Free Poison Tree by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes Page A

sure he had intended sarcasm. He looked back at the computer screen and opened a file. “Here, come look at this.”
    She had put half the room between them, but now sheleaned in to check out the code he had brought up in a text file. At first glance, it seemed like a nasty little computer virus.
    “Here, sit,” Ben said. “It’s a beast, complicated as hell. Mind if I get myself some water?”
    “Go ahead.” Some people could recognize handwriting; Alysia could recognize a programmer by his code, and she was sure she had seen this style before. She scrolled through, trying to get a sense of what the virus had been intended to do, and why the style seemed so familiar.
    “I have a couple questions,” Ben said as he stepped into the kitchen.
    “Yeah?” she asked, without looking up from the screen.
    A jolt made her nearly jump out of her skin at the same time that her chair toppled backward. Her effort to catch herself was sabotaged by a sneakered foot knocking her arm out of the way, so she landed awkwardly, at the same time that Ben asked, “Question one is, why’d you shoot me?”
    Strangely, the first emotion she felt once her vision cleared and she could focus on Ben standing above her with a punch-dagger in his hand was relief. Her instincts weren’t completely dead.
    She
might be, though.
    “I didn’t shoot you,” she said. “What were you doing here that I should have shot you for?”
    “I’m willing to believe you, but only because you let me get behind you just now,” Ben said. “But seriously, don’t get up,” he added when she started to shift position to do just that. “Question two is, why is someone offering a half-million dollars for the delivery of your still-breathing body?”
    “News to me,” she answered. She had been debating how it would go if she tried to cut his legs out from under him, but if he was hoping to take her alive, she could take more time considering her strategy. She was out of shape, which meant that any way she fought back had to be fast and dirty. “Are you Crimson?”
    Onyx members rarely went undercover, but Christian hadn’t even blinked to see this guy in the hall, which meant he wasn’t from Frost.
    “That’s your gig, babe,” Ben answered. He knelt down near her, close enough that he was either very stupid or very certain of his ability to defend himself. “Within the history of the Bruja guilds, maybe a dozen members have gone multi-class. I can count on one hand the number of members who have reached third rank in all three guilds. I can count on one finger the number of folks who reached third rank and then had the spine to tell the leadership to go to hell.”
    She shifted position again, slowly. When he didn’t tell her to stop, she moved inch by inch until she was sitting against the wall. “I can’t tell if you’re flirting or trying to kidnap me,” she remarked, noting that he had sidestepped her question in favor of sharing his observations about her.
    “I don’t do captures,” Ben answered.
    “Did you plant the computer virus?” He seemed to have stopped immediately threatening her, but he hadn’t put down the knife.
    “Duh,” he answered. “All I needed to do was intercept the call to tech support and I had an excuse to come look you up. Most of us figured you were rotting in a ditch somewhere, yousee, but then you showed up on CNN. Are you by any chance here stalking an Onyx creep with lousy aim? Because if so, I want in.”
    She shook her head. “I wasn’t stalking anyone until they attacked me. Was the number against me up before the shooting?” She had been so distracted by Christian that she had never taken a good look at the job board at the Onyx guild hall. Had her name been on it?
    Ben shook his head. “It just flashed a half hour ago, listing SE Haven Number Four as your location. Hidden client, private posting to all three guilds.”
    “If it only happened a half hour ago, then how did you hear about it?” He