Because I hear voices.
Thick Russian voices shouting down female voices. The women are unafraid. There’s a core of iron in their tone and a sharpness that could cut any man down to size.
Any man who doesn’t have to answer to Ruslan Volkov, at least.
And even then, there’s a moment’s hesitation in the flow of their shouting. A moment that comes after a razor retort from one of the older women that sends the Russian bastards into a state of questioning, a moment of silence where those gun-toting cocks doubts every decision they’ve ever made that took them to this point and wonders if it is too late to finish that application to medical school.
But it’s only temporary.
Only a moment.
Because the only thing that could cut these Russians down to size is the grim reaper’s scythe.
Then, before I know it, my aching body is tense, my muscles and mind on alert, just in time for the whipping crack of a gunshot to snap Adriana to attention.
“Get down,” I hiss.
She doesn’t listen.
Because of course she doesn’t.
Instead of dropping to the floor, she flattens herself against the wall next to the door, fists clenched, body tense just like mine, muscles straining and eyes wide and pupils dilated — ready to kill.
In a different life, maybe…
I shake my head. There’s no time for daydreams. Not when a nightmare’s breaking down our door.
A thunderous thud announces their arrival, guns up, frowns down, there’s five of them. I rip the towel away — in a fight, you take any weapon you can get — and my dangling cock draws their eyes like a moth to a flame. I chuckle, whip the wet towel into the face of one thug and charge forward, ready for hell.
At the same moment, Adriana leaps on one, her fingernails going right for his eyes while she snarls. “Eat shit, Boris.”
“But my name is Mikhail,” he replies in the split second before Adriana’s index finger inserts into his right eye and his words devolve into a guttural scream.
Then he hits the ground, clawing and clutching at his face.
“Shut the fuck up, Boris.”
She kicks him right in his bleeding face.
I like her style.
Then I crash into the crowd of stunned Russians, my towel wrapping around hands, wrists, throats, choking and snapping and blinding while my cock helicopters and flaps in a whirling storm of lengthy kinetic beauty.
I hurl one thug into another, their two bodies crashing together while I then leap on another, gripping him by the throatand smashing his head into the ground until he releases his grip on his pistol. The cold solidity is comforting in my hands, and satisfying as I press it to his forehead and pull the trigger, making him twitch, lurch, shudder. The front of his skull caves in, and blood bursts out the back of his head.
In the moment after blowing his head open, before the Russian to my right jumps on me, I lock eyes with Adriana. Her eyes are wide, bright, brown, beautiful and full of life and something like vicious joy.
I feel it too.
For the first time in a long fucking time, something other than grief surges through me.
Then she shakes her head, blinks, and those eyes break from mine to go somewhere behind me.
I whirl around to take a punch to the jaw and a kick to the groin. I expect the punch, but the kick sends me tumbling — they’ve got numbers, what the hell are they doing kicking me in the cock?
“You fucking suck, Boris,” Adriana snaps before she jumps toward the Russian who dick-kicked me. She’s a tornado of clawing nails, shin kicks, and spit — literal spit that catches her target right in the face and makes him blink just long that he doesn’t see the expert kick that catches him in the kneecap and makes his leg bend in a direction that it’s not meant to.
“My name is fucking Ivan…”
