Born wealthy, she had a taste for opulence. Cheated of her birthright, she developed a thirst for revenge. And she had a favorite knife, so she naturally became an assassin. She waited outside the gentleman’s club for her first victim. She hid across the street, huddled in a pile of stolen blankets against the cold of the night’s rain, channeled down the city’s narrow streets by rows of enormous buildings. Invisible among the city’s detritus, she gripped and regripped her knife deep in the grimy blankets’ folds.

Inside, he sat amid rich wood paneling and elegant suits and crackling fires. He sipped brandy and laughed with friends he didn’t really like, and perhaps played cards. She had been among them. She gripped the knife. He would soon step out and wait for his car. The car always took a few minutes. She had waited for the car hundreds of times, a step away from the rain, the club’s warmth clinging to her.

When he stepped out, a knife waited for him on the stoop. It had a few spots of rust, the first blooms of ill care. Underneath, written on grease-stained paper in weak pencil: “Someone wants you dead.”