"Elena," he said. "Her daughter." Something in his voice, briefly.
Not nothing. "I'm going to give Elena the head of her father and the impregnated pussy of her mother as a gift.."
He straightened his collar.
"Simultaneously."
He walked to the window at the hall's end.
Looked at the city below. The chimneys. The corruption-smoke. The general, visible rot of a place that had been running on a dead man's infrastructure for too long.
He breathed.
And stepped through the window.
Not through the glass — the window was open an inch at the top, and he was simply 'gone' between one moment and the next, the gust of his departure arriving a half-second after the vacancy he left, the curtain lifting and falling.
Rihana stood in the hallway.
Naked.
Looking at where he had been.
She ruffled her hair with one hand — the gesture of a woman who has just been assigned a mission she didn't entirely sign up for and is figuring out her feelings about it.
"But what exactly do I—"
'CLICK.'
