Amelia Vance (The Unknown Series)

Chapter 6

The apartment had become a symphony of controlled violence. The thud of bodies hitting the floor, the splinter of wood, the quiet click of a knife being disarmed. Amelia moved like water, her small frame a deceptively powerful force. The men who had been sent to capture her were highly trained, but they had been trained to fight a phantom. They had not been trained to fight a ghost with a newfound love to protect.

She took down the last of Silas’s enforcers, not with a killing blow, but with a series of precise strikes that left them incapacitated. The frying pan lay on the floor, dented but victorious. She moved silently through the wreckage, her ears straining for the slightest sound. She found him in the hallway, standing over the fallen body of his last man. Silas.

He was a ghost from her past, a figure who had haunted her memories even when she didn't know he existed. The scar she had given him was a pale line under his eye. He didn't look surprised by the scene of c*****e. He looked... impressed.

"You've learned to fight again," he said, his voice as cold as she remembered. "But you've also learned to be sentimental. That's a liability." His eyes flickered toward the closed bathroom door where Leo was hiding.

A flash of red-hot fury surged through Amelia. He had no right to even look in that direction. The man who had taken her past would not be allowed to touch her future. She moved, not with the fluid grace she had used on his men, but with a raw, desperate fury. She charged him, not as an operative, but as a woman fighting to save everything she had left.

"You took my life," she growled, blocking a punch aimed at her head. "You tried to kill me."

"It was a cleansing," he replied, his face a mask of cold logic. "To purge the weak parts. The sentimentality. The memory of… a civilian." He kicked at her legs, and she knew he wasn't just talking about her past. He was talking about Leo.

She went down, a flash of pain in her knee. He raised his foot to deliver a final, crushing blow. But in that moment, Amelia knew that her vengeance would not be a physical act. She had been born and trained to be a killer. Silas had been born to be an emotionless weapon. But she had a choice.

With a superhuman burst of strength, she grabbed his leg and twisted, the move designed to shatter bone. He screamed, his perfect composure finally breaking. He toppled to the ground, his face contorted in pain and disbelief.

Amelia stood over him, breathing heavily. She could have ended it. She had him. The knife from the counter lay just inches away. The vengeance was hers for the taking. But looking down at him, at the broken man who had tried to break her, she felt nothing but a quiet, profound emptiness. To kill him would be to finish the life she had left behind.