God of Destruction Read Online Free Page B

at him, the intruder placed his hands on Harris’s lowered
shoulders and forced his knee into the older man’s gut with a force
that knocked him to the concrete ground and sent his hat flying
across the room.
    Spitting blood through his teeth, Harris let
his body slump flat against the ground. His eyes opened with some
difficulty and found his much smaller opponent standing mockingly
above him, pulling the black ski mask off his head. The face that
emerged, however, was not a man’s, but a petite woman’s with lank,
strawberry-blonde hair and light blue eyes; she stared down at him
with a taunting smile fixed across her face.
    She cracked her knuckles once in reminder of
his crushing loss and shook her head. “I was truly wishing for a
worthier adversary, Mr. Harris. You have disappointed me greatly,”
she murmured smoothly, her voice obviously influenced by a thick,
Czech accent.
    She crossed the room leisurely to retrieve
his hat and fixed it onto her head. “It looks better on me, I
think,” she concluded, outwardly blasé. He seemed to be down for
the count, but she’d been tricked by opponents into a false sense
of security before. His accusing eyes had no effect on her, she’d
been doing this far too long to feel anything. “Do not feel bad,
Mr. Harris, you would not be the first man to be bested by me, and
you will most certainly not be the last. It is what I do.”
    “W—?” Harris gasped, unable to move, or
speak.
    “Nothing you need concern yourself with Mr.
Harris,” she promised, striding back to him with the brim of his
cap pinched between her fingers.
    He tried to question her again, but all he
could emit was a breathy moan of pain.
    “Goodnight, Mr. Harris,” she sighed in
contentment, stomping on his cheek, eliciting a sharp crack as his
head snapped to the side and his body went slack. The uneven gasps
of breath ended.
    The mysterious woman circled her prey twice,
admiring her work. She pushed the hair that had fallen in her face
back behind her ear flirtatiously as she sensed another presence in
the room, watching her. “How long have you been watching?” she
grinned, biting her lip. She was an attractive woman, as she well
knew, and she used it to her advantage, even when her job didn’t
necessarily call for it. She kept her back to the visitor, knowing
he would speak of his own volition soon enough.
    “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to
play with your food?” the weary voice questioned with a deep
sigh.
    “I am afraid my mother did not feel any need
to remind me of such trivial things. However this hardly
constitutes your metaphor. I am many things, Kierlan, but a
cannibal does not make the list,” she insisted, eyebrows knit
together.
    “Ugh,” he replied. “Let’s just get the book
and go. If I have to deal with anymore of your…interesting
mannerisms tonight, I’ll put a bullet in my head.”
    “And then where would we be?” she laughed.
“Silly boy, there is no book, only a page.”
    Her partner merely shook his head in
disappointment. He didn’t care if it was an entire library, so long
as he got paid and could go home. “Put on your mask, Natalia,
someone might see you,” he ordered.
    “No one who will live to tell about it,” she
chuckled. “Perhaps you should take care of the other guard. We will
need his uniform to leave the building.”
    “What happened to the plan, Natalia?” he
snapped, knowing immediately what had happened and wondering
increasingly why he’d agreed to work with someone so incompetent.
Well, he amended reflexively, not completely incompetent.
    Natalia Petrov was the best assassin just as
he was the best thief to accomplish this job, and, for the most
part, she did the job better than he could have hoped, aside from
nearly falling into the museum when she broke the clip to her
harness. Her only flaw was theatrics. A lifetime of cold killing
had taken away every ounce of the humanity born to all men and
women, leaving her cruel