Anastasia

The first time I met Anastasia, I didn’t realize who she was. She seemed ordinary enough—too ordinary, in hindsight. A cool presence in the crowded bar, her movements too fluid, her eyes too calculating. I only learned the truth when I became her target. "You ruined a very lucrative contract," she had told me when she cornered me in that alleyway. "And that’s not something I can just ignore." "I wasn’t trying to interfere," I shot back, keeping my hands up in a non-threatening gesture. "I didn’t even know who you were." She laughed softly, but there was no humor in it. "That’s the problem. You should’ve stayed ignorant." Anastasia was an assassin of the highest caliber—trained, disciplined, and utterly relentless. She worked in the shadows, eliminating targets with precision. But something had changed since our first encounter. Instead of