Chapter Ninety: The Assassin Strikes Again

A thunderous blast rang out from the parking lot. Qin Tian and the two women looked back in horror and saw, to their utter shock, that their car had exploded.

"This... this..." Shen Xiaoqing stammered, too stunned to speak.

"How could it explode?" Jiang Yingying cried, her mouth hanging open in disbelief.

Qin Tian drew a deep breath and let it out hard. Lucky he had lost the car keys! Otherwise, the three of them would already have been turned into charred corpses. They might even have left no remains at all.

What had seemed like misfortune in losing something had, in fact, become a blessing.

"Go! Hurry back to the hospital building!" Qin Tian, sensing danger at once, grabbed the two women and ran back with all his strength.

Both women had been frightened senseless by what had just happened. Now they let Qin Tian drag them along as they pelted forward.

With a soft snapping sound, followed by the harsh scrape of metal against concrete, Qin Tian hurriedly pulled the two women to a stop.

A small hole had appeared in the concrete floor before them.

Qin Tian narrowed his eyes. He knew that hole all too well. It was a bullet hole.

In an instant, he thought of a hitman.

These past few days, Qin Tian had believed the person behind the scenes had given up on assassinating him, but now the hitman had appeared again.

Damn it all, this was relentless.

"Hide in the security room, both of you. Keep your heads down. Don't you dare show yourselves!" Qin Tian pointed ahead.

About thirty meters away stood the office where the parking lot security guard stayed. He could let Jiang Yingying and Shen Xiaoqing take shelter there.

When they reached the door of the security room, Jiang Yingying turned the knob, then looked nervously toward Qin Tian in the distance and shouted, "It's locked!"

Qin Tian frowned. In a single stride he lunged forward and with a bang kicked the door open.

Jiang Yingying and Shen Xiaoqing stared in astonishment, and Qin Tian simply shoved them inside, then pulled the broken door shut after them.

"Stay inside. Don't run around!" Qin Tian warned.

He then found cover of his own and hid behind the shrubbery. Judging by the direction from which the bullet had come, Qin Tian could roughly tell the hitman should be to the south.

There happened to be a tall building there, a hotel. The hitman was very likely hiding in that hotel, aiming toward Qin Tian's position.

The man really had been thorough. Besides planting a bomb in the car, he had prepared a second method as well, using a rifle to shoot them down.

After a moment's thought, Qin Tian took out his phone and called Nangong Xiao'e.

At that moment, Nangong Xiao'e was taking a bubble bath in the fish tank of a luxury hotel suite, and even enjoying a bottle of red wine she had no idea where she had dug up from.

Humming a tune and scrolling through her phone, she was just watching a funny video when her phone suddenly lagged. She frowned slightly, knowing that meant a call was coming in.

What a nuisance.

But when she saw the caller ID, annoyance instantly turned to delight. It was Qin Tian.

"Hello! Brother Qin Lei, are you coming to take me out to play? I've just finished washing up all nice and clean!" Nangong Xiao'e said with a giggle.

"My car exploded! There's a hitman!" Qin Tian said directly.

At first, Nangong Xiao'e only paused when she heard that his car had exploded, but the moment she heard the words hitman, her expression changed at once.

"Brother Qin Lei, where are you?" She climbed out of the bathtub at once. It was a pity no one could admire the alluring sight of her like a lotus rising from the water.

Without bothering to rinse the rest of her body, she wrapped herself in a bath towel, went to the bed, rolled once so the sheets absorbed the moisture from her skin, then quickly put on her clothes and hurried out.

By the time Qin Tian finished giving his location, Nangong Xiao'e was already nearly at the elevator. Such speed.

"Ten minutes! Wait for me!" Nangong Xiao'e said.

"No, no, don't come looking for me. Go straight to the hotel opposite me and see if you can flush that hitman out!" Qin Tian said.

"What about your safety?" Nangong Xiao'e asked.

"Don't worry. I can protect myself. If you can find the hitman, my danger will naturally be lifted too," Qin Tian said.

"All right, I understand."

Nangong Xiao'e hung up, hailed a taxi, paid five times the fare, and raced all the way toward the hotel opposite the hospital.

As for why Qin Tian did not try to catch the hitman himself, it was because he still had to watch over Jiang Yingying and Shen Xiaoqing.

Besides, Nangong Xiao'e was a killer by origin. She understood hitmen better than Qin Tian ever could, and she would certainly find the hidden assassin faster than he could.

"Is that hitman still there?" In the security room, Shen Xiaoqing tapped the glass on the door and silently mouthed the words.

Qin Tian could read Nangong Xiao'e's lips. He quickly shook his hand at her, then mouthed back, "Don't come out. The hitman is still watching this side."

"Oh."

Shen Xiaoqing nodded.

Half an hour later, Qin Tian cautiously poked half his body out from the bushes. The moment he showed his head, he instantly felt a surge of danger and took a quick step back.

A bullet skimmed past his ear.

Qin Tian broke into a cold sweat. That had been far too close; one heartbeat more and his head would have burst open.

It seemed Nangong Xiao'e still had not found the hitman.

Meanwhile, inside the hotel opposite the hospital, Nangong Xiao'e posed as a guest and opened a room. While the front desk was processing her key card, she stole a glance at the computer, quickly memorizing several room numbers. Those were the rooms that were currently occupied.

The hitman might well be in one of them.

Of course, it was also possible that he had slipped into the hotel in secret and randomly pried open a room to hide inside.

First, Nangong Xiao'e moved with careful steps, checking the locks of each room. Finding no sign of forced entry, she determined the hitman had entered disguised as a guest.

She took the chewing gum from her mouth, circled around the cameras, and reached a blind spot before casually sticking the gum onto a camera lens.

Then, whenever she came to a room door, she would crouch and lower herself to the floor. The motion was somewhat ungainly, a little like a dog...

Still, a room from which a gun had been fired would carry the smell of gunpowder, and Nangong Xiao'e was especially sensitive to that scent. As long as she found the room with the gunpowder smell, she would find the hidden assassin.

She began with the rooms facing the hospital parking lot, since the hitman would certainly want the best possible sniping position.

From the fourth floor to the fifth, all the way up to the seventh, she had sniffed through every room in the hotel, yet not one carried the smell of gunpowder.

That left only two possibilities: either the hitman was extremely cautious and had prepared something specially designed to absorb the smell of gunpowder, or the hitman was not in this building at all.

Nangong Xiao'e sighed and prepared to check the neighboring building.

But just as she was waiting for the elevator, she suddenly noticed something off about the fire escape nearby. So she walked over and sniffed. A faint smell of gunpowder drifted out from the stairwell, and her face lit up at once.

Got you at last, you little rascal.