decision.
She could take the exit and forfeit the match. Walking away before a duel starts is a highly informal way for a professional gunfighter to resign, but she wouldn’t be the first. It would feel pretty good for about a month, maybe two, but then her money would run out, her creditors would foreclose, and she would become their property—theirs to do with as they pleased, for the rest of her life.
The only real way out is forward, through the scanner and onto the dueling field to face Niles LeBlanc. Make that Niles fucking LeBlanc: professional gunfighter, high-caliber asshole, and poor, dead Chloe’s contemptible ex-boyfriend. Kira brings her cold focus to bear on all the reasons he deserves to end the match with a bullet in his heart.
Right on schedule, fear breaks her chilly concentration, arriving as an awareness of her body’s vulnerability so acute that it sparks a deep ache in her chest. She wraps her torso in a self-hug and breathes, timing her inhalation by count and forcing the exhale to last twice as long. True to the promise of her first acting instructor, her muscles relax, her heart rate slows, and her mind goes blank. The terror flows through her, past her, around her . . . and then it is gone.
The anxiety used to spook her, feeding a fear that she was too weak for the job. Twenty-nine gunfights after her first match, it’s simply part of her changing room routine, like pulling on the dueling tunic with the TKC Insurance logo stitched on each shoulder, slipping her feet into the glove-soft boots, or attaching her ID chip to the box holding her personal effects.
She unwinds her arms and focuses on how Niles will see her, closing her eyes to shut out the changing room’s office-bland decor and bought-by-the-pound corporate artwork. She will enter the field as a deadly apparition, wearing the company colors of forest green and slate gray, her blonde hair clipped into the helmet-like shape of the gunfighter’s cut, and her eyes like two chips of stamped steel. She drives every hint of softness or compassion from her face, tightens her abdominal muscles, and straightens her spine.
Then the words, spoken only for herself: “I am death. I am terror. I am blood.”
She gives herself over to Death’s Angel, her role for the duration of the duel. Playing her longest-running and most popular character, she will step onto her greatest stage to give her largest audience a life or death performance.
She speaks the final words of her personal incantation: “Show time.”
Chapter 2
Although it was only 9:00 a.m., Kira’s first day as a gunfighter trainee already featured a payment glitch that nearly made the hotel manager call the cops and a hassle getting onto TKC property when somebody hung a Society for the Prevention of Dueling flag from the main gate and chained themselves to the entrance. Now, on top of all that, she faced a broken elevator in her new home. Was this the shape of things to come, or was it getting all the bad luck out of the way at once?
Standing in the stairwell, Kira sighed. The company tried to dress up the Logan P. Jameson Building by referring to it as “educational accommodations,” but it was clearly a dorm. No denying going back to a dorm was a step down, though the steps up posed the most immediate problem—dragging her baggage up the three flights of concrete stairs flanked by thick-painted steel railings. She adjusted her backpack, took a new grip on her suitcase handle, and resumed her slog to the fourth floor.
Though having the elevator fail on moving day was a bad sign, the building probably wasn’t that much worse than some places she’d lived while trying to balance food, rent, and loan payments against a small and uncertain stream of income. Once they got the elevator working again, it would probably be better than either the third-floor walkup she’d lived in during her first months in New York or the basement place with the iffy plumbing. Best of all, she’d have a year . . . as long as she didn’t quit or flunk out. A year meant twenty-six loan payments. More financial stability than she’d had since leaving college. But first, climb the stairs with suitcase in tow.
Like all dorms on moving-in day, good-natured insults and bursts of profanity filled the air, accompanied by the underlying smell of mustiness, industrial-strength cleaners, and sweat. On the landing just before her door, the voices from her target floor became clearer—loud, boisterous, and uniformly male.
Shit.
The floor map from the trainee information packet on her handset showed her room at the opposite end of the hallway. To get to it, she’d have to pass through a mass of just-moved-in guys somewhere between the ages of nineteen and thirty. Walking in alone, a twenty-six-year-old blonde would get the kind of attention dogs would give a steak if it tried to stroll through a kennel.
Should she make it a confrontation? Establish herself as a person who wasn’t going to be messed with, even for something as random as a catcall? Risky until she got the lay of the land. But appearing vulnerable might be risky, too. Better to make the first encounter neutral.
She pulled a set of bright-orange over-the-ear headphones from her backpack and set the noise cancellation to maximum. With the phones in place, she brought up some dance music on the handset. Unless somebody delivered his taunt with an air horn, she wouldn’t hear it.
Time to run the gauntlet. She hardened her face, squared her shoulders, and opened the fire door.
A loose scattering of young men, furniture awaiting placement, and bags of trash lined the hallway. A couple shirtless guys lounging against the right wall watched her pass, as did a guy in an Iowa Cubs T-shirt wrestling an armchair through a doorway, but if they said anything, the pounding rhythm drowned it out.
Noise cancellation really might be the best invention of the twenty-first century.
She squeezed past a dresser left sitting sideways and maneuvered her luggage through the same narrow passage. A few more feet across the industrial-gray loop carpeting, and she’d be home free. She tapped her handset, and a green light flashed on the door. Her key token worked. A quick turn of the handle, a pull on her suitcase, and she was inside.
She pivoted and found herself facing a black-haired teenage guy in a powder-blue T-shirt, staring at her with big brown eyes. What the hell was this? She pulled the headphones off, and although she kept one hand on the door handle, her voice conceded nothing. “Who are you?”
He startled. Was he surprised at her tone or surprised she’d spoken at all?
“I-I’m, ah—”
He looked like a kid and she’d taken him by surprise. The T-shirt and jeans were both badly worn and out of fashion, as were the shoes. Nothing suggested he was used to getting his way. She could probably do a good enough teacher-voice to send him packing, and then slam the door shut behind him.
A voice sounded from the bathroom. “That’s my baby brother, Lorenzo.”
Lorenzo looked at his feet.
The voice’s owner emerged. A few years younger than Kira, she was built like a rugby player, with a body so short and squat she seemed almost square. “I’m Chloe Rossi.”
“I’m Kira Clark. I guess we’re roommates.”