I played it up. Let my breathing go ragged, let my body sag, let the groan come louder than the impact warranted. I heard Kolev's boots crunched on the ground behind me, the crunch of a step coming closer.
Now.
I pushed off the ground, turning, the momentum of my entire body channeling into the right cross that connected with Kolev's jaw. The impact traveled from my knuckles through my wrist, my forearm, my shoulder, and into the bone, and the crack was the best thing I'd heard all day.
Kolev staggered back. Two steps. His hand went to his mouth. Came away bloody. He looked at the blood on his fingers.
And grinned.
I grinned back. Holt had called me too valuable to kill. Which meant the mercenaries wouldn't shoot me. Which meant the only thing between me and this Bulgarian mountain was the fundamental question of who could hit harder.
The answer was him. But I was going to make him earn it.
Every rifle in the area swung to aim at me. Twelve barrels from both Jeep teams, twelve red dots blooming across my chest and stomach and forehead like a constellation of ways to die.
"Lower your weapons!" Kolev's voice, sharp, commanding. Not looking at his men. Looking at me. The grin still there, the blood on his lip, the eyes carrying something that wasn't anger but was adjacent to it. Interest. The interest of a man who'd expected compliance and gotten a fist instead.
I heard Holt click his tongue behind me. A small, precise sound. The sound of someone who found physical violence mildly tedious.
Kolev came forward.
The first exchange happened fast. He threw a straight right that I slipped, the fist cutting the air an inch from my jaw, the wind of it brushing my skin. I countered with a left hook to his ribs. Connected. Felt the impact absorbed by the Kevlar vest underneath his shirt, the plates eating the force, my knuckles singing against the hard surface.
Shit. He was armored too.
He drove a knee toward my stomach. I twisted, caught it on my hip, the impact jarring but not crippling. I fired back with a jab to his throat, the one target the vest couldn't protect. He blocked it with his forearm, the bone meeting my fist with a crack that sent pain shooting up my arm.
He was fast. For his size, for the sheer mass of him, Kolev moved with a speed that violated the laws of physics as I understood them. Eastern European military combat training,the system that turned big men into precise instruments, every strike economical, every defense automatic. This wasn't brawling. This was engineering.
I threw a combination that would have dropped any normal human being. Jab to split his guard, cross to the jaw, hook to the temple. The jab landed, snapping his head left. The cross connected with the hinge of his jaw and I felt the impact in my shoulder. The hook missed because he'd already shifted inside my reach, and his elbow found my ribs.
The pain was immediate and structural. Not a surface hit, not a bruise forming. Something deeper. A rib cracking or flexing past its limit, the sharp, hot burst that told my body something had given way. I stumbled backward. He followed.
His fist caught my stomach. Low, hard, under the floating ribs. I folded. His knee came up and hit my chest, straightening me back out, and before I could reset he threw a right cross that connected with the side of my head.
The world went sideways. Not dark, not gone, but tilted at an angle that didn't match the horizon. My ears filled with a high, piercing ring that replaced every other sound, the desert going silent beneath it, and my vision blurred at the edges like a camera losing focus.
I threw a desperate right hand. Wild. No technique, no setup, just fury and adrenaline and the refusal to go down without adding another mark to his face. It connected. His nose. I felt the cartilage shift under my knuckles, felt the wet give of it, and the satisfaction was fierce and brief.
His uppercut caught me under the chin.
The impact lifted my feet off the asphalt. Not metaphorically. Literally. For a fraction of a second I was airborne, my head snapping back, my body following, and the sky above me was very blue and very far away and the ringing in my ears became a roar that swallowed everything.
I hit the ground. Back-first. The pavement slammed the air from my lungs. My head bounced once, twice, the world stuttering like a film with missing frames. The blue sky flickered. The ringing was enormous now, filling every cavity in my skull, and through it, muffled and distant, boots on pavement. Multiple sets. Coming closer.
My body wouldn't move. I told my arms to push up and they trembled and stayed where they were. I told my legs to swing and they twitched and went still. The connection between my brain and my muscles had been severed by the uppercut, the wiring shorted, the commands sent but not received.
Holt's shoes appeared at the edge of my vision. Black. Polished. Stepping into my field of view with the unhurried precision of a man who had scheduled this moment and was arriving exactly on time.
I lay on the Nevada highway with the sun on my face and the desert wind in my hair and blood in my mouth, and I looked at those shoes, and I thought about Nolan's hands wrapping my knuckles in the kitchen. The gauze and tape and the precision of his fingers. The way he'd turned my hands over and inspected his work and told me not to punch anyone for a week.
I thought about Dec on the rooftop. The voice underneath the architecture. The way he'd saidit was emptyand meant the fifteen years before us.
I thought about the grin. My grin. The one that lit up rooms and covered wounds and had been, for eight years, the brightest thing I could offer the two men who'd taught me that brightness didn't have to be a performance.
The shoes stopped beside my head. Holt's voice, from very far above me, pleasant and cold and carrying the patient certainty of a man who had all the time in the world:
"Bring the zip ties. Radio the rest of the team."
