Merci is so loaded on uppers that she can hear the mice scampering in the walls iof  the abandoned home she's sitting in. Her pupils are blown and her ears are ringing; she's been pacing non-stop since she got here, and by the time Caesar shows up, she can hear him from a mile away as he enters the house to join her.

After a brief rundown of layout and security, she starts to leave. Halfway to the door, she realizes there's a decent chance she won't make it, so she turns back around and kisses her former husband goodbye before running off into the night.

She had no marriage to live for anymore. These days, it was all about the risks. Putting herself in bad situations with horrible odds were her bread and butter and she thrived on it. As she approached the first guard from behind, he would have been terrified by the grin on her face, but he never saw her coming. Her boots made no sound on the dewy grass as she grabbed his torso with one hand and his neck with the other and violently snapped his neck. The rush was instant and overwhelming, and as she creeps backwards towards the second target, she turns around and, although she can't see him, she knows he can see her through the binoculars, so she lifts her shirt to flash Caesar.

With that out of the way, she approaches the second guard and retrieves a thin blade from her jeans pocket. Again approaching from behind, she grabs him around the head with one arm and sinks the blade into his jugular with the other. This one struggles a bit, so she leaps on his back and rides him to the ground as the blood from his wound pumps out onto the lawn. One he stops thrashing, she stands and again faces Caesar, out there in the night, and takes a deep bow before heading into the house.

Caesar had held his breath all the while she crept up to the guards, while thinking on the kiss. He need not have worried however. Merci was, after all, a professional assassin, and she knew what she was doing. He grinned widely as she flashed her assets towards him before moving on.  "Ok, just a little bit more. Come on now." he muttered under his breath, gazing at her silhouette through the binoculars. He watched the dark figure creep up to the door, and open it deftly with a set of bobby pins. Right at that moment however, a bell, not much different from the ones they used in schools to herald the end of lessons, started to ring shrilly within the house. 

Employing his favourite swear words, he immediately began the flash his torch, signalling Merci to get the hell outta there. He had not been notified that they had also installed anti-intruder systems along with the guards. He made a mental note to skin his informant alive once he got back.....  

Caesar would have had zero faith in Merci's skills had he known how loaded she was. In fact, had she not been riding a constant drug high since the divorce, he would have never offered her the job, and she'd never have accepted it. As she walks casually through the screeching alarm towards the library, she runs into a panicked wife heading out the doorway. Ignoring the light flashes from Caesar through the window, she grabs the startled woman by the back of the head and sinks her blade deep enough into an eye socket to puncture her brain. The woman dies instantly, and Merci lets her slump to the floor as she wipes gore off on her jeans. Turning around, she's face to face with two small, petrified children who have just witnessed their mother's murder. 

""No heirs!" She yells, although Caesar is nowhere near close enough to hear her or understand the jab at him. With a vicious look on her face, she chases the panicked youngsters back up the stairs.

Caesar curses and puts his binoculars away, as he sees Merci ignore his signals and dart inside the house. Did the woman have no sense? Pulling out his tommy-gun, loading it and cocking it, he descends from the window and makes a beeline towards the mansion. In the all too likely event that reinforcement arrived, he could at least hold them off until she was done inside. He hoped that she could handle herself, considering he wasn't sure any longer what kind of nasty surprises these bastards had in store for them inside the house. 

The man of the house arrives home just in time to see the limp, lifeless bodies of his children get tossed out of an upstairs window and land on the lawn before him. The sound of the alarm is still piercing the air, and his mind breaks free from any semblance of normalcy. Sobbing and dropping to his knees in the grass, he looks around frantically for help, but sees only the dead guards a few feet away. Throwing his head back, he keens into the night, and it is almost musical as it hits and blends with the wail of the house alarm. So distressed is he, that he doesn't think about the remaining threat. Had he bothered to look behind him, he would see his death coming, in the hands of Augustus Caesar.

Caesar was a quarter of the way towards the road from the pavement, intent on heading to the mansion when the convoy of cars arrived. Swiftly ducking behind a set of stone benches, he watches the defaulter step out of the first vehicle, followed by his bodyguards from the following vehicles, just as something drops out of the top window of the mansion, and lands with a sickening crunch onto the ground below. He made an educated guess of what it was, and sighed. He always hated hurting women and children, but this man had forced his hand. The cry of despair rent the night, as Caesar rose into a crouching position and took aim with his tommy-gun.

He gently squeezed the trigger, and felt the weapon kick back against his shoulder, as though it were a child, squirming in his arms. Although the man remained crouching, his bodyguards scattered under the sudden shower of white-hot lead. Caesar saw with satisfaction as streams of dark liquid erupted from a few of them before they collapsed onto the road, never moving again. They were shooting back at him now, and he was forced to duck down. 

Lighting a stick of dynamite, he tosses it back at his assailants, and the sound of the explosion adds to the racket made by the bell, followed by the howls of agony, which told him he had hit his mark. Stepping out from his cover, Caesar sprays the vehicles before him indiscriminately, hitting metal, flesh and the road simultaneously. He kept shooting until the last human sounds had died away, followed by the drum-magazine of the weapon running out of ammunition. 

The defaulter, somehow, had avoided death and seemed untouched by the lead. Lazily propping his weapon against his shoulder, Caesar walks towards the man. He was going to make him feel what true pain is before he granted him the luxury of death. He was so intent on his target, that he did not notice that he had missed one of the guards. He did not notice as that guard pulled out a sidearm and took aim at the back of his head.......

Merci sees what's happening much too late to set up with her rifle. She aims out the window and fires, and whether it's the lack of preparation, the drugs racing through her system, or the fact that that's her ex-husband down there...she fires, and she misses. 

She's never missed. 

Ever.

Not only has she missed, though. She's hit Caesar.

Oh, Christ.

Merci runs in a blind panic down the stairs and out the front door onto the lawn, skidding onto her knees in front of Caesar's unconscious form. She leans down...yes, he's still breathing...and gets up with her hands under his armpits to drag him to the nearest car.

Fortune decided to throw some grace her way, in the form of the dewy grass which she slid him across, and the still-running car that the mark had exited. With a last blast of adrenaline, she heaves Caesar into the passenger seat and races around to get behind the wheel. Backing down the driveway, she kisses bumpers with another car parked to the side before making it into the street. As she drives, she throws glances at Augustus, who is an awful shade of white and slowly sliding sideways in the seat, despite the seatbelt she's secured around him. She takes a right a little to aggressively and his head ends up in her lap. Placing a hand on his throat, she searches for a pulse, and when she detects a light flutter, she leaves her hand there as she drives with her left.

Seeing the lights of a gas station ahead, she pulls in next to the phone booth. Sliding out of the car in her now blood-soaked jeans, she digs in her pockets for change and dashes to the booth to call Kathryn. By the time the operator's gotten through, she nearly hysterical and sobbing.

"I shot Michael. I shot him, I didn't mean to. Kathryn, we're too far away, we need Grace, he's bleeding out, I didn't mean to, please-"

Kathryn, in her ever-present clarity and calmness, tells her where to go and what to do when she gets there. As always, she has everything under control.

Wiping away tears and effectively smearing Caesar's blood across her face in the process like some kind of grotesque warpaint, Merci slides back onto the bloodsoaked car seat and drives off again, hand back on Caesar's neck, more for her own piece of mind now than anything else.

If he died, so would she.

Caesar awoke groggily and found himself staring at a bright golden light. "broken a rib. Very lucky it didn't pierce his lung." a male voice spoke near him, in a low tone. He wondered who they were referring to, and tried to get up. It was agonizing. He sank back into the bed with a cry of pain, and the man who had spoken earlier immediately rushed to attend to him. "Don't move now. You will only rip your stitches and open the wound again." the man told him gently.

It was all coming back to Caesar gradually now. "Who the fuck are you?" he asks the man, looking wearily up at him. 

The deja vu he'd spoken of earlier brushed passed Merci like a sensual ghost, then disapperared. She got up and moved over to him, gently pressing him down on the table.

"You're fine, everything's fine," she said in an attempt to settle him. "These are Kathryn's people. There was a...we're going home soon. The job's done. Maybe not the way you wanted, but it's done. Message sent. A disgusting, vulgar display that I'm sure any of your delinquents will heed.

"There's a private plane waiting. Whenever you're ready," she says, looking down at him with eyes glassy from guilt, unshed tears, and drugs. 

"Heading home sounds nice." Caesar tells Merci weakly. He looks around himself. "How the fuck am I going to get on a plane?!"