I would have the glory of ending him.
And we both knew it.
While I waited for him to get slower and sloppier, weakening without air, I didn’t miss a beat to kill his companion.
After the mere seconds I needed to reach for my gun with my free hand, I raised my arm and fired one single shot at the other man as he tried to rush at me.
A knife fell to the pavement first. It bounced once and settled in a puddle.
Then he dropped, dead with the bullet embedded between his eyes.
Several seconds later, right when that ache started to flare in my side at holding the asshole up one-handed, the other man ceased fighting.
He slumped down to the gritty, litter-covered pavement too. Unwilling to leave anything to chance, I crouched low to place my hands on his head and twist them. Snapping his neck would be the insurance that he wouldn’t survive any of this.
“She told you to stop,” I muttered aloud sardonically.
That woman was nothing but a stranger to me, but something about the fear burning so brightly in her green eyes haunted me. She captivated me, so clearly out of her comfort zone working there but trying so hard.
More than anything, as I looked between the two men I’d killed just because they’d harassed her, I couldn’t erase the memory of how she’d looked at me.
With faint gratitude, as if I were her hero to step in.
With slight curiosity, as if she couldn’t believe anyone had cared to help her.
With some relief, as if she were pleased that those men would get a taste of Karma.
Karma and death.
I’d only intended to rough them up and teach them a lesson for bothering her, but now that I was left with their corpses, I sighed heavily and knew better than to walk away without some cleanup. They couldn’t be anyone important, two ordinarylosers who’d preyed on the wrong bartender tonight. Yet, I knew better than to dismiss it all. Just in case they were affiliated with the Orlovs’ enemies, or if they were connected to someone who could matter, I had to do the due diligence of identifying my latest kills.
Rifling through their wallets produced nothing extraordinary. A little bit of cash and a couple of credit cards that were likely stolen since the names didn’t match either of their IDs, and that was it.
A couple of nobodies.
You won’t be missed.
Good riddance, and I’ll see you in hell, assholes.
Before I rose and walked away, I searched further. Something else was in the bald one’s pocket.
I extracted it and slanted to the side to allow more light to shine in from the street at the end of the alley.
A single small zipped bag. It was the disposable kind used for so many things in life, including the tidy packaging for drugs. Furrowing my brows, I inspected it closer and wondered where these men had gottenthisfrom.
“How do you like that?” I whispered to myself.
We’d faced many complications with the Giovanni Family trying to usurp our drug operations. If they weren’t sabotaging our routes, they were trying to take out our dealers. Then when they weren’t double-crossing us and trying to get us caught by the DEA, they could be interfering with our shipments.
Seeing these random nobodies with a bag of their drugs, marked with the unique printing on the pills, was something of interest.
How the hell did they get their hands on these?
Who sold this to them?
Mikhail ordered us to confiscate and/or dispose of this batch of pills when we found them on a mission over a year ago. The odds of these men having them had to mean something.
Maybe Roberto Giovanni had another stash somewhere and was trying to interfere with the layered competition of the drug trade in the city. Or maybe there was a mishap with the destruction of what we assumed was all of their new drugs laced with potent chemicals.
